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February 12, 2012 Sze Paper/ work in Progress

PLEASE DO NOT COPY OF CITE THIS PAPER WITHOUT PERMISSION

This draft paper is submitted to the for Berkeley Environmental Politics Workshop to be discussed on March 2, 2012

Contexts for this paper:

This paper (working title: “The Work of the Eco-City”) is being co-written with Gerardo Gambirazzio (Postdoctoral Researcher, USEPA) for an edited collection entitled Situating Sustainability, which is the product of a workshop convened by Anne Rademacher from NYU held in Abu Dhabi in November 2010. The main questions of the conference and volume are: How are notions and practices of sustainability defined, cultivated, and assessed at global scales, while also shaped by specific contexts? What are the consequences, of the movement of sustainability knowledge and technologies across diverse, and often assymetrical, social, political, and cultural conditions? I co-authored (with Gambirazzio) a shorter version, called: “Eco-Cities without Ecology: Constructing Ideologies, Valuing Nature” for an edited volume entitled Resilience in Urban Ecology and Design: Linking Theory and Practice for Sustainable Cities (edited by Pickett, Cadenasso and McGrath). Basically, the italics represent the material that will be expanded in this new version. I haven’t yet decided which parts to include from Dongtan, to symmetrically match the Masdar material. The Dongtan research comes from my book project (Fantasy Islands), which focuses on flows, fears and fantasies in contemporary urban and global environmental culture, with a sustained look at Shanghai in China. In it, I analyze Dongtan, a failed eco-city proposal, within multiple ideological and spatial contexts, including Chongming Island, suburban development, and the 2011 Shanghai World Exposition.

Note: I showed this paper to my colleague Diana Davis (who knows this series well), and she told me it was too short, so I (neurotically) decided to add, my 5th chapter from my book, which is on the Shanghai World Expo. This material, which begins on page 13 of this document serves as additional context for the actual paper under discussion (YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS BUT IT’S THERE IF YOU ARE INTERESTED). Basically in both the paper on Masdar and Dongtan, and the book on Shanghai more broadly, I’m interested in the similar themes of the ideological “work” of particular iterations of eco-cities, ecological futurism, etc.

The “Work” of the Eco-City (working title)

Introduction

In the last 5 years, prominent large-scale “eco-city” development proposals have emerged around the globe. While the development of eco-cities is in itself not a new trend, what is new is how the discourses of eco-city building and its concomitant ideas of sustainability

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have developed and transformed, as well as the mechanisms by which eco-cities are developed, promoted, built (or unbuilt). “Eco-cities” has been applied to a number of different projects that embrace a broad array of ideological and ecological goals. This paper outlines the ideologies embedded in contemporary eco-city development through a case-study approach, focusing on two high-profile eco-cities in the United Arab Emirates and China: what values are enacted in the eco-city? Elsewhere, we show that this iteration of eco-city development is based on an ideological world-view akin to green, state-sponsored capitalism, and “eco-cities” are less about “ecological cities” than about enacting and supporting pro-capitalist ideologies, albeit with a green veneer (Sze and Gambirazzio, forthcoming). Here, we examine how neoliberal narratives of environmental clean production (zero carbon emissions) processes have shaped the creation of eco-cities, thus redefining the interaction of humans with nature. The contemporary narratives of the eco-city make a case for particular processes of consumption of nature. We analyze the “affective” properties of these particular eco-cities. What kinds of emotions, feelings, and aspirations are enacted within these eco-cities? Through a close reading of plans, promotional videos and experiences in both places, we argue that this iteration of transnational top-down eco-city development by its very definition- rejects any notion of local or situated sustainability.

The two eco-city proposals we examine include one located in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates called Masdar and another one in Shanghai, China known as Dongtan. What ties Dongtan and Masdar together are their social, political and economic contexts. Both emerge from politically authoritarian regimes. Both of these eco-cities were supposed to be entirely zero-waste and carbon-neutral, and lauded in the global media. Both failed to reach their ambitious goals, in part because the following observation. If the central operating metaphor of ecology is about “interconnected” systems, eco-cities metaphorically (and often practically) fail because they erase interconnectedness in a crucial sense (Cadenasso et al. 2006).

Contemporary eco-cities are conceptualized as an enclosed space through which to measure ecological virtue, such as zero-waste, and low carbon emissions. In sharp contrast to eco-city proponents who argue that the only way to measure inputs and outputs is through containing the eco-city into a particular place, theorists from urban socio-nature, radical geography, and political ecology reject any separation of the “urban” sphere from the “ecological,” and hence, the eco-city from the city itself. Thus, ultimately, we suggest that embedded within the ideology of the eco-city lie the seeds of its own failure. Although Masdar and Dongtan failed, the ideologies that shaped them remain ascendant, and thus important to analyze. Specifically, we argue that contemporary eco-city narratives present a new process of the consumption of nature, drawn from ecological modernization discourses.

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Ecological modernization discourses are a set of concepts used to analyze environmental policies and institutions developed to solve environmental problems in a capitalist society (Mol and Spaargaren 2000; Spaargaren and Mol 1992). Central to the concept of ecological modernization is the idea that ecological crises can be overcome through technological advancement. For the proponents of ecological modernization, ecological crises are overcome via the efficiency of the market through economic growth, and technological advancement. Critics of ecological modernization argue that these ideas inevitably lead to a society whose environment is unsustainable in that human well-being depends fully on corporate sustainability schemes (Fisher and Freudenburg 2010; York and Rosa ; Young 2000). One of those sustainability schemes is the development of the eco-city. Although technologically laudable, the eco-cities analyzed in this paper, fall short specifically of addressing concerns about political governance and distribution of ecological burdens (Martinez-Alier 2007).

Defining “Value” in the Eco-City:

This section describes the evolution of the eco-city, from its countercultural roots, to its current iteration in Masdar and Dongtan. “Eco-city” was first coined by Richard Register in his 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley. Register is the founder of EcoCity Builders, an organization that is the hub of the ecocity movement in the United States, and an early founder of the International Eco City Conference Series. Since the term emerged, many initiatives have fallen under the rubric of eco-city development. In the U.S. context, eco-city development is allied with its early theoreticians, such as Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri and his acolytes (of whom Register is one). Soleri is the creator of a community called “Arcosanti” in Arizona, which began in 1970, and which is based on his concept of “Arcology,” what he calls the fusion of architecture and the ecology.

From the countercultural roots in the 1960’s, eco-city proponents in the U.S. context in the last two decades have focused on green building and technological innovation at a relatively local scale (e.g. the building or street-level). In the last decade, the eco-city concept has gone global, and radically increased its scale from the local to the urban. This shift is evident in the Masdar and Dongtan projects, both of which aimed to create eco-cities where no previous city existed. One of the main characteristics of both projects is that their socio-political context is tightly controlled by their respective governing political structures. The question of why the United Arab Emirates and China are the site of the most seemingly aggressive “eco-city” development is a complex one. However, our immediate concern is to consider how humans and nature interact in these new urban spaces through an analysis of the ecological principles promoted by these two eco-cities. What are these principles and how are they deployed to overcome the environmental crisis in an urban space?

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In what follows, we turn to the concepts dominant in contemporary discourses of eco-cities. The work of ecological economics, widely used in the development of the eco-city, conceptualizes how physical nature is transformed, first from nature to ecological functions, and then to production and consumption/ leisure functions. This transformation takes place through advancement of techniques of measurement and quantification that becomes part of an ideological construct that assigns an equivalent economic value to nature (Heinzerling and Ackerman 2002; Pagiola 2008; Sagoff 2000, 2011; Turner et al. 2003). This process is central to the development of techniques that measure the ecological function of an ecosystem (Boyd and Banzhaf 2006; deGroot et al. 2002; Schneider et al. 2010). In the context of the eco-city, the relevant ecological functions are those that maximize energy efficiency and minimize pollution of water, air and land (Suzuki et al. 2010 ).

