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Urban Transit Systems and Technology

century Black metropolis? If so, where will it be and what will it look like? Many of the authors speak to the suburbanization of African Americans, jobs and housing spatial mismatch, housing discrimination, and the failures of public education; yet each fails to project how the trends they describe will shape communities in coming years and decades. Moreover, much of the data presented is based on the 2000 Census. To meet the expectations set by the title, a greater diversity of methodological approaches and disciplinary perspectives to the study of the Black metropolis would have been useful. The most useful information in the volume is chapter 6 by Stoll, which analyzes housing-employment spatial mismatch; Bullard, Johnson, and Torres’ (chapter 7) discussion of the megaurbanization of the Atlanta region due to the migration of African Americans and others; and Wright and Bullard (chapter 8) focus on the fate of post-Katrina New Orleans. Also of interest is chapter 9 where Grigsby’s description of health care disparities in Los Angeles is an important start in a discussion that involves everything from the fate of African American-founded and -controlled hospitals to HIV infection rates and mortality. Powell’s (chapter 2) “structural racism” framework is useful but perhaps impractical for practicing planners who are keenly aware of spatial discrimination and racial disparities at a regional scale, but largely unarmed to diffuse them. While still useful, the structural analysis of the U.S.’s legal, economic, and policy structures fails to consider how individuals, families, and neighborhoods may be empowered to pursue their own interests while macrolevel racial inequities are corrected. There are also several oversights in this volume: The first is the limited discussion of the social, political, and economic agency of African Americans as it may evolve in this century. Second, the exclusion of chapters dedicated to community development, innercity revitalization, and gentrification is significant. It is difficult to imagine that these three topics will not be critical pieces of the narrative written in the future about the housing patterns of African Americans and other minority groups in this century. Third, the book lacks concluding chapters that do what the individual chapters did not: suggest where current trends may lead and how to alter their courses to avoid certain pitfalls. This volume offers little to be hopeful about with the exception of Blackwell’s epilogue. She lays out some specific directions on leadership development, resource allocations, and alternative modes of public investment. Practicing planners may be frustrated by this book in that it makes recommendations that are primarily beyond the scope of their day-to-day work. To reach a planning audience, a more comprehensive discussion of how community-level collective capacity can coalesce with macrolevel policymaking would have been instructive. As the jobs of planners becomes increasingly complex, a volume such as this may appeal to planning students, academics, and social justice advocates who are concerned with larger questions of race, space, and social justice, and who perhaps need a compendium of current facts and theoretical arguments to support their work. The true value of this work is that is demonstrates well how social scientists and planners must move beyond a mere accounting of the issues facing African American communities to practical solutions if we are to avoid the challenges of the last century.