Sustainable World Expo? The Governing Function of Spectacle in Shanghai and Beyond

Soil Exegesis of Late-Socialist Spectacle and Administration

The idea of ‘spectacle’ was most famously explored by Guy Debord (1994, 2002): he argued that spectacle defined a new stage of capitalism in which images have replaced commodities as the objects and engines of consumption. Drawing heavily on the concepts of reification and commodity fetishism, Debord’s theory of spectacle was a means to reconfigure arguments about alienation and address the pervasiveness of consumer culture. The triumph of the spectacle refers to the dispersed and integrated field of image relations dominating social life that relegates subjects to a passive and depoliticized existence (Krupar and Al, 2012: 248–9). Spectacle perfected the separation between the real contradictions of capitalist production and the mediated dreamscape of consumer culture, resulting in dangerous and mystified political alienation that conceals the social fact of domination and thwarts social change (Krupar and Al, 2012: 249). Debord’s theory is fundamentally a theory of false consciousness; images mediate social relations so that ultimately, and falsely, images become the social relation. While Debord’s ideas have undergone intense criticism and scrutiny, they remain an important resource for analysis of contemporary city-building and urban entrepreneurial strategies, albeit with numerous modifications to account for shifts in political instrumentality, interactive technologies, environmental politics, and different genealogies.

A wide range of scholarship has investigated spectacle as a productive and performative enterprise for political ends – rather than solely an illusory figure and effect of capitalist political economy. ⁵ In Asian urban studies, in particular, scholars have shown that mega-events and spectacular architecture are usually developmental state projects. Aihwa Ong (2011), for example, insists that the Marxist-Debordian theoretical emphasis on spectacle as ideology loses sight of the political-geographical work achieved by spectacular spaces (e.g. zones of exception with differential investments) and the fact that urban transformations are inextricably linked to national aspirations and local entrepreneurialism. Accordingly, spectacular spaces are not the exclusive tool of a seamless global capitalism but also territorializing projects of the developmental state. Assaying the levels of spectacle of Beijing’s green Olympics, Jennifer Hubbert (2010: 126) analyzes the process by which the commodity form is deputized for the Chinese nation: ‘its power derived through the material manifestation of a contemporary state project of capital accumulation and consumerism as political ideology’. She describes a fascinating process by which spectacular Olympic architecture was supported by a network of Chinese intellectuals that instrumentalized Debord’s theories of spectacle to produce and manage a successful commodity image of the nation. ⁶

Drawing on international ‘best practices’ and experts in the policy arena, spectacular green urbanism projects and models have become attractive to Chinese urban and national leaders as ‘placemaking’ and ‘placemarketing’ strategies, integrating sustainability policies with entrepreneurial and developmental goals. Lisa Hoffman (2009, 2011) has explored the governing aspects of green city-building in Dalian, and China more generally, including new territorializing projects of the ‘postindustrial city’ that relocate industry outside of the city center. As Hoffman’s work has shown, new environmental truths and rationalities within Chinese urban planning policies de-emphasize industrial-socialist history and open land to other uses, while urban modeling practices connected to the socialist era aim to shape, discipline, and produce particular kinds of environmental spaces and subjects. Her work advances the analysis of spectacle beyond marketing and eco-branding to biopolitical mechanisms and pedagogy. Sze’s research (2015: 16) on Chinese eco-cities similarly targets ‘the transnational and technocratic visions that guide the projects, as well as the politically authoritarian contexts in which they emerge’. Contrasting representation and the reality of pollution, Sze (2015: 27, 134) analyzes how ‘ecological desire’ maintains technocratic faith in engineering and reliance on authoritarian political structures to facilitate improvements in the face of environmental and social ruin.

I build on this literature to explore the spectacle of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo in terms of the governance of environment and population. The expo was a spectacle about green urbanism and sustainable city-making but also a political-ecological project itself. This national project explicitly aimed to develop the image of the city and quality of life of citizens through tremendous changes in political discourse (i.e. promulgating environmental sustainability) as well as massive material rearrangements of the city – urban entrepreneurialism depends on actively remaking urban environments (While et al., 2004: 550). While scholars have addressed issues of rezoning and the relocation of industry, these accounts do not consider the biophysical arrangements of changing urban governance in China. Similarly, studies of China’s spectacularized urban success and national emergence do not adequately capture the deeply sedimented relations of power that are (literally) taking place. ⁷

This article, by contrast, implements a methodology of soil exegesis that digs into the groundwork of the expo to explore some of the material-ecological relations and administrative procedures that such spectacle installed. Soil exegesis represents a materialist approach to spectacle as integral to the operations of the state. In contrast to analysis of spectacle as superficial and merely surface deep, the critique offered here seeks to re-embed the ideological aspects of the expo and China’s ‘branding of the urbanism of ecological ambition’ within the physical-material organization and administration of the expo (Sze, 2015: 15). It addresses the governing function of the expo – its transformation of nature and technological performance – and, more generally, the way spectacle structures possibilities for life, ranging from soil standards to environmental education (Krupar, 2013, 2016).

