Book Review: Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition

balloon-frame structures of working-class housing to the development of skyscrapers. The interaction between the living space of individual dwellings and the wider urban environment is tackled in Chapter 5 which examines technologies of water, waste and pollution control. The themes of disease and public health emerge as pivotal elements in the shaping of new kinds of relations between cities and the urban environment. The authors show that the transformation from chaotic nineteenthcentury urbanism to the modern urban environment was a complex and often faltering transition. Sharp tensions emerge between public and private demands on urban space and the struggle for reform of municipal government. The theme of urban reform is developed further in Chapter 6, which examines a series of complex challenges for the coordination of service provision such as lighting, town planning and protection from fire. At a structural level this chapter might have been placed earlier, however, in order to emphasize the organizational and political dimensions to urbanization as an underlying theme for subsequent chapters. In the last two chapters we focus on longer-term challenges surrounding rising car ownership and innovations in communications technologies. These themes are developed as part of a broader comparative agenda for the understanding of urban change. Taken together, the different chapters provide a comprehensive overview of the dynamics of American urbanization and the role of technological innovation in the shaping of urban form. This concise and well-written book will be an invaluable resource for any course devoted to the history of North American urbanization. The book will complement other recent works by Joel Tarr (1996), Martin Melosi (2000) and others who seek to place urban technology in a wider social and historical context. The book’s original source materials and up-to-date bibliographies will be especially helpful to any reader who wishes to learn more about the technical complexities of urban change.