Fleeting cities
Subtitle: imperial expositions in fin-de-siècle Europe
By: Alexander C.T. Geppert
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Basingstoke; New York, NY
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 398
ISBN-13: 9780230221642
Description: Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siècle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world-wide web. Conceptualizing exhibitions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities undertakes a transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed within the European metropolis. Focusing on five such expositions – the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung (1896), the fifth Parisian Exposition Universelle (1900), the Franco-British Exhibition in London (1908), the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924/25), and the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris (1931) – this award-winning book examines their specific aims and aspirations, evolving forms and execution, and the public debates they engendered. Who shaped these mega-events, how were exposition venues inscribed into the urban fabric, what legacies did they bequeath? Taken as dense textures stretched over time, these expositions undergo both a close hermeneutic reading and broad spatial analysis. Fleeting Cities weaves extensive empirical research with underlying theoretical concerns, investigating their individual meanings in a new form of transnational network analysis.
Table of contents: title: Acknowledgments; label: chapter 1
title: Introduction: How to Read an Exposition; label: chapter 2
title: Berlin 1896: Wilhelm II, Georg Simmel, and the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung; label: chapter 3
title: Paris 1900: The Exposition universelle as a Century's Protean Synthesis; label: chapter 4
title: London 1908: Imre Kiralfy and the Franco-British Exhibition; label: chapter 5
title: Wembley 1924: The British Empire Exhibition as a Suburban Metropolis; label: chapter 6
title: Vincennes 1931: The Exposition coloniale as a Transitory Center of Imperial Civilization; label: chapter 7
title: Conclusion: Exhibition Fatigue, or the Rise and Fall of a Mass Medium; title: Coda: Pictures at an Exhibition; title: Appendix; title: Bibliography; title: Index