In the contemporary eco-city, the value of natural resources (“natural capital”) and their distribution and allocation are mediated through economic models of efficiency and cost-benefit. “Natural capital” is a concept taken from Lovins, Lovins and Hawkens (1999) influential manifesto. The measurement of ecological functions in terms of economic inflows, outflows, price, demand, supply, and market and non-market natural resources illustrates how the ecology of eco-cities is designed and promoted as economic function rather than as a complex intermingling of the social with the natural, what political ecologists and radical geographers term “socio-nature.” (Robbins, 2007; Kaika, 2005).

Eco-cities as ideological solution to the “solution” but to what problem?

Despite the valuable contributions to urban theory from social scientists, urban theory remained a separate area of study from the study of nature. As Matthew Gandy points out, this separation owes much of its rationalization to ideological considerations, rather than analytical ones, as societies exist within the context of a natural environment (Gandy 2002).

In tracing the trajectory of how the urban and the ecological have become an issue of primary concern to social scientists, a key global event marks this shift: the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 (Dorsey; Becker, Jahn and Stiess). Becker, Jahn and Stiess suggest that the reason sustainability had not been properly researched by social scientists was because anything having to do with environmental concerns drew the attention of physical scientists. While ‘sustainability’ along with the term ‘globalization’ emerged as the buzzwords of the decade, what they meant was not entirely clear. Despite the nature of the term ‘sustainability’, the term possesses an elusive definition. It serves, as Becker et al note, as a sketch more than as a framework for the development of guidelines aimed at conservation, protection and rehabilitation of natural resources (BOOK UNFCCC). Terms such as ‘smart growth’, ‘sustainable communities’ and ‘sustainable villages’, ‘green living’ emerged during this period, as to signify the concern of local communities and international institutions such as the UN for the environment in urban areas. Our

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aim is to contribute to the human ecosystems framework proposed by urban ecologists, which mixes human social systems with resource systems and ecosystem structures and processes (Pickett and Cadenasso 2008; Pickett et al. 2004). The integration of ecological principles into urban theory has been advanced by a group of ecologists around the work of S.T.A. Pickett. Their work of combining a multidisciplinary approach to thinking about human-nature interconnection moves our knowledge of urban ecology from ecology and urban theories as opposite and single bodies of knowledge into a cohesive framework that allows us to explore the complex layering of urban processes and ecological systems (Steward T. A. Pickett 1997; S.T.A. Pickett 2001). Their conceptual framework establishes a road map to identify the multiple connections between humans and nature. Their complex system approach identifies the interplay of social processes and ecological systems at various scales.

The flaw in their framework is that it fails to note the role of capital and history in the production of urban nature (Gandy 2002a; Martinez-Alier 1999). Matthew Gandy, in his work on the transformation of nature in the city of New York, shows how the naturalization of nature in urban New York is the result of complex social processes that hide the role of power and capital. Gandy adds: “The production of nature not only involves the transformation of capital but simultaneously intersects with the changing role of the state, emerging metropolitan cultures of nature and wider shifts in the social and political complexion of city life” (p 5)

• Ecology of cities rather than on the ecological city

• History of social, economic and political processes rather than the naturalization of social, economic and political processes

• Nature and power

• Human ecology as the relationship between humans and nature can:t be understood without understanding the history of human beings and their conflicts.

• Articulation of the social, economic and political processes of ecology as problems of distribution

• Ecology is a social and political construct—must be understood through historical analysis

The emergence of the concepts of sustainability that connect human processes to nature, parallels the history of the study of ecological processes, namely ecosystems. To show how the linkages between human and nature come together in an urban area, we turn to the work of ecological economists. Their work helps us to conceptualize how nature acquires a quantifiable value through techniques of measurement and quantification and becomes part of an ideological economic construct that assigns a monetary value to nature. The work of Erik Gomez-Gaggethum (2010) traces the development of the theory and practices of the commodification of ecosystem services.i This has taken many forms, but primarily is represented through regulations aimed at protecting the environment and

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the public. For example, the Clean Water Act has served as a conduit to establish a market place for Wetland Mitigation. The work of Robertson (2000), shows how the establishment of banks, where rights to wetland conservation, preservation and rehabilitation are exchanged for land development and mitigation rights in urban areas. Moreover, the Clean Air Act has also served as a conduit to the establishment of a market for emissions. The sulfur market, established in the mid 1980s and aimed at reducing acid rain in the New England area (MacKenzie 2007), has served as the basis for current emission markets across the globe, the EU-ETS and most recently with AB-32 in California.

The transformation of ecosystem services across this economic ideology, has taken place through the valuation of nature in terms of cost-benefits. The standard definition for an ecosystem and ecosystem service is provided by the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA). The MEA defines an ecosystem as a dynamic complex of plant, animal and microorganism communities and the nonliving environment interacting as a functioning unit. An ecosystem services are defined as the benefits people obtain from ecosystems ((Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005) Robertson (2007) traces how ecologists working for state agencies perform the uncertain tasks of measuring and quantifying nature. Rudolf de Groot (2002) takes this further and shows how the economic valuation of nature proposed by environmental economists is simplistic and riddle with contradictions. Instead, he proposes valuation method that considers ecological uses and benefits, socio-cultural uses of nature and economic quantification of market and non-market nature.

The large-scale promotion of the eco-city as the technological solution to urban and international environmental problems is the center of much attention at international environmental events. A recently published World Banks report, “Eco2 Cities” promotes the integration of what it calls, a “one system approach” to urban planning and urban living through the development of eco-cities (Suzuki et al. 2010 ). The report recommendations reduce complex urban problems of governance to a rationalist economistic approach, anchored by corporate operations as a model of urban governance. In an insightful comment on the congruency of ecology and economics, Neil Johnson (2011) warns against the insistent reproduction of economic and ecological models into real life by suggesting that it would be akin flying on a “paper plane that had been scaled up to the size of a 747” (2011: 302).

In other words, debates about creating economic value out of nature are part of the ideological context of eco-city-development in Masdar and Dongtan. Both illustrate the fracture between the purported goal of developing a city that is ecologically sound and the reality of urban socio-political complexity on the ground. This contradiction is clear

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in terms of Masdar’s political prominence on the global stage. For example, at the 16th Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Cancun, Mexico held in November-December 2010, Masdar held a prominent place. At a conference aimed at establishing a global agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHG) to avoid the impacts of climate change, it is not unusual to see technologies such as wind, and solar being displayed alongside nature, in the form of tropical forests as ready-made market solutions to abate climate change. The Masdar Eco-City display stood as a solution promoted by the UNFCCC and mainstream environmental groups, for all countries to embrace as a solution to reduce fossil emissions; a space denaturalized of social, economic and political processes, instead focused on its technological advances and utopian qualities.

As the young Italian attendant at the Abu Dhabi UAE exhibit at the United Nations Framework for Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Cancun, Mexico held from late 2010 guided visitors through the large exhibit space, she pointed at each of the walls displaying large architectural design drawings. In the corner of Abu Dhabi’s exhibit area sat a large-scale model of Masdar City, complete with scale sized people and cars. Other countries who sponsored exhibits in Cancun focused primarily on displaying and highlighting their natural resources, biodiversity and policies they have adopted to comply with international agreements aimed at the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (ghg). Abu Dhabi’s eco-city, took up the most prominent location in this particular wing of the exhibit, at the entrance of the CancunMesse ( a hangar warehouse type where the Mexican government held the event for 15000 people), and its main display consisted of a few architectural models and design drawings along with a stack of bags handed out to visitors which contained informational brochures about the project, yanlines, and souvenirs about Dubai, all containing the brand Masdar City in two tones, light blue and light green colors. One visitor asked if David Beckham will purchase one of these homes and come to live in Masdar City.

