Disciplinarily diverse, the volume's contributors have done a fine job in drawing attention to cities’ building regulations before the twentieth century. The collection spotlights the wealth and sophistication of thinking and legislation on urban landscapes over a long era, bracketed by the first wave of urbanization in Europe, on the one hand, and the rise of nationalism, on the other. The intervening period saw cities bloom, demographically decline, and proliferate again in Europe; destroyed, exported, and overhauled by colonial powers in Asia, Africa, and the Americas; and attain unprecedented size and massively impact both their inhabitants and surroundings in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, a trend whose end is nowhere in sight. In terms of allowing us to see the urban globe in context, the present volume is a welcome and timely intervention, with case studies including Athens, Istanbul, Lisbon, Lyons, Trogir (Croatia), Tunis, and Quebec City, and cluster studies from Tuscany, the southern and northern Low Countries, Colonial South America, the British Midlands, and Livonia. Most chapters maintain a solid balance between description and analysis—no mean feat given that some cover up to three centuries—and they touch upon several classic themes in urban planning, such as the creative role of economic elites, social and religious tensions, the public and private spheres, political center and periphery, and the role of military and public health concerns in shaping urban infrastructures and building regulations well before modernity.

Perhaps of particular interest to readers of Renaissance Quarterly is David Friedman's chapter (5), which traces the deeper roots of Renaissance urban planning to the communal era and its focus on streets and their design as linchpins of public order. Here, as elsewhere, the most fruitful way of interrogating accepted caesuras seems to be to unearth basic administrative routines, common behaviors, and material elements that required regular attention, rather than to insist on finding groundbreaking prequels to modern ideas and practices. Other articles likewise resist ameliorating and linear narratives of progress, but not in a concerted way. Despite emerging out of joint conference sessions, the individual chapters are rarely in direct conversation with one another. Other than in the editors’ lucid introduction, there is no systematic critique of subperiodizations per city and region or overt attempt to resist narratives of modernization, rationalization, and professionalization. The result is sometimes ironic. For instance, the architects of modern Athens (and, in time, other Greek cities in the mid-nineteenth century) are described in chapter 14 as taking a cognizant turn toward classicism and away from the “unplanned growth and irregular road network” (274) of Turkish cities, a claim at least implicitly negated in chapter 13, which traces the development of Ottoman urbanism between ca. 1700 and 1900. The influence of Enlightenment ideas about risk in Nouvelle-France explored in chapter 10, to take another example, appears to be undermined by some of the previous seven chapters dealing with late medieval (and, thus, mostly Catholic) European cities. Along with their Islamic counterparts (ch. 2), premodern cities fostered preventative measures to safeguard what they saw as healthy cities, often based on Hippocratic and Galenic prophylactics, without feeling they resisted God's will in doing so.

Finally, a word about form. The volume's production illustrates how some publishers rarely think beyond the rubrics of market share and profit. The text contains infelicities that cannot be chalked up to the editors’ oversight but, rather, to hasty copyediting, and the quality of many figures is low, in a book replete with important photographs, maps, and ground plans that were painstakingly gathered and are germane to the discussion. If this is Routledge's way of pushing us toward the book's digital edition, so be it; but then one would at least expect to see a consolidated bibliography in the latter, for it is absent from the printed version. There is none, however: another crude cost-cutting measure, which perhaps should stop surprising us. After all, how else would Routledge remain the largest publisher in the humanities, with a parent-company revenue exceeding $550 million in 2017 alone? This will remain the case until authors and editors learn how to insist on all their scholarly needs rather than surrender to the dictates of a prestigious publisher.