The following sections investigate the expo’s site preparation in conjunction with the interactive-technocratic environments of the expo’s main theme pavilions. ⁸ The account demonstrates two interdependent ways that the Chinese state administers the city, population, and environment. First, the state requires the waste of the socialist-industrial past in order to appear to govern domestically and to achieve international recognition – while simultaneously denying and/or delimiting the state’s past of industrial contamination. Disavowal of material legacies of socialist-era industrialization, such as pervasive soil pollution, is internal to the governing function of spectacle; yet such waste also serves as the foundation for the Chinese state’s development of soil quality standards and the emergence of a contaminated land regime (i.e. ‘brownfield’ administration) to govern human/waste relations and legitimate the state. Debord’s (1994: 11–24) notion of spectacle as ‘separation’ remains useful here, but revised as a material arrangement of governance: spectacle is not detached from ‘true reality’ but rather operates – materially and pedagogically – to disembed nature from everyday life. In other words, spectacular division is a strategic ontology of the state. The Shanghai 2010 World Expo involves spatial and temporal disembedding from the socialist-industrial past for the purposes of creating new state capacities and an urban redevelopment zone of so-called sustainable futures.

Second, the state-organized pavilions, site management, and expo theme discipline the populace and international audience to see and experience China in a particular way – as a capable innovator of sustainable development. This pedagogical function of spectacle is only possible because of the expo’s pedological politics – the politics of soil composition. ⁹ Located on former industrial grounds, the Shanghai 2010 World Expo campus was a territorializing project of the state that organized an ontological break between humans and the expo grounds. The state sought to contain the industrial-ecological history and former social life of the area through burial of waste, remediation of contamination, removal of residents and/or burial of the material past. In this respect, the spectacle of sustainability – from the environmental technologies and interactive displays showcased at the expo, to the scale of city-wide security and crowd control of the event – depended on the state ‘cleaning the slate’ for an experimental expo zone within Shanghai. This was achieved through an arbitrary pedological fix: remediation of the land to a level of contamination considered to be safe enough for exhibitions, and the associated anchoring of a surface/subsurface division of the soil to administer future human-environment interactions. A powerful truth-telling strategy that presents the land as recuperated from industrial history and pollution, such spectacular division between the expo surface and the subsurface of contamination materially arranges for the state’s refusal of the complex and ongoing material transformations that are the legacy of the socialist era. In short, the pedagogical and pedological politics of the expo reveal a deeply material form of ‘greenwashing’.

Expo Site Preparation: Soil Remediation for Exhibitionary End-Use and China’s Contaminated Land Regime

Brownfield redevelopment strategies and technologies have gained substantial traction in China due to the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. The concept of ‘brownfield’ is used by many postindustrial countries to describe land contaminated by one or more hazardous substances, but that has potential to be reused once it is cleaned up to certain standards (World Bank, 2011). For China, the regulation of and market for brownfield redevelopment is emerging to respond to the complex shifts in land use and the dynamic ‘waste in motion’ that such land-use changes bring. ¹⁰ As hundreds of polluting enterprises are relocated away from city centers, a large number of industrial brownfield sites are being recycled – to address the need for floor space in China’s rapidly expanding cities and to alleviate the pressure on arable lands (although this is debatable, in that industries are often relocated to rural areas with fewer environmental regulations). Such widespread urban land reuse intensifies pollution incidents and exposures, and has raised concern over environmental health hazards. The extent of soil contamination in formerly industrial areas is not easily, if ever, known; a World Bank report (2011) on brownfields in China recently projected that soil pollution depths may reach up to 10 meters.