The UAE exhibit in Cancun clearly shows the literal perspective that is most privileged in the UAE’s representation of Masdar: that eco-cities are high-tech, residential experiences. These ideologies are also on view in the official promotion videos about both perspectives, viewable online (on their official website, in the case of Masdar, and/or on Youtube). In both videos, the perspective you take as a viewer is a birds-eye flyover, which swoops down from above to gaze rapturously at the solar panels and windmills.ii

In the next two sections, we describe how the ecological modernization discourses underpins the actual proposed eco-cities, first in Masdar and then at Dongtan.

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Masdar

Masdar is a planned city in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and designed by Foster + Partners, led by the British-born Sir Norman Foster. The majority of seed capital for Masdar, amounting to $22 billion USD comes from the government of Abu Dhabi. The aim of Masdar, announced in 2006, is to be carbon-neutral, zero-waste, and car-free.

Figure 1. Artist rendering of Masdar City. Figure 2. View of Masdar Institute Copyright: Masdar Corporation

Scheduled for completion in 2016, Masdar’s population is estimated to reach 50,000 residents and it will be home to 1500 businesses (Figure 1). In its initial stages, the city’s electricity will be from photovoltaics, concentrating solar power (CSP), and waste to energy. The CSP plants currently produce electric power by converting the sun’s energy into high-temperature heat using mirror configurations. The heat is then channeled through a conventional generator. Masdar also aims to divert 98% of its waste from landfills to a waste-to-energy facility that will produce biosolids by 2020. Working with a US based firm called EnerTech this facility will convert renewable fuel for energy generation. Lastly, the Masdar government has a “Carbon Management Unit” that is in charge of developing CO2 emissions reduction projects, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, and the creation of a national CCS network for enhanced oil recovery. Masdar is also home to a hydrogen power plant (Crampsie 2008).

Masdar received considerable international attention when the New York Times architectural critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, wrote a cover story in September 2010, which detailed how many early accounts of Masdar were understood to be a gimmick or fad. He writes of the cynicism associated with a project focused on sustainability whose funding comes directly from oil wealth: “Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious” (Ouroussoff

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2010). Part of the daring is the large-scale ambition of the proposal, to build a city of 50,000 where no significant population exists, and to build it in a “green” manner (Figure 1).

He contrasts the more daring features, such as attention to local architectural tradition alongside the most high-tech innovation, and the subordination of the car, with more problematic elements (Figure 2). Among these are the “gated community mentality” obsessed with utopianism and the “Disneyland –like” experience. Much of that Disneyland experience can be captured in two central features of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technolgy (MIST, the only part of Masdar that has been built, as of late 2011). MIST is a graduate research institution focused entirely on renewable energy and sustainable technology development, associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-MIT. MIST is elevated on a hill, and cars are submerged underground. According to Ouroussoff, Foster and Partners combined these elements to help cool the site, by as much as 70 degrees (2010). The underground cars are tiny pods, called a “Personal Rapid Transport System” that run on electric power drawn from solar energy, and using high-tech chips and sensors. The pod system has temporarily been scrapped as technologically ineffective, at times, failing to open for their passengers.

Masdar has failed to achieve certain timelines for its development. Due to the global financial crisis, the rollout time was extended, and the cost reduced 10-15% (Haider 2010). However, the project is still slated to move forward, although whether it reaches its original sustainability goals is very much in doubt.

Dongtan

Masdar was heavily influenced by an earlier ambitious eco-city named Dongtan. Dongtan eco-city was announced to great fanfare in 2003. It was to be located on Chongming Island near Shanghai in China and was to exemplify a “green” approach to urban design, architecture and infrastructure (including sustainable energy and waste management) and economic and business planning. Dongtan was supposed to house 500,000 people by 2050. It was also supposed to be carbon-neutral, “zero-waste” and based entirely on renewable energy while built on ecologically sensitive wetlands. Dongtan was a product of a transnational collaboration between institutional and individual actors in the United Kingdom and China, widely touted in its early days as an example of “best practices” in global sustainability.

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Figure 3. Map locating Dongtan, China (copyright Gerardo Gambirazzio)

In 2005, Arup, a global planning, engineering and design firm based in London, announced that it was going to build Dongtan for the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC), the investment arm of the Shanghai municipality and one of China’s largest real estate developers. Much of the global media coverage adopted Arup’s descriptions of Dongtan from the press releases, which claimed that: “Dongtan represents the quest to create a new world.” Laudatory journalistic accounts extolled Dongtan, which was supposed to represent a fundamentally different model for Chinese sustainable urbanism (McGray, 2007). This view of urbanism explicitly rejected a sequential view of economic development as a precondition for environmental protection (McGray 2007; Normile 2008). As of December 2011, Dongtan has not been built and its future prospects look grim. Before Dongtan’s spectacular flameout, the project was a big political affair (Sze and Zhou 2011 ).

The ideologies of “natural capital” saturate Dongtan’s development discourse. In other words, what historically made Chongming Island “backward,” its natural and rural character, open space, under-development and lack of industry, are now considered the island’s main economic virtues and gives the Island its ecological “value.” The ecology and beauty of the island is –now- the source of its “natural capital.” In their representation of Dongtan’s natural capital, Arup argues that new contexts of scarcity of natural resources transform the historical view of nature from valueless to valued. Thus, companies who can recognize a new paradigm of valuing “natural capital” are positioned to profit.

Arup’s master plan for Dongtan had a planning trajectory of 45 years and was intended to be completed in 2050. The plan provided 29 square meters of green space per person, more than 4 times the amount in Los Angeles, and ensures that no place in the city is further than 540 meters from a bus stop. The Dongtan plan was divided into two sections: first, an 86 square kilometer conservation area of farmland and aquaculture enclosed between the 1968 and 1998 dykes; and second, the exterior wetlands on the sea-side of the 1998 dyke. The wetland area exterior to the 1998 dyke was listed as a nationally protected area in 1992, and in 2001 became an Important Bird Area listed under the

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Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. While best known as a passage area for the critically endangered Black-faced Spoonbill, the Dongtan wetlands also provide passage for the Spotted Greenshank and winter grounds for the Hooded Crane.

Dongtan’s ecological footprint was modeled as being less than half that of a typical Chinese city. Ninety percent of all waste was to be recycled; and 95% of all energy from renewable sources. Biogasification of rice husks was to supplement wind and solar power. A density of 160 people per hectare was planned to enable public transportation. Only cars with zero tail-pipe emissions were to be allowed inside the city while all others (like in Masdar) were supposed to be left in a parking lot on the edge of the development. The city of Dongtan was to be formed through the integration of three towns, Marina Village, Lake Village, and Pond Village. In addition to the town and city plan, SIIC’s comprehensive master plan included three leisure parks, each focused on a different theme: equine and water sports, water sports and science education and vacation villas. (Sze and Zhou, 2011 ).

Why, given the tremendous amount of energy, political resources and excitement did Dongtan eco-city fail? The project failed for many complex reasons, including the arrest of its biggest proponent on corruption charges, disputes between Arup and SIIC (i.e. whether the project was truly car-free, and who was going to pay for it), changing national policy on land-taking, and the clear lack of progress on technological innovation (Sze and Zhou, 2011).

