Group items tagged

International Group including Centre for Global Negotiations Launches Plan For Global Commons           Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:39:40 -0500 EST  |  No Comments by Aria Munro PHILADELPHIA, Pa. - An unprecedented move to gather worldwide commentary on a new "global commons" was announced this week in Berlin by an international coalition including the Philadelphia nonprofit organization, Centre for Global Negotiations. The proposal calls for wide-ranging discussions on a common action plan, authored by the world's people, to address transnational problems and create checks and balances on the world's governmental and corporate sectors. The strategy for this integrated global dialogue was outlined by HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, chairman of a group of international leaders who will shepherd the consultation process. Joining him at the press conference were (alphabetically listed): Scilla Elworthy of the United Kingdom, Frithjof Finkbeiner of Germany, Olivier Giscard d'Estaing of France and James B. Quilligan of the United States. "If we do not have this conversation and realize a new framework for the global commons during the next several years, the bilateral economic and religious tensions we have been experiencing will almost certainly result in world conflict," said Prince Hassan. "It is time to listen, engage in dialogue and ask the people of the world to decide on a responsible course of action," he said. An international partnership - called the Coalition for the Global Commons - will use advanced internet software on an interactive web site, (www.global-commons.org), as well as personal discussions, international meetings and electronic surveys to gather input. Initial partners include such organizations as the Centre for Global Negotiations, CIVICUS, Ethical Markets Media, LLC, and Global Marshall Plan Initiative. The Coalition aims at tapping global opinion and expertise on problems that transcend national b

lexander C. T. Geppert.  Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.  New York  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.  424 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-22164-2. Reviewed by Jill Steward (School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University) Published on H-Urban (March, 2012) Commissioned by Alexander Vari Laboratories for Scrutinizing Modernity: Imperial Exhibitions The great world and imperial exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century, sometimes described as one of the era's most distinctive products, were made possible by innovative technologies in transport, building, and communication and given the oxygen of publicity by the world's media industries. An urban phenomenon, they were visible signs of the transnational mobility of people, goods, and information made possible by technical innovation, industrial development, and commercial enterprise. Supported by the press, they contributed to the dissemination of knowledge and information across national boundaries and encouraged economic and cultural transfers. They made an enormous contribution to the growth of urban tourism and the spread of new and distinctively modern forms of visual culture and mass entertainment. It is not surprising therefore, that exhibitions could be seen not only as indications of modernity, but also its catalysts and agents. As we contemplate the intense media excitement aroused by the mega-events of our own time, notably the Olympic Games (which were merely sideshows at the 1900 Exhibition Universelle in Paris and the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition), we can understand the impact made by their nineteenth-century predecessors on the public imagination by the "fleeting cities" of the title of Alexander Geppert's study of imperial exhibitions, an allusion to Baudelaire's characterization of modernity as a set of representational practices embracing "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent," which involved the temporary occupation of acres of