EXPO 2010 theme development

Shanghai

2006

The Shanghai Expo 2010 with its theme of better city, better life, is aiming to explore the positive meaning of city life and seek an innovative approach to solve the tension in our cities and our lives, incurred by the new worldwide process of urbanization. The new urbanization process is embedded in the context of intensive global circulation of information, technology, commodities, capital and labour, with mass immigration and emigration, increasing mobility, and the emergence of new megalopolis’ in the developing world as the major features. The increasing conflict between competitive economic space and spaces for living, the crisis of identity with fragmented cultural practices and intensified cultural confrontation and the overstressed physical and social infrastructure in rapidly expanding cities manifest in the critical transformation of the contemporary city. We need a new way of thinking on city development and new approach in order for city development to have a positive influence on our urbanized life. As a mega event, the Expo itself is a huge transnational metropolitan practice, a performed global urbanism realized by the reconfiguration of space, social mobilization, monetary investment and mass media. The Shanghai Expo 2010 should be a live lab not only for demonstrating historical and contemporary urbanism, but also for inventing a new urbanism for the future.