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have suggested that contemporary eco-cities represent a new process of the consumption of nature- drawn from ecological modernization discourse, that functionally segregate the social and political from the urban ecological. The two case studies we presented illustrate how narratives around ecological sustainability have been implemented and portrayed as green urban utopias. Masdar and Dongtan are placed outside the traditional cities they are closely affiliated with (Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai). In being placed outside the major cities to which they lay adjacent, the eco-cities reveal both what they are - building something new, highly technological, and also their failing- that they are ultimately irrelevant to the vast majority of urban residents. For example, although the actual Masdar site is car-free, few people who work and even live in Masdar (at MIST) are completely car-free. The vast majority of those who work at Masdar drive from central Abu Dhabi (39 miles away), and some even from Dubai (more than 60 miles away). That is in line with early estimates that at the project completion, over 60,000 workers will commute to the city from off-site, to join the 50,000 residents on the site. Likewise, Dongtan was the first major eco-city that conceptualized itself as an “island” of ecological virtue within the Shanghai regional context.

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Masdar and Dongtan illustrate how ideological discourses of ecological modernization become assumed, and been built into green design and architectural practice. Paradoxically, this naturalization of ecological modernization leaves unexamined the social, political and economic variables that create the actual ecologies of the city (Gandy 2002). Thus, these eco-cities essentially segregate ecology from the everyday workings of the actual city that spawns the eco-city in question, and ignore the political contexts of their creation.

(thoughts on design)

Ecology and design---social dimensions of urban design

• Redefine their insistence of focusing on design as a natural process of the city.

• Design as a sustainable process driven by an understanding of urban ecology as a process built on solid historical and social practices rather than contingencies of capital and markets.

• Nature not as the backdrop of sustainability, environmental or ecological (ecological modernization) concerns but rather as driver of sustainable and environmental design.

• The role of institutions in design practice and of sustainable ecological resources

Thus, it is perhaps no surprise to find so many correspondences between two eco-city projects half-way around the world from each other. Both were conceptualized as enclosed, pioneering, clean, controlled and virtuous ecological spaces. They share both logic and form. They propose building cities where there where none before, and imagine that their construction produces environmental benefits- value out of nature. From the perspective of eco-city proponents, the contemporary urban center is largely associated with unsustainable human processes: poverty, segregation, blight, crime, sprawl, and industrial pollution. These challenges, and those associated with climate change, can only be mitigated through technological and built solutions, shaped deeply by neoclassical economic principles. The complex social, political and economic problems of the contemporary city are reduced to a set of rationalist and capitalist ideologies. These ideologies promote the development of urban institutions of governance that re-inscribe political and social hierarchies in their management of sustainability policy, resource extraction and use, which would isolate certain social and economic groups to the whim of market and technology.

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Chapter 5: Ecological Urbanism at the World Expo

Green Dreamlands: Ecological Urbanism at the World Expo

Introduction

From Thamestown’s empty streets, we now come to Shanghai’s glittering entrée to the global stage, the 2010 World Expo. Billed as the largest gathering of nations ever, over 70 million people visited a massive site on two opposing sides of the Shanghai waterfront during a six month span. In an old stereoscopic view of the 1893 World’s Expo that I own, mostly men wearing bowler hats and few ladies in fashionable dresses were in a crush facing the camera with a line at the bottom of “A Surging Sea of humanity.” Visiting the Shanghai World Expo is exactly how I imagined being in that sea. I waited 3 hours to merely get in through the gates (with an extra 15 minute delay, stopped by the gate checker fearful that my AidsWalk T-shirt signaled that I was a possible protester, rather than a clueless tourist who grabbed the first clean shirt I could find). Once inside, I waited another 3 hours to go to the unattractive United States Pavilion, curious to see how America represented itself (more on that sad story later!). On yet another day, I waited 3 hours to get into the visually stunning UK Pavilion, and another 2 to get into Happy Street, land of plastic sheep and stropwafflen (sp) (a.k.a. the Dutch Pavilion). Two days after one of my visits, the single day attendance total was over 1,00,000 people, the largest number ever to go to the Expo (and arguably the largest single day attendance for any event in human history). Even on relatively low-attendance days, lines to get into the $164 million Saudi Arabia Pavilion (the “Moon Boat”) which recreated the desert was stretched to the 9 hour mark, while the regular waits for the other popular pavilions (Japan, Russia, Latvia, Germany and Spain) ranged from 3-7 hours). While I can’t answer why exactly all those people waited in those long lines (Americans are well-known, in the theme-park industry, to resist lines that make us wait even 1 hour), I know why I did. I wanted to know what the Shanghai 2010 World Expo was all about, particularly its view of the ecological future it imagined and represented to its audiences, both in person and on-line, national and international.

Historically, World Expositions tell a national story, and explicitly aim to leave their cultural, psychological and architectural marks long after the actual Fairgrounds have been dismantled.iii According to their official sanctioning body, “Expos are unique events unparalleled for their scale, the innovation they encourage, and their power to attract large masses.”iv The largest and most famous of the Expositions are the so-called “Universal Expositions” that supposedly transcend time and place. Another theme that transcends their differences is the abiding faith and love-affair that the World’s Fairs have with technology. Despite their supposed universalism and transcendence (a discourse that the Fairs share with the Olympics), World’s Fairs reveal far more about the power and ambitions of its host (both nation and city) than about the world it purportedly represents. The very first of these in 1851, “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations” (also known at Crystal Palace) showed the glories of the

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Industrial Revolution in Queen Victoria’s British Empire. The Eiffel Tower is the most famous remnant of the 1889 World’s Fair. Chicago’s hosting of the 1893 Columbian Exposition was a sign of American ascendancy in world affairs and the decade that established America’s Empire overseas. The 1915 Pan Pacific Exposition highlighted San Francisco’s return from the devastations of the 1906 Earthquake, 1939 New York World’s Fair and the GM Futurama Ride which revealed the “ world of tomorrow” was a testament to America’s utopianism in the context of the Depression and impending War and the 1962 Seattle World’s fair left the Space Needle as an icon to the Space Age.

A recent French exhibit on the history of the World’s Fairs calls them “Dreamlands.” Alongside the technical wonder of the Futurama, the 1939 New York World’s Fair highlighted a Dali designed pavilion called ‘The Dream of Venus’ where a melted façade contained inside a choreographed water ballet, and reproductions of Botticelli’s Venus and the Mona Lisa. Many scholars have also noted the darker side of the Fair’s dreams, which one critic describes as “the fascination with recreating the world in miniature, with controlling and shaping the world….. the urge to gather the world together, to control and display it.”v One its most noxious forms (to contemporary eyes) took place at in the Midway Plaisance (Check) in 1893, where this impulse to “control and display” led to the creation of so-called authentic villages that approximated the Philippines, Alaska, and Hawaii. Colonialism, imperialism and racism shaped these representations of the “world” at the same time that the inhabitants of these villages, often paid entertainers, created their own communities and resisted the gaze of their predominantly white audiences.vi

What are then, the stories associated with the Shanghai World Expo? To be sure, the impulse to display and control are prominent in contemporary Chinese theme parks, most notably the Beijing World Park (the site of Jia Zhangke’s melancholy “The World”), Shenzen’s Windows of the World (where you can ride a camel among the Egyptian pyramids, and a pony in the American West) and in the hundreds of “ethnic villages” that dot the Chinese tourist landscape. But that impulse is not the main narrative of this particular World’s Expo. First and foremost, the event is extolled as yet another sign of China’s ascendancy in global politics, as the first Expo organized in mainland Asia (previously, the only Asian host nation was Japan). Certainly, China’s economic strength is a major factor, as the entire Expo budget was RMB 28.6 (US $4.2 billion, THE MOST EXPENSIVE IN HISTORY).vii The site was also the largest in history at 528 hectacres (and apparently twice the size of Monaco) and split into two parts on the along the banks of the Huangpu River.viii The Expo is also host to the largest numbers of participating organizations and nations (over 240- CHECK AND CITE) and the first to take place in a developing country.