Following the nation’s successful bid to host the 2010 world expo, Shanghai became one of the first cities in China to address the problem of soil pollution. Preparations for the world expo revealed the extent of soil contamination in Shanghai and drew attention to the issue across the nation. During the last century, significant areas of Shanghai were contaminated with heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, and other industrial pollutants (Liu, 2012). Heavy industries had been located downtown and/or around the Huangpu River; while many of these were closed or relocated elsewhere to make room for the development of the local economy, numerous industrial operations and their hazardous wastes remained prior to expo remediation. The expo site itself was located in an old manufacturing district along the river, where hundreds of factories, including some of China’s oldest, had been stationed. The Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau stressed that any land found with contaminated soil could not be redeveloped until the soil had been cleaned (World Bank, 2011). World expo preparations made soil pollution a government priority and led to the inception of the problem of soil quality (Stanway and Niu, 2013). ¹¹

In 2005, the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences formed the Shanghai Center for Soil Remediation to clean the contaminated expo grounds. Although considerable effort had been given to dealing with air pollution and water pollution in China, no national standards on contaminated site soil existed at that time. Shanghai’s Academy of Environmental Sciences drafted assessment standards for the environmental quality of the expo site’s soil, before construction of the buildings began. These world expo soil standards were submitted to the Ministry of Environmental Protection and later published as the nation’s first soil quality standards (Ministry of Environmental Protection of the People’s Republic of China, 2007). ¹² The official document sets forth evaluation criteria and soil quality assessment indicators for exhibition sites, namely allowable levels of contaminants and soil quality targets.

Although the expo site cleanup heavily involved the government at national and local levels, making it difficult to replicate elsewhere, officials and scholars contend that the expo standards demonstrate China can develop feasible methods of soil quality control and effective regulatory bodies (Caldwell and Wang, 2010–11). They point to the prodigiousness of the Shanghai soil center which, since 2005, has completed well over 20 major projects being built on contaminated soil, and remediated more than 400,000 cubic meters of contaminated soil and 20,000 tons of underground water. ¹³ The center more recently focused on comprehensive remediation for the Shanghai Disneyland project in Pudong and an area of the Baoshan district, where 1000 factories are to be shut down and relocated to make room for residential compounds.

Fueling this expansion, the state has developed capacities as a brownfield supplier in an emerging contaminated land regime. In Chinese land governance, soil comes under regulation when land use changes. Responsibility for contamination and for the cost of cleanup is a contentious issue that remains unresolved, but an important aspect of brownfields in China is that the biggest polluter companies were mostly state-owned. This means that the state is largely responsible for contamination and conducts the cleanups, until financial incentives are put in place to encourage companies in pursuing brownfield remediation. Land in China is publicly owned. Central and local governments take control of the land market – including heavily contaminated areas – and set up land use planning; developers cannot possess land permanently but use it for a fixed number of years. Known as the Chinese urban land reserve system, the operation generally includes three stages: land purchase, requisition, and regain; land consolidation and reserve; and supplying land to the market (Cao and Guan, 2007: 129; Zhang and Jia, 2000; Zhou et al., 2003). Preparing the Shanghai World Expo site merged brownfield ideas associated with redevelopment with this land reserve system. Land was assembled from dispersed users and managed as one site, clearing away the obstacle of inconsistent property rights and, eventually, bringing the brownfield into the land market, as evidenced by the commercial and hospitality sectors that have developed in parts of the former park. Effectively, the state can appropriate and consolidate polluted lands to then package and supply brownfields for different end-uses.

The Shanghai 2010 World Expo entrenched a clear relationship between land-use planning (deciding the type of land use) and brownfield management (specifying remediation standards and assessments). Cleanup standards and threshold limits of contaminants were established and implemented according to the end-use of the site: a high-profile exhibition area. Such standards then guided the entire cleanup process: remediation of the site was conducted according to the nature of the proposed land re-use, and decided upon by the corresponding requirements of contaminated soil assessment. In other words, the cleanup ensured that contamination remains in place, at levels permitted in accordance with the designated end-use. Instead of static land-use categories, end-uses are associated with state-determined ‘safe’ levels of exposure and graduated soil standards according to subsurface depth (i.e. below a certain depth, allowable levels of pollution expand or are without limit). ¹⁴ Moreover, expo site preparations applied remediation technologies on an unprecedented scale to achieve soil quality standards, pioneering new applications that will have a significant impact on the soil column in as-yet-unknown ways.

