In Silent Witnesses: Modernity, Colonialism, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier's Unfinished Plans for Havana, Joseph R. Hartman examines Havana's urbanization under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (in power 1925–33), focusing on the largely unrealized plans of French urbanist Forestier and his Franco-Cuban team of architects and planners. Scholars until now have focused on cataloguing the regime's extant monuments, while giving far less attention to Forestier's unbuilt urban works. The Machado regime's building campaign spoke to modern aspirations of Cuban independence and nationhood, but also to enduring colonial paradigms of race, power, and urban space. Interpreting the history of Havana's urbanization requires taking a critical view of Cuba's colonial heritage and the survival into modern times of local and imported colonialist practices. Revisiting this history lends new insights into the cultural stakes of urban restoration efforts ongoing in Havana today.

In Silent Witnesses: Modernity, Colonialism, and Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier's Unfinished Plans for Havana, Joseph R. Hartman examines Havana's urbanization under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (in power 1925–33), focusing on the largely unrealized plans of French urbanist Forestier and his Franco-Cuban team of architects and planners. Scholars until now have focused on cataloguing the regime's extant monuments, while giving far less attention to Forestier's unbuilt urban works. The Machado regime's building campaign spoke to modern aspirations of Cuban independence and nationhood, but also to enduring colonial paradigms of race, power, and urban space. Interpreting the history of Havana's urbanization requires taking a critical view of Cuba's colonial heritage and the survival into modern times of local and imported colonialist practices. Revisiting this history lends new insights into the cultural stakes of urban restoration efforts ongoing in Havana today.

An intense national debate preceded the 1937 Paris Exposition, involving two series of competitions that summarized the issues of the entire decade of the 1930s and intersected with controversies about the future of Paris. The 1932 competition to select a new exposition site in an area where it could stimulate Paris’s growth and the subsequent competition series of 1934–35 yielded remarkable proposals. These included projects by Beaudouin and Lods, Pierre Patout, and Le Corbusier, as well as Auguste Perret’s proposal for a “Champs-Élysées of the Rive Gauche” affecting the entire southern half of Paris. In Reinventing Paris: The Competitions for the 1937 Paris International Exposition , Danilo Udovički-Selb looks at the complex discourse around the 1937 Exposition and concludes that this occasion was a missed opportunity for the “reinvention” of the French capital, which emerged only as a mirage in phantasmagoric light pageantries for the duration of the exposition.