The other major storyline about the World Expo is about Shanghai. One guidebook for the event suggests that the World Expo “….is Shanghai amplified, distilled, and celebrated, in a festival of cosmopolitan exhibitionism….. Shanghai’s global significance

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has nourished a self-absorption that would be insufferable, were it not that the city harbors the entire world within itself, its limitless self-regard entirely ameliorated by an equally unlimited openness. For Shanghai, hosting the world is a mission so natural it almost seems an original destiny.”ix Indeed, Shanghai took its mission seriously, spending an estimated $45 billion (exceeding by XX what was spent in the 2008 Beijing Olympics). Shanghai used the money to build new infrastructure and improve transportation links (including a Mag Lev train that attains speeds at XX miles per hour), new airport terminals, to double the length of its subway lines, a $700 million riverfront promenade in a spruce-up of the historic Bund, resurfacing hundreds of roads, and repaving sidewalks. The growth of the subway system is particularly impressive. A system that began just 15 years ago, is now the largest in the world in terms of miles (420 KM, outstripping London’s 408 Km and New York’s 368).x Since 1992, Shanghai has attracted some $120 billion in foreign direct investment or 23% of China's total ($14.6 billion) for 2006. Despite the red-hot economic climate, urban infrastructure and other living conditions have been relatively neglected. Daniel Vasella, head of the International Business Leaders Advisory Council for the Mayor of Shanghai and chairman of the global pharmaceutical firm Novartis explained why quality of life concerns matter to the large global work force and expatriate community in Shanghai: "The government is now more aware of quality-of-life issues…They realize that if you can't deliver [a good standard of living], people won't want to live there."xi Thus “quality of life” of which environment is a key, albeit vague term, is an important component of Shanghai’s urban and economic development strategy. Simply put, World Expo preparation equals “urban development on steroids.”xii (READ URBAN LAND INSTITUTE REPORT) (expo fever UA149 and survey on 154)

Among these many stories, I’m most interested is about how themes of ecology and urbanism are represented and communicated at the Shanghai World Expo, often to multiple and competing audiences. As the Official Guide to the Expo describes: “Expo 2010 is the first world exposition that focuses on the issues of (the) city” and that the event will “showcase interesting examples of sustainable development and harmonious society.”xiii China experimented with these themes at the last expo, in Aichi.xiv How does the Expo represent sustainable development” and “harmonious society?” What is at stake in the particular representations of “Better City Better Life” at the Expo? (science and technology- one of the pillars of the four modernization).

To answer these questions, I looked at Official Expo publicity documents, Chinese government press releases, and my own wanderings along this so-called “epic stage.” As in Dongtan, the image of ecology is everywhere, although the specific individuals and ecosystems are not. But the prominent narrative about ecology is not about valiant individuals fighting polluters and enacting change (or signaled by heroic prophets like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir or Rachel Carson). Neither, is the story about the economic costs evidenced by Chinese government policies and investments in sustainability. Rather, the hero of the story is the technology itself. In that sense, the dominant story of Expo 2010 is actually a new version of a very old Expo story, one that

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glorifies technology. Many great (and more minor) technological debuted at the World’s Fairs, including the telephone (XX), Telegraph (??XX), and the Ferris Wheel (XX).

Although the fascination with the technological is quite old in the history of World Expos, as is World Expositions “brand” cities and nations, the ecological branding of world cities is relatively new. This chapter explores the implications of eco-branding Shanghai, and what are the broader impacts of defining sustainability through technology. In particular, I focus on the theme pavilions, as opposed to the more glamorous national pavilions, which are the focus of the most intense visitor curiosity. Nevertheless, the theme pavilions, especially Urban Planet and the Pavilion of the Future, are the best expressions of the China’s branding of sustainable urbanism, in a City actively remaking itself to both compete with and exceed, the current cosmopolitan capitals of Asia in Hong Kong and Tokyo. In this version of modernity, epic skyscrapers are not enough. Technology and sustainability- not power or politics, take center stage.

Defining Better City, Better Life

In earlier chapters, the language of “betterment” was applied to various land use and development projects. Shanghai’s economic, urban and environmental policy work synergistically to produce the improved city that promises a “better life” for its . After decades of neglect from Beijing, since the 1990’s, Shanghai has been seeking to restore its luster from the 1930’s and take its rightful place among the pantheon of the world’s great cities. And some undefined version of nature and environment, is a key component to the city’s transformation what one U.S. based planner working in Shanghai calls: "…. the greatest transformation of a piece of earth in history.xv

For local and national politicians, the World Expo is the primary agent of this urban transformation. Dreams of Shanghai’s hosting a World Expo span well over a century. According to prominent historians, in 1905, Shanghai-based novelist Wu Jianren rewrote the 18th-century novel The Story of the Stone, where the hero Jia Baoyu visited a World Expo staged in the city's Pudong area. In 1910, another Shanghai novelist, Lu Shie, predicted in his novel New China that the World Expo would come to Shanghai 100 years from then.xvi The culmination of these dreams realized have been immortalized in a bronze statue at the Urban Planning Museum that commemorates the moment when the 7 members of the Paris-based Bureau of International Expositions awarded the Expo to Shanghai in 2010. For much of the next 8 years, the ubiquitous slogans and images about the World Expo blanketed the City. Banners proclaimed: “Thank people for their understanding and support for relocation” often on the sites where large-scale demolition of housing took place. Others proclaimed, “hand in hand, eradicate messiness and untidiness.xvii

Despite the prominence of “betterment to the Expo slogan, in actual usage, the official

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meaning changes based on whether aimed at English or Chinese speaking audiences. This difference reveals the necessity of understanding the multiple layers of meaning at the Expo, evident in the actual translation of official materials. For example, the English slogan on the website, billboards, and official guides is “Better City, Better Life.” In Chinese, the slogan is 城市,□生活更美好! Chengshi, rang shenghuo geng meihao! (roughly “City, makes lives are more beautiful!”). Here, discourses of improvement are roughly related to beauty, not betterment of lifestyle per se. In other instances, the differences between the English and Chinese versions are equally divergent. According to the English version of the Expo theme, “Better City, Better Life” represents “the commonality of the whole humankind for a better living in future urban environments.” The Chinese version explains that the Expo “is a festival of discussing human urban lives. It is a symphony of creativity and fusion (of different cultures and traditional culture). This will become a wonderful conversation about human civilization.” The symbolism of the emblem and the mascot also differ. The English version of the emblem describes the image as three people (you, me, him/her holding hands symbolizing the big family of mankind) whereas the Chinese description claims that it derives from the Chinese character “shi (世)” (“world”) which represents the concept of the World Expo: “Understanding, communication, happy-together, and cooperation.” Most obviously, the English version of the website highlights the international pavilions, while the Chinese version shows the pavilions from the Chinese provinces. The differences between the materials (text, videos and photographs) show that the content shifts considerably depending on the audience, with the Chinese content receiving considerably less “environmental” content than the English language version, while increasing the “cultural” content in discussing the Expo themes. Despite the lack of formal usage of the “betterment” discourse in Chinese, the closest linguistic equivalent circulates around city “health” and city “illness.” Around 1998-2002, a number of academic papers introduced the discourse of "chengshi bing" (city illness). These early papers define “chengshi bing” as the problems occur during the process of city's development, which include traffic, a shortage of water supply and energy supply, polluted environment, and an unbalance of an input and output of energy. In addition, city illness is caused by overpopulation and the speed and scale of urbanization processes.xviii The idea that sick cities can be remedied with physical infrastructure that clears up the various clogs in the system and idea that runs through one of the Pavilion of City Being, the only theme pavilion designed by Chinese companies.

