Capitalizing on a wealth of previous publications, Friedrich Lenger's study, written especially for an English audience, is an extremely ambitious work aiming to synthesize work published in German, French, English and Italian on European urban developments during one of the most momentous periods in their history. By contrast to Andrew Lees and Lynn Hollen Lees’ recent synthesis of European urban history (Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750–1914 (Cambridge, 2007)), which focused mostly on Britain, France and Germany, Lenger's work is geographically much more inclusive, with the author making a constant effort to go beyond these core countries to discuss urban developments at length in Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, Russia, the Balkans and Scandinavia. What emerges as a result of the author's systematic reading of the secondary literature on these geographic areas is a truly pan-European urban history of the 60 years preceding World War I, which excels in integrating disparate developments into a coherent and well-structured narrative.

The book (which is the prequel to a future work in which Lenger plans to cover the history of urban Europe in the twentieth century) is organized in seven chapters dealing with the role of capital cities (chapter 1), economy and demography (chapter 2), immigration and suburbanization (chapter 3), urban housing (chapter 4), administration and reform (chapter 5), culture (chapter 6) and social protest (chapter 7). These broader themes allow the author to delve in chapters 1 and 2 into issues such as the role of world fairs in promoting urban development; the impact of Haussmannization on Paris and other cities; changes in life expectancy, and fertility and mortality rates, and their role in spurring the turn-of-the-century urban demographic boom; as well as the connections between industrialization and urbanization, on the one hand, and cities and the country, on the other. Chapter 3 focuses on patterns of migration from the immediate rural hinterlands and more distant places to the city, and their role in shaping a heterogeneous urban environment, often characterized by social and ethnic fragmentation. Many of the changes in the spatial and social make-up of especially Western and Central European cities were related to processes of suburbanization which took off on a great scale by the turn of the century.

The middle chapters of the book address changes in urban housing types from single dwellings to multistorey apartments as well as urban living conditions, which are analysed by the author from a comparative perspective stretching from west to east, and north to south. The squalid conditions, in which the urban poor lived, prompted middle-class supported land and housing reforms. Municipalities and local administrations played a key role in pushing the reformist agenda to the fore, and in the process they turned themselves into a model for urban self-government. Their successes in urban planning and in the provisioning of the city with clean water, and cheap gas and electricity, made possible through their takeover of water treatment plans, and electric and gas distribution companies, became synonymous by the century's end with the rise of municipal socialism as a widespread model of urban management, that – as Lenger points out – was not only less than what socialists desired but was also a model that cut across the political spectrum.

The last two chapters shift the discussion to matters of urban culture and social protest. While opera and theatre represented the cultural preserve of the middle class, European cities were also the sites where avant-garde works in the field of art and literature, together with new varieties of working-class, popular and commercialized mass culture fed the divide between elite and mass culture that characterized turn-of-the-century urban modernity. New developments, such as the rise of cinema and spectator sports which attracted large crowds on weekends, increasingly shifted the balance in favour of the latter. At the same time, European cities served as an arena for continuous conflicts over the representation and uses of urban spaces. The opening of department stores, which attracted a mostly female clientele, and women's involvement in charity work, enabled many women to overcome the gendered separation between public and private spaces. Similarly, the symbolic separation between the middle-class centre and the working-class suburbs was overcome on the occasion of workers’ demonstrations by day, and through the presence of a host of interlopers (beggars, thieves and prostitutes) in the city centre at night. While these were mostly peaceful transgressions, acts of terrorism, pogroms (especially in Russia) and occasional clashes between police and demonstrators turned urban conflict into a bloody affair.

Well written and with a much to be admired ability to transition seamlessly from one topic to another, Lenger's work is a model of accomplished scholarship. While it is hard to challenge the cogency and overall high quality of his synthesis, one area where one would have wanted to see a better integration of the secondary literature and as convincing a presentation of the material as in all the other chapters, is chapter 1. Although the volume's bibliography is 45 pages long, and the author briefly focuses on the literary myth of Paris and on the role of the flaneur as a quintessential figure of urban modernity, from the perspective of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, important works by Timothy J. Clark, Christopher Prendergast, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Jean-Pierre Bernard on the representation of Paris in the art and writings of the long nineteenth century are not included. The lack of focus on the genealogy of the subjective construction of the city in these works, as well as the chapter's chronological limitation to a coverage of London's Great Exhibition of 1851, Paris's rebuilding under Haussmann and Exhibition universelle of 1867, as markers of the two cities’ claim to the status of ‘capitals of the nineteenth century’, leave out discussion of the positioning of London as the centre of a global empire, and of the role of 1789, 1830 and 1848 Parisian revolutions, the building of the Eiffel tower, the world fairs of 1889 and 1900 and the introduction of electricity (which made Paris to be known as City of Light) – that also undergirded those claims, making this chapter less rounded than the others. Notwithstanding, with its panoramic survey of European urban history between 1850 and 1914, the book will enable many students to acquire a bird's eye perspective of developments at a continental scale, before delving deeper into specific topics. As such, it will fulfil an important role in attracting new practitioners to the field, as well as being a text that could be successfully assigned to undergraduates.