For areas that required fast remediation prior to the construction of expo buildings, the City of Shanghai excavated and displaced contaminated soil, transporting it to the city’s Old Port, where it was sequestered and contained. Clean soil was then backfilled. This remediation method – referred to as ‘dig and dump’ – massively redistributed the contaminated soil elsewhere, because the development of the site was so urgent. The strategy is the most common response to China’s rapid urban redevelopment, even though the country has a limited number of waste-disposal sites and lacks the specialized facilities capable of treating polluted soil (Su, 2012). ¹⁵ For expo buildings that were not built as rapidly, the city applied a curing agent to contaminated soil, to produce a chemical reaction that fixed pollutants in place; the chemical ‘fixing’ generated a dense solid material to block the release and migration of contaminants in sites with a slower redevelopment time scale. The creation of this subsurface layer of solidified contaminants – the country’s first domestic large-scale application of this remediation technology – prepared the ground for the Urban Best Practices Pavilion, an innovative clearinghouse of city-oriented urban best practices from around the world that made its first expo debut in Shanghai (Li and Cai, 2011; Best, 2011).

Soil remediation based on the end-use of ‘exhibition’ produced a new nature/grounds for bureaucratic oversight and the expo’s eco-city experiments, effectively buffering against responsibility for ongoing harm or material remains (unless incorporated as inputs to China’s nascent waste remediation industry or industrial heritage). The regulatory application of soil standards and subsequent subsurface/surface material arrangement facilitated the symbolic cleansing of the city’s historical industrial roots and the relocation of people based on the land-use shift. The expo redevelopment project required that the state and invested parties recognize the risk inherent to the soil’s instability as the rationale for remediation, while the completion of the ‘remedy’ allowed for the denial of the ongoing uncertainty and material history of industrialization in the soil, water, and people’s bodies. The remediated land was deemed clean – ‘safe enough’ – for use as an exhibition site, once the allowable levels of contamination were established and met by the cleanup.

The cleanup externalized industrial waste to the subsurface and to other sites, dumping dirty soil in the city’s Old Port area, which now serves as a landfill of industrial history. In essence, this process enlisted the industrial paradigm of nature for a post-industrial end-use, wherein byproducts and waste, as the externalities of growth, were cast off to the environment as dumping ground in order to secure the expo’s cleared site. In world expo preparations, the cycle came full circle so that waste dually served as the input of a nascent brownfield bureaucracy and remediation industry and as the political grounds of a new spectacular governing relationship. Contaminated soil was removed or fixed below the surface in order to ‘re-naturalize’ the site and, in doing so, facilitate new forms of land speculation and habitation.

By ‘dislocating’ the site’s material history, industrial wasteland was re-administered as Expo Parkland (Yu, 2012). The large areas of contiguous industrial remains along the Huangpu riverbanks supplied resources for the making of industrial relics, which have become popular settings for the burgeoning creative industry in Shanghai: for example, the conversion of an art-deco-era slaughterhouse into a design hub, the expo’s adaptive re-use of the Nanshi Power Plant as an exhibition hall, or the preservation of two shipping cranes to serve as sculptural flourishes in an area of the expo waterfront that had formerly hosted the Shanghai No. 3 Iron and Steel Plant and Jiangnan shipyard (Zhou, 2015; Shanghai Daily, 2011). Such sanitized industrial remains and the attraction of a few heritage objects of industry deracinate memories of the city’s industrial and turbulent colonial past, clearing the ground for more state interventions in environmental cleanup and green space creation (Abbas, 2000; Krupar, 2008, 2009). In this light, urban revitalization and soil sanitation generate seismic shifts in collective memory, enabling the creation of dehistoricized crowds of people that can be removed and re-placed. Signaling the extent of this modernizing operation on the population, a controversial joint-NGO appeal to the United Nations in 2010 advocated for an investigation into the forced eviction of 18,000 families to clear the grounds for the Shanghai World Expo (UN Watch, 2010). The letter stresses the expo’s violation of human rights and the complicity of the UN, given its significant presence and participation in the expo: victims allegedly received no compensation or fair warning, and in some cases were detained by the Chinese government (UN Watch, 2010; Human Rights in China, 2010).

The pedological politics of the expo supported the founding operations of displacement, inequality, and destruction characteristic of many mega-events (Human Rights in China, 2010; Moore, 2010). Particularly due to its national-level priority, expo planning disrupted legal and social norms in order to ensure a beautiful redeveloped and efficient event space. Substantial parts of the city experienced mass evictions and massive construction projects, the implementation of highly restrictive regulatory and legal instruments to ensure public compliance, and the use of vast amounts of public money for the securitization and corporatization of space. Such mega-events

temporally engineer a crisis of deliberative structures: the immutability of deadlines, the stakes of reputations, the primacy of delivery, and the scale of the watching audience engender a systemic violence to existing or potential participatory … structures, from planning processes to established civic freedoms. (Hayes and Horne, 2011: 761)

Expo Pedagogy: Sustainability as Systems Thinking, from Crowd Controls to Everyday Practices

Brownfield redevelopment and soil remediation of the expo site cultivated the state’s legitimacy as an effective manager and regulator, countering the state’s historic role in polluting the environment. Preparations for the mega-event attempted to naturalize the tensions of modernity and global-city formation as objective environmental problems. The remediation of the expo grounds and redistribution or fixing of waste under the site effectively generated a blank slate – in terms of a cleaned up past – in the center of the city, to serve as an urban laboratory of systems controls and lessons in sustainability. The spectacle was at once administrative and pedagogical – and based on the pedological politics of the transitioning state – to perform China’s progress in sustainability initiatives, solidify the state’s environmental leadership, and respond to growing domestic concerns.