Haibao Harmony

If you went to Shanghai from 2007 to 2010, you probably saw lots of Haibao, the mascot of the World Expo. According to the English version of the Expo website, the mascot was created from a Chinese character meaning people, and embodies “the character of Chinese culture.” The Chinese version, in contrast, focuses on the meaning of Haibao from the characters themselves (hai = sea, and bao = treasure). Created by a Taiwanese designer in an open competition, each of Haibao’s elements is imbued with meaning: “the blue color: implying inclusivement and imagination, symbolizing China which is full

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of hope and potential of development. Hair: resembling the rolling waves…Face: simplistic cartoonish expression, Eyes: round body, evoking beautiful feelings for harmonious life, cute and lovely, Fist: the thumb is raised to praise and welcome friends from the whole worlds, Big feet: standing firmly on the ground and giving strong support to the outspread arms, which implies that China has the capability and determination to hold a wonderful world exposition.” Most importantly (to the organizers), Haibao symbolizes that: “only by supporting each other and living in harmony between man and nature, people and society and people among themselves can urban life be better” (italics added).xix

For most people, Haibao is a souvenir, sold everywhere on Shanghai streets. Still others note its resemblance to Gumby. Thus, rather than symbolize “inclusivement and imagination” Haibao represents Chinese tendencies to trademark violations. These intimations tend to spark nationalist outrage. xx My own favorite picture of Haibao was one I took on a department store escalator which exhorted people to “properly use the elevator because the World Expo concerns everyone.”

Haibao’s purported representation of the “harmony between man and nature, people and society, people among themselves” is tied to another important question about the World Expo. Just how “Green” is the World Expo? Amid global concerns over pollution and climate change, and in an effort to live up to its theme of "Better city, Better life", Shanghai organizers have made audience seats out of deserted milk packages, handbags and tissues out of recycled paper, and used low-energy consuming LED screens, acoustic devices and electricity-powered vehicles in the Expo Park. xxi On the one hand, the infrastructure investments, particularly in its Metro line, is a long-term strategy that may reduce pollution associated with cars, a problem that has long plagued Beijing. A mostly positive in-depth 2009 assessment of the environmental dimensions of the World Expo conducted the United Nations Environment Program praised Shanghai for having improved its energy mix and reduced its reliance on coal to 51 percent of its energy needs in 2007 from 64 percent in 2001, and for improving its air quality (a major critique of Beijing and the Olympics).xxii Expo boulevard (UA 233) and various eco-building innovations. (ADD DETAIL). (pavilions are actually quite conformist due to BIE and the narrative structure of the journey ( UA 237).

On the other hand, one of the main features of the Expo is by definition, unsustainable. How many buildings will be left after the Expo? What happens to them?xxiii One major article highlights the “apparent, and glaring, contradiction,” that is, that with “the promotion of sustainable urban development practices a key goal, the huge international event champions priorities that hardly seem to square with spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the construction of nearly 200 booths and buildings, nearly all of which are designed to last only for the six-month duration of the show. xxiv The only structures that will remain on the XX acre site are: National Pavillion, ETC ETC. Some nations are transporting their buildings back to their home nations, or donating them to provinces in

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China. According to one expert in sustainability, “Building all these structures for temporary use is not a great model for sustainable urban practices.”xxv

Dreaming the Green Future: The Theme pavilions in Context

Despite the glaring contradictions embedded in rapid construction and deconstruction of the Expo, the event still highlights its so-called “green features.” These are located in (ADD LIST HERE- the BUILDINGS, and the UBPA) and in the special theme pavilions. Three of these (Urbanian, City Being and Urban Planet were housed in a gigantic structure (one of the few buildings that will remain after the Expo). According to the official guide, the building is inspired by the concept of “paper folding” and the traditional Shanghai shikumen housing architectural style. The remaining pavilions (Footprint and Future) are held on the Puxi side, in repurposed industrial buildings. Four of the five pavilions where designed by non-Chinese companies, representing the same tensions and dynamics of nationalism/ transnational cultures in the broader city and eco-city-building trends discussed in earlier chapters.

The City Being, Urban Planet and Future Pavilions are most interesting to understand in terms of complex and competing representations of the “City” and the “Environment,” although each one is unique in its presentation of technology and the experience of the visitors through space and time. For instance, the Pavilion of City Being presents a fascinating view of the city through the theme of “vigor” and metabolism, and which most clearly illustrate the opposite of “city illness.” This pavilion was designed and planned by President Xu Jiang and Vice President Song Jianming of China Academy of Art.xxvi In an interview, Xu Jiang said:" We really hope that our audiences come here not for a fad or just for fun. They come here to understand city and to know what city is. This is the original goal of the expo and this is also why our country invested so much money in this expo” to make Chinese people make them realize their world citizenship.”xxvii The pavilion design was also highly contested, changing in design eight times. According to Xu, the original idea and symbol was to represent the life of city as a tree whereas the branches of the tree are streets. However, this idea proved untenable and unpopular, and the result, that the pavilion follows a normal person’s experience in a city was what was finally built. According to the designers, the pavilion follows the spatial experience from someone who enters a city, arriving in a city in a train station, taking a subway to city streets, city garden, and the city square.” These match the sections of the pavilion, which illustrate the city life from a “human-scale perspective: entering the city, feeling the city, reading the city, and hoping a better city” (italics added).

As I entered the dark space, placards revealing: “A City is an Organism throbbing with energy and metabolism.” After reading the panels, visitors are channeled into a huge room flanked by old trains. The back of the room switches between a train schedule and global stock prices, flanked by “vigor stations” associate with various global sites: New

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York, Vatican City, Oxford and Houston. According to the official Expo guidebook, “in a metaphorical way with high scientific technologies, a city is compared to a living being consisting of body and soul. Metabolism and circulation are important for it to function properly” (italics added). xxviii These metaphors are visually represented by a 5 minute audio visual show. The ceiling is covered in a large number of screens that start as a bright blue sky. Suddenly a large airplane flies over the crowd, eliciting gasps from the surprised crown. The image transforms to a series of bouncing dots, with an aural accompaniment of trains, then moving to a series of fantastic lights, and the hyper “Blade Runner” city views, orange images of traffic run through the skyscrapers as the city shrinks in size, surrounding by a series of circling blue lights, exploding finally into a lights that end up as a visual of circuits and computer bits as numbers (financial information and markets) distill into a rainbow of lights, individual water blobs, each with a organic self-contained cities (several of which visually resemble the plans for Dongtan as represented by Arup). The view of these unnamed networked cities dives down suddenly ala Google earth image onto Shanghai, and the Expo site itself. That pavilion also situates Shanghai among the great cities of the world (Argentina, Nairobi, Edmonton and Bombay in a surround sound film) or containing a teleological narrative of travel, progress and technology, the video show, along with the entire City Being pavilion, advance a theory of the technological, networked City. The nationalist politics are also clear, in the inclusion in the other Chinese site represented in the film, not one of China’s great cities, but the areas devastated by death and destruction in the Sichuan earthquakes.xxix

In another section of the same cavernous building, the Pavilion of Urban Planet exhibits similar ideologies in its representation of the core theme of “humanity in symbiosis with the city and planet.”xxx Here, environmental images and themes are more prominent, beginning with a cowboy Haibao with a giant globe greeting people entering the line (ADD IMAGE?). This pavilion was designed by Triad Berlin, which won the commission against 150 other firms. According to its website, is one of Germany’s “most successful communication agencies.” The firm specializes in creating “emotionally intelligent communication formats in spaces.xxxi According to the Expo website, the logic of the pavilion is split: “The scenography combines traditions of Western narratives with motives taken from the Chinese Feng shui heritage. With a two-part structure, the exhibition focuses on the ambivalent character of cities: On the one hand, they destruct the environment, on the other, they are also places for creating value, prosperity and technological innovations.”xxxii

However, this “ambivalence” is not a source of tension, but of the essential “Taoist” philosophy. Here, according to Triad, “If the balance of the elements is preserved, this dynamic will progress in harmony. However, if the balance gets lost, it can also unleash destructive forces. Both aspects are reflected in the two-part structure of the exhibition as well as in the overall architecture of the pavilion.”xxxiii

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Thus, in Triad’s words, the architecture of the “experience” ascends through a “Road of Crisis, whereas the “Roads of Solutions” suggest what will “solve” the crisis (surprise, surprise- technology!). The problems sections- the Road of Crisis, is split into five sections that build upon and adapt “natural elements” essential to Chinese philosophy: water – fire – metal – wood – earth. Thus, according to the designers, the “Road of Crisis” visualizes “water shortage, water pollution, the massive burning of fossil fuels as well as the possible consequences in terms of climate change, depletion of our resources of oil, steel or copper, the extinction of species, and, last but not least, the production of non-perishable waste.”xxxiv To visualize the crisis, five gigantic ticking metronomes represent that “time is running out.” Although the exhibit was designed by a German company, the ecological information is presented in terms most understandable for Chinese audiences. For example, the “water crisis” display is a large water tank that is covered in the different national statistics on “per capita” consumption (in this case, per capital consumption in China is 89 liters per day versus 295 liters per day in the U.S.).

