In The City of the Future: Journeys Through Bourgeois Europe, the authors, Justo Serna and Anaclet Pons, chart a unique narrative journey across the European continent, by stagecoach and railroad, drawing on the experiences of José Inocencio de Llano y White, a bourgeois man of Valencian, Basque, and Irish descent, who, during the middle decades of the 19th century, recorded in his diary the dizzying changes that the nascent bourgeois Europe was undergoing.

Throughout the narrative, we learn how this new hegemonic social class is shaping a new world that encompasses the political, economic, and cultural spheres.