Showroom City

A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world
High Point, North Carolina, is known as the "Furniture Capital of the World." Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world's furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings--once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations--are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition.

In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition's relationship with