As an undergraduate student of town and country planning in London in the second half of the 1970s, I occasionally demonstrated against what were seen at the time as the oppressive and reactionary urban policies of the Callaghan Labour government, little knowing that these would soon be as nothing compared to the systematic and sustained assault on the poor, the working class and the institutions of local democracy initiated by the Thatcher government and its successors, both Labour and Conservative. Which just goes to show that things can sometimes get worse, no matter how bad they might seem at the time. For example, the election of Donald Trump and his inauguration as the 45th President of the United States of America on 20 January 2017 marked the end of the “Time of Obama”. One year earlier, a collection of sixteen essays (plus an introduction, conclusion and afterword) on national urban policy in the U.S.A., edited by James DeFilipis, was published because, as he puts it in his introduction, “The past eight years should have been a remarkable time for American urban policy” (p. 1, emphasis added), but “There has been nothing in the Obama administration’s urban policy to stir the blood” (p. 8). We can only imagine how the disappointments expressed by this collection of scholars and analysts have broadened and deepened in the years since the book’s publication. In 2013, when most of the contributors came together at sessions of the Urban Affairs Association in San Francisco, Donald Trump’s political ambitions were neither clear nor treated with any seriousness. But, the ensuing book is very good at tracing the history of “national urban policy” initiatives in the U.S.A.