Città globali in scena: le esposizioni universali. Global cities on display: international exhibitions

Over a broad time span covering the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the great national and international exhibitions sketch out the image of multiple global cities, temporary experimentations in reality and illusion. The session discusses the phenomenon of exhibitions as a useful tool with which to study urban history with reference to the construction, in a critical sense too, of the global city. Making use of a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach, the session investigates the meaning attributable to the expression «global city» with regard to exhibition events, and wishes to examine its peculiarities and forms in the light of a defined idea of «global city» within the perimeter of these events and as well as without, by considering the host city to examine the image for presentation which it has chosen, the degree to which the event marks its transformation from a local city to a global one (books exhibitions; Paris's underground 1900), the roles of the various actors involved in the process (clients, designers, artists who worked in Torino's Borgo medievale 1884), the signs left behind (Copenaghen, antiquities). Paradigmatic is the story of the global cities generated by such events, left to us in the narratives published by the journalistic reports of the day and, above all, by depictions produced with various techniques (the role of images in St. Louis 1904; Brazil Independence Commemoration Years 1920-1925) which, beyond merely defining their boundaries, present drawings, arrangements and exhibits, analyzing the role assumed by the authors, designers and artistic industries, the context of the production and its subsequent use which, at times, goes as far as to transform spaces, architectures and objects exhibited into models.