The experience of reading this book resembles the best kind of graduate seminar. Its first half would be devoted to identifying the authors’ intentions and arguments, and then, aroused by the arguments they have provoked, participants would follow up to new places the major issues they have raised. The volume is by turns instructive in its contents and irritating in its omissions, educational in its discipline and provocative in its structure. It challenges the reader to think how the history of science and technology could better be harmonized with urban history.

The authors of this slim collection are long-standing leaders and indeed pioneers in the study of cities, science and scientism. They have not needed to tell us everything they know. Instead, through a series of workshops they have refined a coherent collection of essays on the place of visions of science and technology in the rapidly developing cities of Paris, London, Berlin, Chicago and Tokyo at the end of the nineteenth century. They have operated at two levels. At one they are expert in the detailed institutional history of urban renewal, electrification, museum development and exhibitions – themes that run through each of the essays. They also have easy familiarity with the elites of science and technology and their compelling rhetoric.

In her introduction, subtitled ‘City, exposition and museum in industrial society’, Miriam Levin provides a synthetic overview introducing the key topics and the concepts of elites and modernity. This is followed by her essay on Paris, in which many of the tropes that will be explored through the book are introduced. A considerable part is devoted to the developing physical structure driven through by Haussmann. She deals with that contemporary star Gustav Eiffel and the building of the great expositions. The shift between the Second Empire and the Third Republic is deftly dealt with and the essay ends with a look forward to the revival of the technocratic elite of France fifty years later in the second half of the twentieth century.

Sophie Forgan, in her treatment of London, naturally treats the building of South Kensington but also explores such less well-known exhibitions as the Parkes Museum of Hygiene and the less-frequently visited but equally huge estate of the General Post Office which came to take reponsibility for telephony. She ends with treatment of the new exhibition spaces at Wembley, Earls Court, Olympia and, above all, the White City, which housed the Franco-British exhibition of 1908. Reference to the ‘White City’ brings out a fascinating dimension of cross-reference in this book, partly explicit and partly implicit. For the ‘white city’ is an important theme in Robert Kargon's treatment of Chicago, home of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893. He deals also with Daniel Burnham's Chicago Plan, which arose from the exhibition meant to implement the White City ideal, and the Armour Institute of Technology, which was the engineering school that the University of Chicago refused to be.

In part the cross-reference is left implicit: the main title of Sophie Forgan's London essay is ‘From Babylon to White City’. Babylon's Ishtar Gate was, of course, literally re-created in Berlin's Pergamon Museum in the 1930s. Drawing on an already outstanding historiography, and intense national self-examination, Martina Hessler's treatment of Berlin is perhaps the outstanding piece in this volume. It treats both the boosterism and the technophilia of Siemens and the ambivalence of the kaiser. The awareness of Paris and the wish to emulate the City of Light, but also the wish to distinguish the capital of the new empire from that of the old, are brought out. This is well done through the treatment of the free-enterprise 1896 industrial exhibition. Fascinating parallels are suggested by Morris Low's essay on Tokyo, in which again museums and industrial exhibitions are considered.

Yet, and yet, rumbling as an undigested issue through this book is the question of how much the promotion of science and technology through the ringing phrases of ‘progress’ was itself an energy source changing society. To what extent were the small clusters of enthusiasts dealt with here just a few amongst many groups opportunistically promising solutions to such terrifying and daunting problems as grinding poverty and resentment, dilapidated housing, industrial unrest, international competition and deep fears of chaos and degeneration? To what extent is ‘elites’ the right term for these all too often impotent prophets? One could point to the successes of other lobbies, arguably generally very much more influential, such as the military, imperialists, the churches and the socialists, which offered alternative and occasionally overlapping remedies. Such competing ‘elites’ are, however, hardly mentioned in this book. Thus that most influential and widely feared of scientistic groups, the scientific socialists, are missing (though Marx and Engels get a solitary mention), despite their importance in local as well as national politics.

On the other hand, this book is a wonderful contrast to those treatments of science as esoteric and ivory-tower. The reader who wanders down London's Kingsway or Paris's Metro will experience these spaces in new ways and be prompted to reflect on science and technology and their past.