Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
chapter five
Imagining Ecological Urbanism
at the World Expo
From the empty streets on Shanghai's periphery, I traveled to the city's glit-
tering entrée to the global stage, the 2010 World Expo. Billed as the largest
gathering of nations ever assembled, more than seventy million people vis-
ited the expo site on the Shanghai waterfront during a six-month span. In an
old stereoscopic view of the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition that I own,
a packed scene of thousands of men with moustaches wearing bowler hats
and a few ladies in fashionable dresses faced the cameras with a line at the
bottom describing the scene as “A Surging Sea of Humanity.” Visiting the
Shanghai World Expo is exactly how I imagined being in that surging sea of
fl esh. I waited a full three hours to merely get in through the gates (I faced
an extra fi fteen-minute delay, stopped by the gate checker fearful that my
AIDS Walk T-shirt signaled that I was a possible protester rather than a clue-
less tourist who had grabbed the fi rst clean shirt I could fi nd). Once inside, I
waited another three hours to go to the U.S. Pavilion. Another day, I waited
three hours to get into the visually stunning U.K. Pavilion, and another two
to get into Happy Street, a land of plastic sheep and stroopwaff el in the Dutch
Pavilion. Two days after one of my visits, the single-day attendance total
was more than one million people. h
is attendance represented the largest
