This fascinating book is, at its most basic, a history of the city of Lemberg during its existence as the capital of the Habsburg crownland of Galicia. More specifically, it is a study of the city's urban development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and more recently Christian Schmid, Weck focuses on the question of the “production of space” in the city's growth during this period and, in particular, the role of the railroad in that spatial and urban development.

In the process of this investigation, Weck divides her study into three sections. The first presents an overview of the history of railroad building in the Habsburg Empire, including the connection of Lemberg to the growing imperial railroad network in 1861. Following this, Lemberg was connected by railroads to other important regional cities (Brody, to the north, and Czernowitz [Czerniowce, Chernivtsi] to the south). Weck demonstrates how the evolution of Lemberg into an important railway hub profoundly influenced its subsequent development.

The book's second section focuses on the rapid urban development of the city after the arrival of the railroad. Weck describes how the construction of the different railroad lines after 1861, and especially the train stations serving each one, exercised a tremendously important effect on the growth and transformation of the parts of Lemberg in which they were situated. For example, the fact that the first train station, the terminus of the line from Kraków (and ultimately, Vienna) was constructed in what had been the western outskirts of the city, meant that subsequent urban development moved largely in that direction.

Importantly, the book's final section focuses on the history of that very train station, as a kind of case study for the theories about the production and uses of space that underlie the entire work. The original train station was opened in 1861 to serve the newly built railroad line. In 1904, by which time it was one of several stations in the city, it was completely rebuilt in grand style as the city's main train station (Hauptbahnhof). Weck describes how this reconstruction was very self-consciously a kind of “prestige project” on the part of the municipal and imperial authorities, and how the station subsequently functioned as an important “stage” on which were enacted various ceremonies and demonstrations, both public and private, commencing with the huge public celebrations connected to the opening of the new train station itself. I found particularly interesting the ways in which the station figured in the literary imagination of local writers, and how it became deeply associated with a sort of local, urban identity. I was reminded of works on the history of the Sirkeci train station in Istanbul (the terminus of the Orient Express), opened around the same time (1881), which also became a source of pride and artistic inspiration almost from the day it opened.

The work draws on an impressive variety of archival sources (in Austria, Ukraine, and Poland) as well as various travelogues and published contemporary reports, besides the relevant secondary scholarship. Methodologically, the study is equally wide-ranging, relying heavily but not exclusively on the fields of urban history and geography. The third section, especially, uses analytical tools related to architectural symbolism and design. The book is extensively illustrated throughout with photographs, tables, and maps.

This work should be of interest not only to students of the late Habsburg Empire, but also to urban historians and others interested in exploring the development, uses, and manipulation of urban spaces.