At a time when tensions surrounding multiculturalism are frequently located and acted out in our increasingly networked global cities, studies focusing on the historical development of urban selfhood provide important clues to the competing forms of identity that constitute modern subjects. Historians of Central and Eastern Europe have long understood the value of studying the region's diverse populations, and the late Habsburg Empire is a fertile case study for exposing the dynamics of how individuals negotiate the contours of citizenship. Until very recently, however, the focus of examination has most often concerned itself with issues of nationalism or ethnic exclusion. Although this approach has been invaluable to helping trace transformations in the broader social and political landscape of competing nations, it has minimized the vital role that individual cities—studied as networked communities in their own right—have played in extending our understanding of the effects of modernization and new technologies on the region.

Nathaniel Wood's Becoming Metropolitan is part of an important move to shift historiographical emphasis from models of nation-building and national identification to the distinct yet not so tidy and sometimes imperceptible process of self-identification that takes place in cities. Drawing on critical scholarship and methodological models forged in this emerging field of study—most notably Vanessa Schwartz's Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin de Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998)—Wood is seeking to reveal traces of what he terms “interurban identification” in the history of Cracow's rise to the status of metropolis in the opening decade of the twentieth century. As an “unlikely metropolis” (18), Cracow offers an intriguing nexus of study, a city that Wood convincingly argues contains a populace for whom historiography has generally assumed only national identification matters. In this sense, Wood's focus on a smaller or lesser city distinguishes his research within urban studies literature as an innovative approach to the question of shared cultures in the rapidly growing and diverse urban contexts of Central and Eastern Europe.

Wood's book is divided into seven chapters and opens with a detailed description of Cracow's urban population, its living conditions, neighborhoods, and political makeup in 1900. This helps orient readers to the complexities of a city that Wood suggests has traditionally been sentimentalized by historians as the “Polish Athens” (4). Chapter Two examines the growth of a boulevard press in Cracow, and the subsequent two chapters describe the expansion of the city as its inhabitants aspired to join the ranks of other great European centers. Wood underscores here, and in Chapters Five and Six (where he details many of the difficulties of the modernization effort facing fin-de-siècle Cracovians), that urban growth in Cracow created ambiguities in the self-identification process. By the conclusion of the book, Wood contends, and quite convincingly, that becoming metropolitan was part of the establishment of an urban and mostly nonnational character for the average Cracovian.

Although Wood's core arguments and methodology provide a well-organized and tightly constructed thesis, it is not a study without shortcomings. Perhaps most problematic is the decision to limit analysis almost exclusively to newspapers as the prime site of analysis. As a result, there seems to be a lack of attention to how the mechanisms of modern urban self-identification can be understood as both an intellectualized and embodied process. And even though Wood does attempt to move beyond the text and read a number of newspaper illustrations in light of a range of urban identities he outlines throughout the book, it would also have been useful for Wood to study Cracow's architectural and urban spaces of interaction in connection to, but also in tension with, the city spaces and imagined “European” citizens Cracovians sought so hard to emulate. Here, the methodological underpinnings of a loaded and difficult concept such as “becoming” would be well served by the incorporation of theory, such as the work of Gilles Deleuze and his generative model of becoming. Nonetheless, Wood does succeed in pushing the discourse about Cracow's modern inhabitants in new and productive directions. His study will inspire historians to consider alternative lenses through which to examine the social and political milieu of Central and Eastern Europe, while also connecting ideas about urban selfhood to the problems of our present times.