The Shanghai 2010 World Expo was the largest expo in history, and its organization and operations were a feat of planetary-scale proportions, given the duration and daily numbers in attendance. Stability and social order were maintained through surface control mechanisms aimed toward the technical management of life. These included civility campaigns, crowd control and health risk management, urban-systems feedback loops that trained expo visitors to monitor their energy use, and interactive technologies that rehearsed citizenship as a duty of managing anticipated futures. Not only was the vision and planning of the event a demonstration of state competence, but expo programming demonstrated that Chinese state power is not merely repressive but rather actively seeks to organize bodies and mobilize subjects through technical oversight and circuits of virtuous citizenship (e.g. health, risk, pleasure, enterprise) (Callahan, 2012). Long before the expo’s opening day, Shanghai residents and prospective visitors in China were taught how to modify their behavior for the event (Nordin, 2012b: 114).

Similar to the Beijing Olympics, education in civility was a major focus of expo preparations. A state-led campaign aimed at inspiring Chinese citizens to ‘raise their awareness of civility, develop a collective sense of representing the host nation and/or host city, re-mold their social manners and habits’ (Law, 2010: 169). A series of public-service announcements on television gave specific directions about how to act in public and how to conduct oneself at the expo site. Books on expo etiquette circulated that informed readers how to properly greet, walk, shake hands, queue in expo lines, and care for personal hygiene (Nordin, 2012b: 114). As expo social conditioning attempted to foster citizens who would collectively advance etiquette and health, the design and administration of the Expo Park implemented systems of crowd control and public health both inside and beyond the expo site (Sun et al., 2013; Zhou et al., 2009; He et al., 2012). Prior to the event, expo organizers engaged experts on crowd management: digital systems of crowd modeling were used to anticipate pedestrian traffic flows, and large-scale simulations rehearsed responses to potential crowd behaviors and tested the degree of chaos and disaster that proposed control systems could endure. The Expo Park became an outdoor site for experimenting with crowd behavior and organizing all necessary city services within the enclosed space. ¹⁶

The Shanghai context required that the administration of the expo master the density of Chinese masses and provide a well-ordered, contained outdoor site – essentially a miniature city with well-disciplined inhabitants and highly-managed atmosphere and encounters. A flexible expo operations control center was established to monitor the event in terms of people, traffic, and energy. The center was equipped with technical systems that collected all available data and communication avenues for responsive actions, such as a TV circuit, remote-control infrastructure (electric power, public lighting, etc.), traffic control, loudspeakers, alarm systems, automatic data links and video projection for displaying public messages, and other devices aimed at moderating circulations of the event. As Sophie Houdart (2012: 133) astutely comments, the expo campus layout was designed to facilitate orderly lines and discipline masses of visitors via an atmosphere conducive to waiting. An assemblage of devices provided shade, cooled down lines with water vapor or fountains, ventilated waiting areas, and effectively kept people in good shape under stressful conditions due to heat or extended passing of time (Houdart, 2012: 133). Flexible barriers broke up potential crowd gatherings, channeling bodies into lines that wound around pavilions. Signs at the entrances to queues displayed the estimated waiting time until entry, discouraging the amassing of bodies beyond the queue gates. Line composition was also controlled by security personnel who were swiftly dispatched to respond to crowding anywhere inside the expo, from designated bathroom areas to transportation zones outside the gates.

The combination of atmospheric, technical, and security devices mitigated disorderly crowds and chaos with incredible versatility, and enabled expo controls to quickly track any ‘problem areas’ and coordinate responses. Crowd control mechanisms were particularly crucial for the large gathering, in order to reduce the risk of public health emergencies, including heat illness, general injuries, communicable diseases, food-borne illness, and mass casualty events (Sun et al., 2013; He et al., 2012). Disaster risk reduction was given top priority: the expo site accommodated an average of 400,000 visitors per day, with 700,000 on most peak days and over 1 million people as a record high for daily attendance. The Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a special unit on public health security to coordinate medical services within and beyond the Expo Park (Sun et al., 2013; He et al., 2012). Health monitoring and security points around the expo coordinated information across the city via an extensive health surveillance network (Houdart, 2012: 130).

