Blue-Collar Conservatism examines the blue-collar, white supporters of Frank Rizzo—Philadelphia's police commissioner turned mayor—and shows how the intersection of law enforcement and urban politics created one of the least understood but most consequential political developments in recent American history.

Cracked Foundations reveals that the postwar suburban boom was built on debt and speculation. Historian Michael R. Glass shows how home mortgages and municipal bonds made suburban life increasingly precarious and insecure, and how they established inequalities that have persisted to this day.

Freedom Enterprise follows Black Southerners’ journeys to Detroit during the initial wave of migration in the 1910s and 1920s, and from their efforts to build a prosperous Black business community in the 1930s and 1940s to the destruction of that community through urban renewal projects and freeway construction in the 1950s and 1960s.

Philadelphia: A Narrative History presents a comprehensive portrait of the city’s history, from the region’s original Lenape inhabitants to the myriad of residents in the twenty-first century. Understanding Philadelphia’s past, Paul Kahan says, is key to envisioning future possibilities for the City of Brotherly Love.

Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around West Philadelphia’s University City, advocating a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that, despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments are precious urban resources.

Paris’s late twentieth-century parks—ambitious, innovative, controversial—illustrate the height of postmodern design and urban planning. Amanda Shoaf Vincent examines five major parks to reveal how they draw upon garden models, the city’s history, and their local context to redefine the relationship between green space and the urban environment.

Hospital City, Health Care Nation recasts the story of the health care system by emphasizing the economic and social importance of hospitals in American communities. While hospitals have become vital economic anchors in cities across the country, the spending that supports them has constrained possibilities for comprehensive health care reform.

A sweeping history of urban incarceration in Chicago and Cook County, This Is My Jail shows that jails are critical sites of urban inequality that sustain the racist actions of the police and judges and exacerbate the harms wrought by housing discrimination, segregated schools, and inaccessible health care.

Even as postindustrial cities have climbed from the depths of decline in the twenty-first century, they have witnessed a cruel paradox: with prosperity has come greater inequality. Tracing the origins and effects of uneven revitalization, this book examines the genesis of America's second urban crisis and prospects for its resolution.