What Legacy Will the Shanghai World Expo Have on Cities?

The 2010 Shanghai World Expo opened a few days ago under the motto “Better City, Better Life”, signaling the fair’s emphasis on urban development and improvement. The expo’s unique emphasis on urban life, combined with it’s immense reach (it’s estimated that the expo will see 70 million visitors), means that it has an amazing opportunity to reshape people’s ideas about cities.

The expo is highlighting its theme through five theme pavilions: Urban Footprints, Urban Planet, Urban Dwellers, Urban Beings, and Urban Dreams. The pavilions present information on urban history, sustainability, transportation, and other relevant topics. The descriptions of the pavilions sound engaging and it remains to be seen how fair attendees react to the content.

The biggest attraction of the expo is certainly the pavilions of the 189 countries represented. It’s clear that most countries organized their pavilion exhibits with an urban theme, but some countries took the direction more seriously than others. Countries like Canada, Denmark, and Singapore highlighted some of their progressive urban achievements. In Denmark’s pavilion, visitors get on one of 1,500 bikes and ride up a ramp exploring Denmark’s commitment to bicycles.

Many countries, however, used the cities theme as a way to simply highlight their national culture. I think that’s a reasonable thing to do at a world expo, and I’m sure expo-goers will appreciate this approach just as much as the urban approach. It’s a shame that all countries weren’t required to do more to present what makes their cities unique; this expo is a great opportunity for ideas to be swapped across cultures in a bottom up fashion. If people from one country visit another’s pavilion and are impressed, they could try to implement those ideas back home.

The architecture of the pavilions themselves represents the biggest missed opportunity of the expo. It’s as if the organizers of the pavilions tried to adhere to the urban theme on some level, but failed to enforce that theme with their architects. Instead, architects saw the pavilions as a chance to create an iconic work without the constraints of a context. This is exactly the opposite of what they should have done. The theme is cities, and in cities architecture must be in balance with its surroundings. Most buildings will have to deal with party walls, street façades, views, and other constraints. In every city there is room for a few iconic structures, but the Shanghai World Expo is a city overloaded with them. Part of the blame falls on the expo organizers, who gave each pavilion a parcel that didn’t require countries to work together when designing their pavilions. Each parcel allows expo-goers to circulate around each pavilion like an oversized sculpture garden.

The Shanghai Expo could have taken its “Better City, Better Life” motto to heart and created a true city. Each country could have been in charge of designing a street instead of a sculpture/building. The streets would represent each country’s view on what modern urban living means to them. After the expo, Shanghai would be left with a truly unique district full of urban experiments. Prior to the expo, a swath of neighborhood was destroyed to make room for these pavilions. Replacing one neighborhood with another seems like a better way to make amends for the destruction.

Indeed, the legacy of the expo might be the irony of its motto when compared to the place left behind. In place of an existing, functioning piece of urban fabric, Shanghai gets sculptural pavilions (most of which will be dismantled or reassembled in their home countries) and public plazas.

It may all be worth it if the ideas spread inside of the sculptural pavilions do ignite progress in cities around the world. World expos and world’s fairs have done so in the past, but Shanghai has set its bar higher by promising a “better city” for expo-goers.

All images via ArchDaily. They have a great roundup of pavilions here and here.