The Shanghai 2010 World Expo demonstrated that crowds could be disciplined by comprehensive social-technical management. This was accomplished not only at the scale of general expo infrastructure and logistics but also through the pavilion system and exhibition technologies that encouraged self-regulation and participatory forms of environmental management. Within the expo’s pavilions, visitors engaged with displays that granted access to or simulated the expo’s technical (‘sustainable’) systems and made the new nature of technological experiences available. The Shanghai 2010 World Expo contributed to an ongoing shift in international exhibitions from the display of commodities and technology as the means of national identity and promotion to the construction of experiential activities and themes, often without overtly national references (Harvey, 1996). The ‘intermedia’ character of many national pavilions provided occasions for viewers to either temporarily inhabit narratives related to the expo’s theme ‘Better City, Better Life’ or to anticipate the conduct of human life in the future via staged encounters with new technological devices and services (Balsamo, 2012). Mega-events like the expo can be seen ‘through their capacity to act as powerful agents of technology transfer and technical norm diffusion, with a wide mimetic potential in both geographic and public policy sector terms allied to a demonstration effect designed to encourage positive, individual lifestyle changes amongst civic populations’ (Hayes and Horne, 2011: 750). A brief examination of several state-run expo pavilions makes evident the normative nature of interactivity at the expo, as well as the pedagogical imperative to anticipate and rehearse the future as a socio-technical exercise in environmental crisis management and systems thinking. ¹⁷

The assorted urban sensorium on offer at the state-themed expo pavilions worked to attract and mobilize subjects to participate in and seek pleasure from interactive experiences and pedagogical lessons in social and environmental management as the purview of the state and enlightened citizenship. For example, the State Grid Pavilion – sponsored by the China State Grid Corporation, the nation’s largest power distributor – orchestrated an intense, embodied disciplinary experience by integrating visitors in a state-scripted feedback loop. Inside, expo-goers entered a science-fiction-like ‘Magic Cube’ where they were suspended on a transparent platform and surrounded by a 720-degree LED screen with digital sense-surround of superhuman scale. ¹⁸ Here, a video showcased the transformation of natural energy into human use and induced a dizzying sensation of cube rotation: giant energy vectors traversed the globe, a riveting engagement with Chinese energy imperialism and insertion of bodies into the ‘sovereign power’ of a planetary energy grid. Such exhibits and syncopated video displays served the governing function of producing citizens exposed to – and capable of engaging with – advanced technologies of/for the future.

The state-themed pavilions coordinated an affective economy of anticipation of the future as disaster, as the basis of citizenship (Adams et al., 2009: 249). Exemplary of this mode, the Pavilion of the Urban Planet encouraged expectations of global environmental crisis. Dramatic scenery of destruction, pollution, and energy depletion confronted visitors with the simulated and actual detritus of a ruined world, tempered with the possibility of solutions for healthy ecological living. Pavilion goers strolled by sprawling illuminated scrolls of landfills and urban rubbish piles, punctuated with waste-drum displays of encased consumer cast-offs. Ticking clocks, swinging pendula, and hourglasses containing the last drop of oil or water or precious mineral marked the countdown to scenarios of planetary demise (Nordin, 2012b: 112). Such display techniques substantiated the idea that limits had been reached or were imminent, demanding decisive and creative actions. Portal holes directed attention toward a provocative series of rhetorical questions that encouraged viewers to speculate on uncertain futures: What will we do when the world runs out of oil? If there’s no water tomorrow, what will become of our city? The pavilion tour ended in a solutions chamber, where miniature displays of green technologies, eco-city models (Treasure Island, CA; Masdar City, UAE), and ‘bionic’ parametric blobs symbolizing sustainability spiraled down around an enormous, inflated sphere, rendered as the planet earth via a cohort of projectors. The playful and serious elements together suggested that danger permeated the present – but that planetary survival could be managed through technical solutions and modified behaviors.