The other chapters provide little visual surprise. The section on energy show pictures of crowded urban streets filled with cars cheek to jowl with melting ice caps. The room on “industrialization” is filled with photos of scarred landscapes, similar to what renowned Canadian photographer Burtynsky documents in both his Manufactured Landscapes and China series. One section entitled “Nature, an archive of pictures” features a robotic sounding female voice emanating from mini-skyscrapers that show images of bicycles and birds. The last section in the Road to Crisis takes the audience alongside a gigantic single mural of trash heaps with frightening text about high lead rates in children.

From this depressing journey through environmental exploitation, the exhibit then switches gears to what Triad calls its “Eureka moment.” The audience walks into a separate room, the centerpiece of which is a giant globe, illuminated with a light and image show. Here, the visitors will “experience five spectacular metamorphoses of the hemisphere, which go along with a visible dynamic of change and adaptation. The Earth is now telling its own story.” Despite this rhetoric, clearly Triad is telling the story to the mostly Chinese audience. But are the important features of that story…..

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(author credit).

The ideology in the Road to Solution is embedded in the image of the Earth itself. The light display is eerily reminiscent of the ceiling of the City Being Pavilion, with its passage through time, space and light. The penultimate image, the circuits that connect the “networked” globe, show that the solutions to environmental crisis are technological, rather than moral or political.

The sections on “ecotopia” are fascinating in this regard. The panels in the solutions highlight a number of prominent ecological design projects, ranging from the reconstruction of the New York City Highline park, to an entire eco-city panel. The Eco-city section shows pictures of the San Francisco Treasure Island development and the Masdar eco-city being built in the United Arab Emirates. Dongtan is not mentioned anywhere in this section, although the first opening date was announced to coincide with the World Expo (the one mention of an ecological city on the wetlands is Liaoning). The section contains a number of pictures of spray robots, green cars, and panels extolling plans for “modern icebergs made entirely of garbage.”

This content and structure of this exhibit argue that the solutions to environmental crisis are ultimately technological. The story is about pollution’s destructiveness, and how new technologies restore balance. The faith in new technologies is evident from the prominence that “bionic forms,” space-age green cars, and the various panels that highlight the “eco-city trend.” According to one description accompanying the 15-foot high blobbly forms “bionics is said to be derived from the green bion and means life-like. It is the science of imitating the special abilities of plants and animals.” This faith in technology in solving the environmental crisis transcends nations and cultures, but Triad’s german origins shape its representation of the “100 best practices in both the German and the international context” in its highlight of global leaders in environmental technologies like Bosch and Daimler/smart.”xxxv Many of the panels along the “Roads of Solution” highlight borrow ideas from the “Cradle to Cradle” design movement, as defined by the manifesto of the same name by American green architect William McDonough and the German environmental activist/ chemist, Michael Braungart. They argue that many environmental problems can be solved by better design, and that designers should look to nature and natural systems to create healthy products, buildings, and societies. Like Jane Benyus’ biomimicry, the call is to look to nature to solve environmental problems. The exhibit highlights this perspective through the repetition of bionic structures. According to Triads, these bionic forms form the core sceneography in this section: “Three-dimensional sculptures are the dominating design elements …..With their structures showing both a coolly technoid and a biomorphic structure, they symbolize the amalgamation of nature and technology: Without technology there will be no eco-friendly change. The forms of the three-dimensional sculptures are duplicated in the two-dimensional reliefs, which are used as displays for the content of the respective

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topics” (italics added).

Pavilion of the Future.

The fetish of technology is echoed, albeit in slightly different forms, in the Pavilion of the Future. Located in Zone E, in the older Puxi side of the river, the Pavilion is in a repurposed industrial building. A hybrid of the Chinese-designed City Being, and the German Pavilion of the Urban Planet, this Pavilion is also designed by a European company but with a significant Chinese influence in the original moving films. Utopia and dystopia quite literally permeate the exhibit. According to the Official Guide, the pavilion tells how a city was “envisaged, planned and realized” in history. This view of planning draws heavily from science fiction in the opening “Dreams of Yesterday” sequence, which spotlights dystopian views of the city in clips of the German classic Metropolis (Check and expand). These images are contextualized by large banners that explain “a scenario composed of modern architecture and mythological buildings witnesses a world where Gods rule over humans.” Moving from these black and white clips, the audience moves through a giant room of books on urban planning. These oversize piles of books include Fourier, Archigram, Thoreau’s Walden and David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope. This odd collection of books is set against various utopian city planning schemes, including Broadacre City (and Ebeneezer Howard). The next room highlights gigantic sculptures further highlighting the “9 themes of urban development.” These include “Sustainability” envisioned as a balanced scale between building and trees, Harmonious Growth as a cluster of multicolored light rods, nature as a big shiny rock (of gold?)Urban Planning visualized as gigantic ants on a big rock. Narratively, the next section proclaims that “the future is here,” but to get there, the audience walks pasts a curious lonely mannequins of “old time” Shanghai industrial laborers. After the exhausting walk through ideas, space and time, a dimly lit room highlights brilliant and strange cartoon images in a revolving loop describing what the cities of the futures- eco city, space city, intelligence city and energy city look like. Here, the convergence of utopia and dystopia return. In the text introduction to the “Intelligence City,” the screen reads: “Well, I’d like to live in a knowledge city. A Chip would let me learn without any effort at all and I’d spend my time trying to understand more complicated things. There would be big screens in the streets that would help us reflect and learn.” The text for “Eco City” reads: I’d like to live in a city full of woods and animals, full of historic monuments. The factories and traffic would be under the ground and all of the space above ground would be for walking and entertaining.”

The overall concept of this pavilion originated from a Spanish Company named INGENIAqed Company.xxxvi This Bureau of Shanghai World Expo Affairs and Coordination also invited Mrs Carmen Bueno from INGENIAqed Company to work as an independent consultant who helped with the development of the concepts/themes of Shanghai World Expo, thus their influence was larger than the single pavilion. xxxviiAccording to an interview with Bueno, “Dream is the 'engine' that we made to 'run' this pavilion. It will lead the beautiful future-oriented trip for all thinkers, technocrats,

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scientists, and visitors.” When asked what kind of urban experience inspired Bueno in selecting the content, she answered that “some surrealist films and literature including the utopian works which are beyond the reality gave us inspiration. This inspiration can provide various points of view. For example, we can use different ways of thinking to think about city. We can think about the question of how to build a more idealistic city.”xxxviii

The original animated films in this pavilion were designed by the Beijing born 37-year old artist Hua Bu. The cartoons on the films were fantastic in their own regard, and the music contributed to the surreal atmosphere. In the Eco City film, the beginning images was of a space ship, followed in succession by a roman bath, a magical unicorn, pipes and a factory, and girl zapping a dragon out of a handheld machine. The factories produced a “Delicious nanometer cake” and as the multiracial children jump on space age pods, a deer runs away, leading to the next city of “diverse possibilities.”

