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tunnels, where rails are installed and electric lights are lit day and night,
and trains fl ow to and fro like fl ying. . . . [A] huge bridge is built across
Huang Pu River to link Pu Dong with Shanghai, . . . so as to facilitate the big
Exposition to be held in Pu Dong, which is already as thriving as Shang-
hai.”
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At the time, responses to this novel were mixed, with the audience
fi nding it too utopian and unrealistic. With the actualization of the “dream”
of the Shanghai World Expo, these authors have been widely celebrated as
prescient visionaries.
h ese dreams are immortalized in a bronze statue at the Shanghai Urban
Planning Exhibition Center that commemorates the actual moment when the
seven members of the BIE awarded the expo to Shanghai in 2002. For much of
the next eight years after the initial announcement, ubiquitous slogans and
images about the world expo blanketed the city, ranging from corporate
advertising to state-sponsored exhortations. Banners proclaimed, “h ank
people for their understanding and support for relocation,” often on the sites
where large-scale demolition of housing and businesses had occurred. Other
banners proclaimed, “Hand in hand, eradicate messiness and untidiness.”
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h ese notions of “messiness” and “untidiness” bring us back to James
Scott in
Seeing Like a State.
He argues that governments and bureaucrats
“see” the conditions that “need” improvement in vastly diff erent ways than
the actual inhabitants of these so-called defective places. h us, where the
state (in this case, the Shanghai municipality) seeks to consolidate and exer-
cise its power using the guise (even if earnestly believed) of improvements as
its raison d'être, local residents often argue that such improvements create
new harms or are based on new logics that do not necessarily represent their
own worldview.
Take, for instance, the case of the much-vaunted Shanghai subway sys-
tem. Experiences and opinions vary greatly, depending on the particular
circumstances and subject position of the person asked. Anecdotally, one
family friend lost their business due to new station construction, but was
