Pieter van Wesemael
Architect, Researcher, Urban Planner

Towards world fairs as promotional models for sustainable city life

The unavoidable question is what sustainability actually is. Everything wants to labelled “sustainable” these days – it is a term that has become a victim of its own success, an insatiable guzzler. I won’t weary you with it any more. For now it is sufficient to ascertain that if sustainability is significant anywhere, then it is in the realm of society, the civic, where the focus is processes of social change. And that leads me to my first point.

(I)
If we look to the history of world fairs they seem to be the ideal instrument for promoting sustainable city life, for the following reasons:

1. The world fair is a didactic-ideological instrument that strives to familiarize the public at large with the massive structural changes in their traditional living environment, their habitat, as a result of modernization and globalization. So, promotion is its primary nature.
2. It does this by presenting the “better society of tomorrow”, often against a backdrop of the “better city of tomorrow”: a model society in a model city. So, promoting city life is its second nature.
3. Sustainability is not an unfamiliar theme for the world fair. Certainly not in its broad sense of sustainable use of energy and natural resources, via clean production technology to the long-term and harmonious society of diverse classes or ethnic groups. To be more precise: world fairs never preach revolutionary changes but always evolutionary changes: the reconciliation of the local and global or of tradition and modernization. So, promoting sustainable city life is its third nature.

(II)
If we want to emphasize the role of world fairs in promoting sustainable city life we must, first and foremost, take its didactic nature desperately seriously.

This means:

1. that we should realize that our public are the population of the country where the world fair is being organized and that we must emphatically target them as regards the content and design of exhibition ideology and the exhibition didactics. After all, traditionally, 95% of the world fair’s visitors come from the country organizing it.
2. that we realize that the exhibition’s content is provided to only a small extent by the organizers themselves. After all, unlike a museum or theme park, the fair does not have its own collection but it is the exhibitors who determine the content of the fair with their submissions. Therefore, if we want to find exhibitors who wish to collaborate in propagating the exhibition ideology and didactics as conceived by the organizers, then these must also be attractive to them.
3. that the world fair is traditionally the place where not only governments and organizers share their vision for the future, but also and especially the business community. These are literally the producers of the ‘Society and Habitat of Tomorrow”, more capable than anyone else of presenting this in a concrete, tangible and therefore convincing manner with their products and services.
4. that only in this way is there the guarantee that it is not just a handful of themed presentations by the organizers convey the world fair’s message, but that the entire world fair is thoroughly impregnated with it.
5. that the most dramatic, pervasive and convincing way in which the fair does that, in the traditionally didactic sense, is by literally staging the better society and habitat of tomorrow so that it can be experienced physically and collectively.

(III)
I cannot say how the ideal world fair about sustainable urban life would look – in order to do this, I would first have to know where it was being held, I would have to know who the public is – but based on the history of world fairs, there are a couple of things I can say:

1. In order to attract visitors (and exhibitors) to the world fair, the organizers will have to devise an exhibition ideology in which the theme of sustainability is tied in with both the large-scale structural changes that are pervading the modern global society, as well as with the local and everyday perception of the average visitor from the organizing country. Though I might not be a social philosopher, if I were to characterize the big structural shift then, for example for the Netherlands – the country I come from – I would say that the expo should be about the transition from industrial to post-industrial society. A society in which services, knowledge, IT and the creative industries are key. Here in the Far East something very different is happening, something unique: a process of industrialization, the development of a consumer society and the birth of a post-industrial society are occurring simultaneously. The task for the world fair would then have to be to demonstrate how these complex and turbulent transition processes might be shaped in a sustainable manner in a model society and habitat. Businesses can show how they think they can make a contribution with their cutting-edge knowledge, products and services, and countries can display how, based on their respective cultural backgrounds, deal with this kind of large-scale socio-economic structural changes. This means that businesses and countries also have a clear-cut self-interest in taking part in the expo and in jointly     conveying a unanimous message.

While I do not have a precise picture of this sustainable urban society of tomorrow here in the Far East – since I know too little about the local context – but in the Netherlands it would be synonymous with the post-industrial society and city. One in which the industrial city’s rules of the division of functions, of work and dwelling, are broken, simply because this is redundant and it is much more pleasurable to re-combine living and working. It is the end of large-scale, uniform mass production, because thanks to a combination of intelligent harmonization between individual buyers, developers and producers, as well as computer-controlled production technology, we can deliver custom-made products for the same price/quality ratio as the old-style industrial mass production. A city in which it is not social segregation and ghettoization that set the tone, but the social intermingling of young and old, family and singles, black and white, and so on. City-dwellers who are not governed, but who enjoy the maximum leeway to live their own lives in their living environment – not gated communities but community-interest development …. From architecture and urban development that looks the same all over the world to an urban planning that does justice to cultural and climatological differences …. And, of course, new construction technology strives to be sustainable, as has always usually been the case: in the Netherlands, brick is used in areas where clay is available, while wood is used in areas where the ground is too unstable for heavy structures and trees are abundant. Proceeding from the vision of the transition process, it becomes obvious which instruments, methods and strategies are required (and therefore what kinds of sustainability we are dealing with here).

2. How exactly the sustainable city of tomorrow should look is something I would not dare to speculate, but the history of world fairs teaches us that this not only requires looking carefully at the latest developments in the fields of architecture and urban planning, but also looking to the popular culture of science fiction literature and film. In 1939 it was the world of Flash Gordon and in 1970 it was the world of Star Trek – which does not make the exhibited cities of the future any less serious and influential: the streamline style of 1939 was prominent throughout the 1950s, and High-Tech has been booming since 1970. This would imply that for the world fair city of tomorrow we should be looking at films like Blade Runner, Brazil or ….