Lemberg was the capital of Galicia, Crownland of the Habsburg monarchy between 1772 and 1918. The city—known as Lwów in Polish (especially when the city belonged to Poland in the interwar period), L'vov in Russian (during the Soviet period), and L'viv in Ukrainian (since 1991)—was historically a multiethnic and multiconfessional urban society. This heritage presents challenges for every historian researching and writing the history of the city. The narratives of nationalist Polish and Ukrainian historians suggest that only a Polish Lwów or a Ruthenian L'viv existed in the past. Markian Prokopovych does his best to emancipate himself from the rule of the nationalist-committed historiographical tradition. He is, however, not alone in this endeavor. Harald Binder from L'viv, Anna Veronika Wendland from Leipzig, and Patrice Dabrowski from Harvard University are but a few representatives of this approach to the history of Lemberg and Galicia who assist Prokopovych in reinstalling the imperial past of the city.

The main issue argued and justified in this book is not that nationalism or any nationalizing efforts have totally been absent from Lemberg's Habsburg past. The Austro-German cultural and political hegemony was unambiguously felt up at least to the 1870s, coinciding with the enforcement of an ambitious urban planning project, the most visible outcome of which manifested itself in architecture and infrastructural modernization. The urban development program, ordered from Vienna and carried out by immigrant German bureaucrats and professionals, transformed the provincial and backward town into a European-style metropolis.

The concurrent reform of the local administration led in the long run to a Polish ruled city. This brought with it an ever-growing nationalization of all kinds of urban public spaces that soon came to displace the prevailing imperial spirit. Ruthenian national ambitions, moreover, also began to surface, paralleling in part the numerical growth of that particular ethnic group. The sharp rivalry between the Poles and the Ruthenians in defining public culture in the early 1900s became the main determinant of Lemberg's life. In spite of all of this, Prokopovych insists that the unshakeable and permanent loyalty to the imperial Habsburg power remained in force, owing in part to its flexibility.

The historical account, based on extensive archival and printed source material, focuses on the development of architecture, especially of public buildings (the private ones being dismissed), the changing use of public space (through such public institutions as the theater, library, casino), the creation of public parks, the erection of various historical monuments, commemorations, the restoration of some historic buildings, and the practice of organizing diverse exhibitions. The common element among all of these subjects is the symbolic meaning attributed to them, with the aim of enforcing imperial or nationalist agendas. Prokopovych's book is more descriptive than it is analytical.

Prokopovych promises—but ultimately misses—comparisons of topics examined in detail with similar cities in the Habsburg monarchy, such as Prague, Trieste, or others. In spite of his many references both to the Polish and Ukrainian historiography and the international urban historical discourse, the use—especially of the latter—for interpreting and nuancing several of his empirical arguments seems unsatisfactory, in that their main function is not to dialogue with and comment on the literature, but rather to show that the author has kept abreast of recent advances in a field pertaining to his own. The notion of urban public domain, central to the work, has also been insufficiently defined and applied. And what is more, the ethnic community—the single historical agent in the story—is devoid of any meaningful social attributes. Saying nothing about the internal social stratification of the various ethnic components leaves in totally obscurity the question of how the Polish elite could rule the city after 1870 under the circumstances of the contemporary Galician electoral system.

Prokopovych has nonetheless contributed significantly to renewing urban history by applying the cultural history paradigm to the history of Galicia. He also succeeds in proving that this inquiry of urban scenes provides deep insight even into the nascent East European nationalisms shared by peoples lacking at that time a nation-state of their own.