The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy. By Richardson
Dilworth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 280p. $49.95.
In his book, Richardson Dilworth takes the familiar argument that
cities use development policy to compete for residents in our fragmented
metropolitan areas and flips it on its head. In Dilworth's account,
development policy is an important causal factor in the creation of the
fragmented metropolitan areas in which this competition occurs. His
detailed historical accounts of how communities in New York and New Jersey
in the late 1800s dealt with issues of incorporation, consolidation, and
annexation speak to current interest among urban politics scholars in
patterns of suburbanization and the politics of regional coordination. By
providing interesting accounts of how a good goes from being defined as
private to public (e.g., water, gas), this book may also interest public
policy scholars more generally.