Other main theme pavilions interpellated visitors as consumer-subjects of city modeling, urban systems thinking, and state-managed modes of future living. For example, the Urban Best Practices Area accommodated myriad city models and 3D negotiations of city risks and best practices, submitted by municipal governments (Wu, 2010). Such diagrams, in their variety, worked together to give form to the city as an autonomous, irreducible domain that is both naturally self-governing yet requires constant intervention. In yet another portion of the large state-run exhibition hall, the Urbanian Pavilion persuasively exhibited the idea that there are units of urban living that operate across the planet in different configurations. Through case studies of six families (first introduced in wax-figurine tableaux) representing cities that ranged from Phoenix to Zhengzhou, Rotterdam to São Paulo, visitors learned to cross-examine different urban lifestyles using the rubric of family, work, contact, education, and health.

In a subsequent section of Urbanian, expo-goers explored an approach to urban sustainability of excess proportions, interacting with an enormous city model of overstocked everyday items: skyscrapers of piled plastic bins, buildings made of filing cabinet stacks, the dense built forms of stacked doors, even the corrugated tin of slum typology. A multimedia interactive in the Citizens Initiative Pavilion made this exercise a more individualized performative undertaking. Eager participants arranged large model building blocks and urban landscape figures, to make a 3D-image of their personalized built environment appear on the back wall. A sign exhorted people to ‘become a designer of the future city’ as an adventure in self-advancement and urban planning education. The Pavilion of City Being was evocatively presented as a sewage system, interspersed with electronic marquees and billboard messages about urban-ecological systems thinking. City Being installations exhorted visitors to perform a cybernetic style of thought – the city was a system that could be imagined and efficiently controlled through the continuous modulation of risk, feedback, and equilibrium, i.e. the city as a feedback loop.

The gargantuan Theme Pavilion intensified this interactivity with city governance, by embedding expo visitors in actual site management and sustainability controls, via striking displays of real-time monitoring of the event. ¹⁹ In a corner of the Pavilion of City Being, for example, a monitor screened a live feed of the number of bodies currently circulating in different pavilions, giving an ‘insider’ infomatic audit of crowd behavior. Similarly, the State Grid Pavilion, along with its displays about smart grid technology, housed the high-tech transformer substation that exclusively supplied power to the whole expo site and all of the pavilions. Visitors were invited to examine this ‘backstage’ control room and watch the live computerized monitoring of power supply across the expo site. Visitors became participatory energy managers and, potentially, more self-aware energy users by consuming a live feed of data rendered as graphs that showed where power was being used the most within the expo grounds.

Such ‘ecofeedback’ participation reached new levels at various waste receptacles that incited users to monitor their inputs and outputs of consumption. Environmentally-friendly public toilets hailed users as self-regulating individual feedback loops: stall signs advocated paperless human waste removal (or at least treeless toilet paper aids) and expressed gratitude for your participation in the expo’s high-tech sanitation system and on-site greywater recycling. These experiences represented an effort to mobilize enlightened and efficient practices of everyday life, for the purpose of expanding the purview of urban systems thinking to the practice of the self as a kind of rational circuit or self-sustaining eco-city. Through countless simulations and surface control mechanisms, the expo was an education in sustainability as technical environmental- and self-monitoring.

Alternative Field Guides to Spectacle

The preceding examination of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo sought to re-embed the event within broader governing relations. Soil exegesis of the expo drew attention to the ways that waste is a basis of state-led land-use redevelopment and constitutive of ‘new’ urban nature. For the expo site, the Chinese state materially arranged the end use and allowable levels of contamination, thereby producing the grounds for China’s international emergence out of the socialist-industrial past to a sustainable environmental future. The analysis pointed to the material and symbolic cleansing of the site’s soil for expo preparations, as the basis for the kind of citizen participation and training enlisted by the mass event, particularly the pedagogical inducements to systems thinking and the constitution of rational crowds and advanced urban subjects. Further extending the material-relational investigation of spectacle as a governing arrangement, the commentary on the theme pavilions explored the manifold ways that displays sought endorsement of sustainability initiatives through social-technical rationalities, from integrated crisis management to engagement with the state as energy manager.

