Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chinese tourist landscape. Yet despite their particularity, expos also hold
certain themes and approaches constant, chief among these the valorization
and confl ation of technology and spectacle.
defining better city, better life
In earlier chapters, I discussed how the language of “betterment” and qual-
ity was applied to various land-use and development projects. h e “natural
capital” and ecological discourse that saturated Dongtan and Huangbaiyu
represent the desire to add “value” to economically depressed rural spaces.
h is desire (value = rural + technology = ecology) was also a recurrent theme
in the Shanghai World Expo. Shanghai's economic, urban, and environmen-
tal policy worked together to produce the improved city that promises a
“Better City, Better Life,” according to the o' cial expo slogan. A vision of
nature and environment is a key component to the city's recent history,
what one U.S.-based planner working in Shanghai calls “the greatest trans-
formation of a piece of earth in history.”
15
For local authors and politicians, the Shanghai World Expo was the pri-
mary agent of this urban transformation. Dreams of Shanghai hosting a
world expo span more than a century. In 1905, the Shanghai-based novelist
Wu Jianren rewrote the eighteenth-century novel
h e Story of the Stone,
in
which the hero, Jia Baoyu, visited a world expo staged in the city's Pudong
area. In 1910, another Shanghai novelist, Lu Shi'e, predicted in his novel
New
China
that the world expo would come to Shanghai one hundred years from
then. According to one plot summary, the novel's protagonist, Lu Yunxiang,
wakes up in an entirely new and unrecognizable Shanghai. In this new rei-
magined city, “extraterritoriality on foreign concessions is abolished, for-
eigners who used to be arrogant and dominating are now respectful to the
Chinese, and innumerous changes have taken place in the street, those
trams which used to have lots of accidents with pedestrians are now changed
into underground trains . . ., the ground is hollowed to make way for
