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The essay introduces this issue of Technology and Culture, which highlights the intersections of technology, mobility, and geography. While recent scholarship on mobilities foregrounds mobile objects, people, and ideas, this issue’s articles link mobility to geography, illustrating the spaces that shape or are created by changing sociotechnical practices of movement. Here, the where of technology’s social construction matters as much as its who. The articles approach geography on different scales—from national territory to urban, suburban, and rural spaces. Geoff Zylstra, Greet De Block, Els De Vos, and Hilde Heynen show how streetcars, railways, and automobiles influenced the social production of space, while Tiina MŠnnistš-Funk shows how geography shaped the production of bicycles. Connecting technologically enhanced mobility with modernity, race, gender, and national and regional identity, these articles show how the coproduction of technology and geography affects power and inequality, helping produce peripheral, segregated, and otherwise unequal spaces.

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National and international critics of Paris's 1900 Universal Exposition claimed that it was a disaster on various levels. That year, in addition to two walkway collapses that killed thirteen people, Paris experienced numerous construction and transportation accidents; electrical failures and fires; a deadly heat wave followed by a water shortage, near sewer failure, and "great stink"; and typhoid and smallpox outbreaks that killed more than a thousand people. Taking the spatial turn in exposition studies, this article interprets these claims as part of a conservative disaster discourse that targeted the exposition to undermine the Third Republic and its progressive conception of urban modernity. Thus, rather than examining an actual disaster, I show how the Republic's critics used fears of impending disaster to cast modern Paris as a "risk society" characterized by "normal accidents," which in turn questioned the Republic's project, widely hyped at the exposition, of controlling nature and achieving social progress through science and technology.

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