The Shanghai expo is but one experiment – on a mass scale – of China’s ongoing ‘post-carbon’ transition: it was a discrete bounded area where sustainability expertise and technologies could be developed and applied. In this respect, the expo was similar to China’s numerous eco-city projects, which have come to occupy a central place in the Chinese developmental state’s agenda (Goh, 2009: 4; Sze, 2015). As a city-scale laboratory of sorts, the expo attempted to integrate some of the social and ecological contradictions of late-socialist economic growth, as evidenced by China’s widening income gap and multi-pronged environmental crisis. Integrating infrastructure, ecology and technology, the expo exhibited the territorializing logic of these eco-city projects: the anticipation of disaster and carving out of divisible ecological and economic security zones, to support circular metabolisms and all other manner of disembedded systems thinking. An important legacy of the expo, therefore, is a local material one – a governing arrangement of subsurface and surface that will endure for an unknown future. While the site remains largely an uninhabited de/construction zone – a landfill of ‘eco-chutzpah’ and outdated models – it affected and continues to affect how life is organized and lived in Shanghai. The case also has important implications beyond Shanghai in national and international policy arenas: the Chinese state is coming to terms with the results of the nation’s comprehensive soil survey completed in 2013, which essentially maps the brownfield nature of the entire country. ²⁰ Reportedly, a critically large portion of the country’s urban and especially agricultural land is contaminated. How the state will adapt and arrange land governance will likely center around the organization of waste and soil quality across variegated land uses, from exhibitions to food production.

The case of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo also directs attention to a lack of processual equity: entertaining and technical aspects of sustainability were privileged over democratic or redistributive ones. An important lesson to draw from the Shanghai Expo is that ‘sustainable development is conceptualized as “best practice,” “best available technology,” “green growth” and so on; it is not a question of environmental citizenship as democratic deliberation’ (Hayes and Horne, 2011: 759). The physical geography of such spectacle naturalizes dispossession and docility – its organization of matter and bodies is an inducement to perform within control systems. Ephemeral mega-events bolster long-term emergency state powers and may also lead to harmful physical effects, such as denying the ongoing toxicity of remediated land and sequestering public resources. Basically, spectacle forestalls ethical consideration of the way the past persists in conditioning the social-ecological relations at present. While the expo aimed to improve the urban environment, city image, and quality of life of citizens, the state’s investment in maintaining spectacular division between subsurface and surface supports administrative neglect and a qualified life: notably a refusal of socialist-industrial ecologies, the ongoing treatment of soil as free disposal/waste container, and land use futures that require intensified technocratic systems control.

Finally, the Shanghai Expo provides a window to the long-term dangers of ‘sustainable spectacle’. These efforts often seek to overcome local environmental limits, resource constraints, and the consequences of global climate change through internalized metabolic flows and social control. Such practices of ‘transcendent urbanism’ disavow spatial, ecological, and sociopolitical complexity. While integrating and relocalizing food, energy, water, and other resources is laudable, the systems thinking of eco-city models, for example, too often fails to register the conflicts between ‘best practices’ and place-specific contexts, and can even legitimate increasingly militarized forms of ecological and economic security, such as enclaves of the privileged and/or authoritarian mechanisms of governance (Hodson and Marvin, 2010). As such, disembedded urban systems thinking leads to the technical organization of life for the survival of economic value circulation and state management of a future that is already considered to be ecologically devastated. The depoliticizing arrangement of such sustainable spectacle represents – is – a durable obstruction to living differently.

What responses might we imagine? This article sought the geographical, earthbound character of power relations involved in Shanghai Expo planning and performance. Instead of a limited visual understanding of spectacle, the methodology of soil exegesis directed the analysis to the sedimented power relations of spectacle, as an arrangement of truth and relations with biophysical nature, and as constitutive of the population and subjects. Soil exegesis of the Shanghai Expo demonstrates that spectacle is at once a material reality of governance and false image: the soil standards for the Shanghai Expo are a form of administration and false consciousness that bracket off the past and establish new grounds to legitimate the state. Particular futures are embedded in the soil composition and end-use of remediated land, and toxic foundations and effects are hidden from view, annulling linkages of the site’s material history to everyday lives, health, and ecologies.

Moreover, the expo site’s ongoing performance as ‘postindustrial’ and ‘sustainable’ channels what ecologies, communities, or entities can enter politics; technical controls as well as anticipatory modes set conditions of possibility for action in the present, producing futures that appear to be inevitable. By digging into the political materiality of spectacle, the methodology of soil exegesis gestures toward a critical physical geography of spectacle and mega-event – that is, to take soil seriously but not as simple truth or a passive medium of politics. Critical physical geography ‘combines critical attention to power relations with deep knowledge of biophysical science or technology in the service of social and environmental transformation’ (Lave et al., 2014: 2). Countering the plethora of Shanghai Expo guidebooks that now constitute another waste pile of the event, critical physical geographies of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo and its effects might instead serve as ‘antidote field guides’ that encourage alternative versions of sustainability and feature new modes of living and landscapes of sustainable growth (Gibson-Graham, 2011). It is an effort to embolden theory to be an activity that works for more creative and just compositions of life on the planet – combining the critical operations of ‘denaturalization’ with a material-ethical commitment to transform nature-society relations.