City Inc. – Bata’s Corporate Towns

An Exhibition of the STIFTUNG BAUHAUS DESSAU

The exhibition ‘City Inc. Bata's Corporate Towns’ explores the urban design and cultural legacy of urban utopia in the early 20th century. Fordism, Garden City concepts and socialism provided the ideological breeding ground upon which the Czech shoe enterprise Bata formed its global mission of ‘shoeing the world’. Zlin in the Czech Republic served as the testing field for the production of a factory city based on the architectonics of Modernism that could be rationally created and mass reproduced. Following this strategy the Bata Empire eventually created an international corporate network including eighty factory cities.

The exhibition presents three international satellites of the Bata enterprise: Batanagar in India, the Bata Colony Möhlin in Switzerland and East Tilbury in the UK, cities that illustrate different paths of development depending on the remaining presence or final absence of Bata production in the city. Whether as a monument of industrial culture or as a place of permanent change, they still share a corporate identity. The exhibition not only offers insights into the respective local complexities and contradictions of life in a Bata City as impacted by the dynamic changes of the 20th century, but also investigates the uncertain future of these places under the influence of post-industrial transformation.

 

Result of the Bauhaus Kolleg XII:
Urban Footprints: Bata Cities
Curators: Regina Bittner, Wilfried Hackenbroich, Stefan Rettich
Curatorial Assistants: Joanne Pouzenc, Sarah Philine Schneider
Exhibition Design: Thilo Fuchs – TATIN Design Studio
Exhibition Management: Katja Szymczak
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Director: Philipp Oswalt