Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
h e organic and self-contained cities visually resembled Arup's plans for
Dongtan. h e view of these unnamed networked cities dove down suddenly,
à la Google Earth, zooming in on Shanghai and the expo site itself. h at
pavilion also situated Shanghai among the great cities of the world in a sur-
round-sound fi lm, in a teleological narrative of travel, progress, and tech-
nology. h e video, along with the entire City Being Pavilion itself, enacted a
theory of the technological, networked global fi nance/world city.
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h is concept of experiencing the city as a resident may at fi rst glance
represent the ideological opposite of
Seeing Like a State.
But that's not the case
in the City Being Pavilion. In “Seeing Like an Eco-City,” the political scien-
tist Warren Magnusson argues that to “see like a city” means to “recognize
that the static order we so often associate with the state is an illusion. h ings
are in fl ux.” While seeing like a state involves a search for order and control,
to see like a city is to be uncertain about “the politics of the moment” or its
meaning. Rather, we can only “trace its patterns, note its instabilities, and
keep watch for signs of change.”
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On the one hand, the pavilion mirrors the
“experience” of entering the city, but its optic is still more like that of a state
in its search of control and order. In the Pavilion of City Being's imaginings,
you entered a globally networked city, one that prioritized the airplane,
travel of people, and unfettered fl ow of fi nancial information, and where the
advanced network eco-city reigns supreme.
In another section of the same building, the Pavilion of Urban Planet dis-
plays similar ideologies through its visualization of the core themes of
“humanity in symbiosis with the city and planet.”
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Here, environmental
images and themes were more explicit, beginning with a cowboy Haibao with
a giant globe greeting people entering the line. h is pavilion was designed by
Triad Berlin, which won the commission over 150 other fi rms. According to its
website, Triad is one of Germany's most successful communication agencies,
specializing in creating “emotionally intelligent communication formats in
spaces.”
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According to the expo website, the logic of the pavilion was split:
