Advertising and the European City

Historians are only just beginning to replace outmoded theories of advertising manipulation with more sophisticated cultural explanations of the ways consumers filter and select messages. The contributors to this volume find the origins and trace the development of this new world of perception in modern city: London and Paris, the forerunners, and the cities and larger towns of France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, where advertising created new urban perceptions, leading to new avenues of consumption and altered lifestyles. Advertising is viewed in the volume as a new way of perceiving and organizing the world of the city-dweller, a visual culture, a way of attaching meaning to things and to words, or rearranging the mental map of modern life.