The whole reason Webster sponsored our trip to Shanghai was because of the World Expo. I had never even heard of the World Expo before Webster told us about the trip but supposedly it’s a big deal. Shanghai spent more money building the Expo (which will run for one year) than Beijing did on the Olympics, and we’re talking billions of dollars here. The Expo was built on a area of a few square kilometers a little outside Shanghai’s center, and was divided in half by the river. The smaller side of the Expo was the corporate side, and the larger side was the country side. Each entity (whether that be a corporation or a country) built a “pavilion” that was supposed to showcase the corporation/country and fit the theme “Better City, Better Life.” So the point of the Expo was supposed to be a showcase on how different companies and countries are supporting sustainable urban growth.
We went as a group on Monday morning, starting on the corporate side, and the best way to describe the felling of the Expo is Disneyworld. There were wide expanses of concrete, little vegetation, and the pavilions were kind of like the rides. The pavilions were all about show—each corporation/country trying to outdo the other in terms of architecture. They were some of the weirdest and most unique buildings I have ever seen, and all I could think about was that all but five of them would be torn down after the year was over. There was a lot of hype about the Expo circulating through the city, and the number of expected visitors per day was anywhere from 200,000 to 700,000. There were theme-park style lines built outside each of the pavilions, and some of them had waits of over 3 hours to get into.
The first pavilion we went into was the Theme Pavilion, which was the centerpiece of the Expo. It actually turned out to be the best one we went into all day as it had more substance than some of the others and it was one of the least crowded. There were various rooms, all with high ceiling and very stark design. A big thing in all of the pavilions was to have sounds, lights, and huge graphics and/or movies playing on all the walls, ceilings, floors, etc. It was all very abstract and trippy (if anyone has ever seen the early episode of “Lost” where Kate/Jack/etc. are in the Others’ complex and they see the room where they strap people to chairs and make them watch weird images on huge screens with loud noise accompanying the images – that is what it reminded me of). It took us about 45 minutes to get through, and we saw some cool things pertaining to urban development including:
• Various maps from cities around the world showing their growth. The screen would show satellite picture of the city 20-30 years ago, then a satellite image of the city today. It was amazing to see the difference in the cities that had planned urban growth vs. those in third world countries where the massive influx of people moving to the cities has caused chaos and poverty. The planned cities are nice little grids and the unplanned ones are messes of streets going in all directions.
• Some ideas of future buildings and alternative cities, like a building that is covered in vegetation or a city that is entirely floating on water.
• Technology of the future, like a refrigerator that tells you the status of your food (is this chicken still good?) and a toilet that reads your poo and can tell you what’s wrong if you don’t feel well.
Next we headed over to the GM/SAIC pavilion, and I hoped to learn about what the companies are doing in making their Chinese cars greener. It was probably the most disappointing pavilion of the day. We watched a movie in seats that moved along with the movie (and it was in Mandarin with no English subtitles so I was quite confused) and then some interpretive dancers in glow-in-the-dark spandex outfits did a dance around some Jetsons looking cars. I thought maybe after the movie the pavilion would be more museum-like with realistic cars of the future and something about what the companies were actually doing, but as we poured out of the theater we were directed to the gift shop and then the exit. Oh well.
Photo: The poo-reading toilet.
Videos: The Theme Pavilion and the GM/SAIC Pavilion.
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