Urban Design Discussion

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Criticism of the US Pavilion in the Shanghai Expo of 2010 is reasoned.  The American program is presented in “mall” glass/steel architecture, but it gets worse.  Not much elso to say about the US mall, but since it did get privately funded, American participation in the Expo’s theme  ”Better City, Better Life” includes policies aimed at blending five urban ideas worth of brief review.

First, a kind of question, how can we manage the inevitable diversity of culture?   The second offers the obsurdity of continuous economic prosperity.  The third is the promise of technological and scientific innovations that are likely to save us all from the effect of “continuous prosperity”.   If that is not enough, two ideas with a “last minute tone” promote the importance of design through urban remodeling practices and a somewhat vague suggestion regarding the need to define the physical interactions of urban and rural governance with greater accuracy.  But wait, just when it seems to make sense at the last minute, it gets worse. 

The business or corporate sense of priority at these Expos is carried by a truely vapid narrative of ad copy headings such as,  “quality leads to better experiences”, “sustainability is mandatory”,  “enable healthy lifestyles”, and my favorite, “be frugal”.   There is nothing like a set of flavorless clichés to successfully obscure the actual challenges that lie ahead.  It is obvious that irony will not be dismissed and that getting to the truth remains very, very difficult.

In  2012, the Expo will be called “The Living Ocean and Coast” (Yeosu, Korea)  or why a nation’s policy of believing in self interest (fair, but differentiated) is in everyone’s self interest.  Was it not self-interests little sister “due dilegence” that turned the Gulf of Mexico into an oil storage tank for about two months, predicating the wild use of chemical dispersants (soap), and then celebrated the well’s final closure in early August 2010.  Obviously a different relationship between the private and public interest needs to be reviewed.  N’est pas?

In 2015 we will be treated to an expo-presentation entitled, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” (Milan, Italy) that will no doubt be organized to apolgize to the twelve million people facing death through starvation in that year.