Think of the landscapes your sens generated. Did the billboards form part of it? Did they? Then the book you are looking at has been produced for you... Indeed, billboards form an integral part of our environment. They are all over our cities, they light them up, they hide building sites, they acommodate creativity and they often pop up on frequently used roads. They are points of reference and they even may be the symbol of a city (Times Square and Big Apple). Formatted, deformatted by the publicity agentes, their changes over the course of years, over the seasons and weeks, all capture our attention. There billboards are really familiar to us. We see them more often than our own home and in the end, we know them by heart. When we pass them closely, their gigantic size simply overwhelms us. The top models that figure on them appear to be even more out of reach. The cars, even the two-seater sports cars, seem to be made to take our entire family on a comfortable holiday. Billboards breathe life into the city. And each city has its own universe of wooden or aluminium billboards to offer, its bus shelters that are the work of renowned designers sucj as the likes of Philip Cox, Mario Beliini or Norman Foster, enchancing the architectural patrimony of the city (Brussels and is famous > Horta). You can also encounter unique pieces of work all over the world: the > or the > in London, the Adidas > in Lisbon, the Vuitton at the Hong Kong airport,... Until today, no one has ever dedicated a book of photographs to this urgan furnishing in the world. Now you are finally looking at it. Not an exhaustive catalogue, but advertising campaign(s), moods, original ad sensational formats, as the title already indicates. This book will take you on a tour of the world of major cities, along famous routes, and will make you marvel at the most beautiful shopping centres in the world. The gigantic sizeof billboards with original formats or the technology used to create them, will impress you. The title had already been decided on, but one of the chapters in this compilation could most certainly have been title >. You get the picture: the shining lights of the billboards at night did indeed deserve a separate section! As does the highly > like character of the latest of the big mass media... Leafing through these pages, you will recognise familiar landscapes and images,from Chinatown to the Eiffel Tower, from Disney characters to the heroes of our time (Zidane or Ballack), and prestigious brands. Because this urban furniture is the vehicle for the prestige of those who figure on it or use it. The grandeur is never far away in this world where modile phones are 10 metres high and where skaters jumpover entire cities. Always with style, with class and with elegance. We invite you to take a walk with us through this book published in a format that does justice to its subject. Enjoy the publicity campaigns shown in it, but above all the architecture, the surrounding landscapes and the daring formatting for oversized billboard campaings. In conclusion, we would like to thank the company JCDecaux for making its photo archives available to us. Without their help, this book would simply not have been what it is now.