Surrealism- not literally (TRANSITION)

Competing Narratives of the Expo and Shanghai

“Universal Expositions are urban phenomenon…..Cities Accommodate Expos, significantly Define them, participate in their glories, and absorb some …fraction of their impact…..the Expo has been energized by creative tensions between the principal levels of large-scale social organization, provoking a prolonged public meditation upon relations between the individual, the city, the nation, and the world…..” (UA 158) how are these tensions realized, expressed, enacted?

Before the Expo, the site was home to the 18,000 residents discussed earlier, alongside of the City’s historic industrial sites, such as the massive Jiangnan Shipyard. The Shipyard, with its 145-year history, was an important industrial site in Shanghai and China, the first manufacturer of rifles, cannons and hydraulic presses, and several 10,000 ton ships for the US. The Shipyard was relocated to Changxing Island, next to Chongming Island to make way for the Expo. xxxix

One of the main counter-narratives against the rhetoric of harmony is from the 18,000 relocated to make way for the Expo site, as discussed in the previous chapter. Another is about the role of the peasant in the World Expo, the implicit target for national improvement and betterment. Cao Guoquiang, a prominent Chinese artist, staged an art show at the Rockbund Art Museum called "Peasant da Vincis." According to Cao Guoqiang, it was conceived as an artistic counterpoint to the official Expo by highlighting inventions, including submarines, plywood airplanes and robots made by

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peasants to celebrate their ingenuity. "These peasants' objects are different from the type of national, corporate power connected with the Expo," says Cai. "Until now, you only hear the collective voice of Chinese, but this is about individuals' voices." xl Another of Cai's slogans is, "Peasants make a better city, better life," in a play on the official slogan "Better city, better life." Cao recounts that: "This city's construction, its labor force, is all made up of peasants. These tall buildings, these roads, these subways, they were all built by peasants."xli

One of the peasants whose work is highlighted in the exhibit is named Wu Yulu. He built several talking robots, artist robots, which drips paint on canvas, and a robot Damian Hirst, which creates art out of colored dots, robot rats and a robot infant. With just five years of official schooling, Wu Yulu has been mocked for years by other peasants for his robot obsession. He expresses great pride at being included in the exhibit: "It's hugely significant. I'm representing peasants at this exhibition. I'm winning glory for peasants. It seems like peasants have been a bit neglected in the official Expo."xlii

The tensions between the official and counter-narratives around the Expo are played out in a number of other artistic representations of the Expo, and of Shanghai’s growth and development.

Conclusion:

Urban planet

“We have only one world“ Reaching the exciting conclusion of the “Road of Solutions,” visitors will find their way into the heart of the “Blue Planet” and experience the history of civilization in a fascinating 360 degree panorama show.

The final message “We only have one world” reiterates the crucial point: we urgently need to act – both as a global community and as individuals. Our future lies in the hands of each and every one of us.

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i Gomez-Baggethun explains that this process has been accomplished in three steps. The first step emerged in the 1970’s, and involved the classification of nature as an ecosystem service. This purpose, he argues, was done to raise awareness in the public about protecting the environment. The second step was an expansion of the market and privatization of nature that took place starting in the 1980’s. The third and final step was the articulation of nature as a marketplace. ii (ADD URLs) iii There are three kinds of exhibitions, those historically knows as Universal (and now known as registered), international, and horticultural. They are sanctioned by the Paris based Bureau International des Expositions (BIE; English: International Exhibitions Bureau) and last anywhere from three weeks to six months. iv http://www.bie-paris.org/site/en/main.html v http://thefastertimes.com/visualarts/2010/06/03/to-shanghai-perchance-to-dream/ vi Adria quote vii Urbanatomy page 26. viii Urbanatomy 50 ix Urbanatomy. 47 x http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/04/15/shanghais-metro-now-worlds-longest-continues-to-grow-quickly-as-china-invests-in-rapid-transit/ xiShanghai Rising China struggles to build a livable city inside a world-class business capital http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_08/b4022055.htm

xii urbanatomy 48. xiii http://www.bjreview.com.cn/nation/txt/2009-05/09/content_194750.htm xiv it is not, the first expo to deal with environmental themes, which have been a “meta-theme” of World’s expositions since the 1960’s (urbanatomy 36), in Montreal (ADD YEARS AND FULL LIST). Seville Spain 92 Nature and Environment UA 131. Lisbon: the Oceans 132. Hanover 2000 Humankind, Nature, Technology. 2005 Aichi Nature’s Wisdom.China’s Pavillion in 2005- Nature, City, Harmony Art of Life. City as a piece of nature. UA 135. xv Ben wood article? Shanghai rising ibid xvi http://www.bjreview.com.cn/nation/txt/2009-05/09/content_194750.htm xvii (THANKS TO NYU Anthro grad student WILL THOMPSON for the translation). xviii This article was from an academic paper and UPLA uploaded it to its own website in 2007. The original article was published in “Urban Planning International” (Guowai chengshi guihua) in 2005. “Urban Planning International” is an academic journal which is organized, edited, and published by the Bureau of China's Urban Planning and Designing (located in Beijing). The official website is: http://web.archive.org/web/20080428215606/www.upo-planning.org/index.asp

The website (UPLA.cn) was established in March, 2006 by Bendao-Chongqing company which i a high technology (Internet-based technology) company. This company/ website aims to provide information,

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knowledge, business policy, technology consultation for architecture designers and garden designers. This website also provides an online forum for users to discuss the issues of urban planning. The registered users are 120,000 (“About Us,” UPLA, http://www.upla.cn/about/about.shtml, accessed Nov.29, 2010.) ( http://www.upla.cn/special/chengshibing/ ) xix Book. xx Louisa lim NPR and aftermath xxi http://dk.china-embassy.org/eng/fyrth/t695369.htm xxiiGreen faces article. Or original source. xxiii http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/19/content_9745597.htm xxiv http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/world/asia/30iht-rshanover.html?_r=1 xxv Green faces xxvi http://expo2010.caa.edu.cn/xmzs/20100323/34.html, Accessed Sept. 25). xxvii ("City Being Pavilion: the Totally China-made Pavilion," Xinhua-Shanghai News Net, April 28, 2010, http://www.sh.xinhuanet.com/2010-04/28/content_19650050.htm, Accessed Sept. 25). xxviii cite xxix The movie "Soul Square" was directed by the chair of the Media department of China Academy of Art Xia Su. Su said that each story of each square demonstrates the spirit of people who live in that city. Su said the earthquake did not happen when they began to design this program. However, the earthquake occurred when they were shooting the film and they were moved by people who help each other and latter try to rebuild the city. Therefore they add the square of Wenchuan-Hanwang town to the movie <"The Design Plan of the City Being Pavilion Was Changed Eight Times," Sohu Culture- News (original in Oriental Morning Newspaper), April 27, 2010, http://cul.sohu.com/20100427/n271773817.shtml Accessed Sept. 25, 2010>. xxx Expo guide 19 xxxi http://www.triad.de/en/company xxxii http://www.triad.de/en/expo2010-germany/topic xxxiii http://www.triad.de/en/expo2010-germany/topic xxxiv Cite xxxv site xxxvi http://www.ingeniaqed.com/ xxxvii (“The Bureau of Shanghai World Expo. Affairs and Coordination,” Shanghai-World Expo Official Website. http://www.expo2010.cn/expo/sh_expo/qt/zzjg/userobject1ai44546.html accessed Nov. 11, 2010).

xxxviii Source: The Official Web of Shanghai World Expo., June 12, 2009. http://www.expo2010.cn/a/20090612/000025.htm xxxix xl http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126425172 xli http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126425172 xlii http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126425172