1 Themis Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance, New York: Routledge, 2011. ISBN 978-0-415-89158-5 (cloth) The removal of the Occupy Wall Street encampment from Zuccotti Park, a.k.a. Liberty Plaza, in November of 2011 was a telling moment from an urban policy perspective. The intensive amount of coordination, subterfuge, secrecy, and force used by the New York City Police Department to remove the protesters signaled that Occupy had struck a nerve and generated substantial unease among City officials and others. Further, the police action was accompanied by a remarkable public relations operation wherein a few potent ideas were mobilized to effectively justify the use of force against a peaceable political assembly, rendering the removal socially palatable and even ostensibly just. Mayor Michael Bloomberg deployed arguments about quality of life, the imperative to control disorder, and the need to ensure the rights of a broader public. As Bloomberg (2011) explained in a formal statement, “Unfortunately, the park was becoming a place where people came not to protest, but rather to break laws, and in some cases to harm others. There have been reports of businesses being threatened and complaints about noise and unsanitary conditions that have seriously impacted the quality of life for residents and businesses in this now-thriving neighborhood”. Some compelling questions are evident here. Were petty crime, noise complaints, and sanitation violations really at the heart of the angst expressed by New York City’s power elite? How is it that a handful of very particular complaints were capable of dislodging a national, if not global, social movement from a professedly public space in a city that likes to think of itself as cosmopolitan and tolerant? To answer these questions, ideas about urban disorder must be situated in the context of far-reaching political-economic and ideological shifts that have been decades in the making. Themis Chronopoulos’ book, Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance, does the painstaking work of outlining how these abstractions emerged from that larger context, and in so doing makes a potentially valuable contribution to urban geography.