In this engaging and ambitiously researched contribution to urban history, public policy, and legal studies, Black carves out his topic with considerable independence of mind, bracketing a period around the calamity in its subtitle and the New Deal reforms and continuities with which Structuring Poverty closes. The 1871 Chicago fire functioned on this view much as disasters do in the writings of Klein, providing a “shock” that also creates opportunities for elites to rebuild environments and social relations from the ground, and to take their own planning roles still more seriously.1 The urgencies of rebuilding Chicago on a vastly greater scale turned especially on providing housing and on attracting labor, without assuming ongoing responsibilities for the fate of the latter during depressions, relocations, and personal tragedies.
Where poverty was concerned, the “Making of an Order,” as described in the book’s initial full chapter, involved a redeployment of (anti-) vagrancy...