Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
is relatively new.
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h e special theme pavilions are arguably the clearest
manifestation of China's branding of sustainable urbanism. In this version of
modernity, epic skyscrapers are not enough. Technology and sustainability
take center stage to make the new growing world cities sources of wonder
and order, rather than fear and chaos. h us, Shanghai is contrasted with
Lagos in the global imaginary or with Calcutta so famously described in all of
its sensuous negativity in Paul Ehrlich's infl uential 1968 tract
h e Population
Bomb.
At the Shanghai World Expo, eco-desire is technology and sustain-
ability conjoined, managed, and packaged by state and business to make
urban growth desirable and not a diseased trend to be feared.
world's fair dreaming
Over the past 150-plus years, since the advent of world expositions in the
mid-nineteenth century, they have always told a national story and explic-
itly aimed to leave their cultural, psychological, and architectural marks
long after the actual fairgrounds have been dismantled.
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h e largest and
most famous of the expositions are the so-called universal expositions, so
named because they supposedly transcend time and place. h ey are, and
have been, particularly eff ective repositories of memories, utopian fantasies,
and primal fears. A recent French exhibit on the history of the world's fairs
calls them “Dreamlands.” h e 1939 New York World's Fair highlighted a Sal-
vador Dali-designed pavilion called “h e Dream of Venus,” where a melted
façade contained inside it a choreographed water ballet and reproductions of
Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
and Leonardo's
Mona Lisa.
Historians have also noted the darker side of the fairs' dreams, which
one writer describes as “the fascination with recreating the world in minia-
ture, with controlling and shaping the world . . . the urge to gather the world
together, to control and display it.”
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One place where this impulse to “con-
trol and display” was clearest was the Midway Plaisance in Chicago in 1893,
where so-called authentic villages approximated those in the Philippines,
