The study of city politics has changed immensely over the past twenty years. In the 1960s the benchmark work was Banfield and Wilson's City Politics (1963), a treatment of the urban as an arena in which uneven acculturation to a modern, reform provided the fulcrum of conflict. The 1980s' benchmark may well be Paul Peterson's City Limits (1981). In the past twenty years, political culture has yielded to political economy as the central concern, and Peterson's book is a sophisticated effort to synthesize various political economy approaches. But Peterson's book, like that of Banfield and Wilson earlier, promises to be the target of substantial criticism. Just as Banfield and Wilson's term publicregarding ethos linked a program of reform with the interest of the community as a whole, so Peterson's notion of a unitary interest of the city as a territorially bounded jurisdiction links economic development with the well-being of the community as a whole. Neither Banfield and Wilson nor Peterson have argued that discordant interests are absent from the city, but critics regard all three authors as inattentive to issues of class domination. Nevertheless, Banfield and Wilson largely set the terms through which the politics of machine versus reform were examined. Whether Peterson will be equally central in the examination of the politics of economic growth and transformation remains to be seen, but a variety of newly published studies makes a preliminary assessment possible. The four books reviewed here address different aspects of the politics of urban economic development and represent a variety of approaches. Public-Private Partnership in American Cities, edited by Fosler and Berger (1982), is a collection of case studies of eight cities (Atlanta,