Preface

This second visual essay on Dubai represents an exploration of Expo 2020 (delayed until 2021 because of the pandemic). As a rule I don’t have any desire to attend major international events like the Olympics or World Cup. But this World Expo was different: I needed to attend. In recent years, with actual disasters and forecasts of further disasters from climate change accumulating, I wondered how this would transform our concept of the nation state. It’s already clear that climate change will be a destabilizing event for the international system. Forced climate migration across borders will continue to rise and the scarcity of basic resources like fresh water will push nation states into conflict. In addition, steps taken by any individual nation to mitigate carbon emissions are insignificant, since what’s needed is a global framework. What evidence was out there that our system of nation states would prove malleable enough to meet these challenges?

If there was a fresh public perspective on the nation state I figured it could show up in the national pavilions of the Expo.

I’ll cut short any speculation and note that there didn’t appear to be any movement to re-imagine the nation state. Our system of nation states is an old and curmudgeonly institution, and it remains stuck defending itself as a stable, solidly bordered thing. Expo 2020 turned out not to be a clear window into a future global system so much as a reflection of the current ideology of nationhood. I was surprised at the extent to which, after all the design cleverness thrown into these pavilions, they all came back to the same ideals. That made my job in this visual essay a little easier, since I didn’t need to cover a bewildering array of national visions, but rather walk cover a handful of key pavilions.

In the course of reflecting on the experience of Expo 2020 I began to research another Expo from the past: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Thanks to material I browsed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, including guidebooks and image collections, I felt like I could imagine this grand event held along the shore of Lake Michigan. Although the Dubai and Chicago Expos were linked in the effort to put on an awe-inspiring event, and to present the global system in a physical and walkable form, the underlying view of the world had shifted dramatically between 1893 and 2021. The global order in 1893 was based on colonialism and industrial progress, and within that order nations justified themselves with constant reference to the past. Turning to 2021 the design sensibility was always modern, and interest in the past had been displaced by a focus on the future and technological transformation.