Toronto debates whether to bid on 2015 world's fair Some see event as irrelevant in age
Apr. 18, 2006. 05:30 AM
JOSEPH HALL
Toronto Star
Dragon-shaped balloons float above the opening ceremonies of Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, above. The fair, expected to draw 15 million visitors, ended up attracting almost 22 million. Toronto could reverse that trend if it decides to bid for Expo 2015. Possible competitors include Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Izmir, Turkey.
Is Toronto about to fish in a bygone era for the future of its waterfront?
With the city set to decide late next month whether to back a bid for the Expo 2015 world's fair, Toronto could soon be searching, yet again, for an international extravaganza to kick-start its port lands development.
But some experts say these international exhibitions, which date back to the middle of the 19th century, are anachronisms in this age of mass tourism and the Internet.
"Certainly there are lots of people who regard these events as anachronistic, as cultural dinosaurs ... as things that have outlived their usefulness," says Montana State University historian Robert Rydell, who has made a study of the 155-year-old world's fair movement.
The Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions will make a decision on the 2015 fair location in February 2008. To date, other cities expressing interest include Moscow, Rio de Janeiro and Izmir, Turkey. Toronto's bid would require some $2 billion backing from Ottawa, Queen's Park and the city.
Over the past 16 years, Toronto has unsuccessfully bid on two Summer Olympics — the 1996 and 2008 Games — and the Expo 2000 fair, as well as some more minor cultural and sporting events. The 2000 fair, which was awarded to the German city of Hanover, was widely considered an attendance and entertainment failure.
Expo expert Bruno Giberti has called the global exhibition passé in an age of instant information access and global travel.
"You have to ask yourself, who really needs a world's fair when you can look up the world on the Internet?" Giberti, an architectural historian at the California Polytechnic State University, told the Toronto Star in 2004.
"I do still see these fairs as passé," he said recently, "unless Toronto has somehow reimagined the event in some unanticipated way."
Giberti says international spectacles of all kinds have lost their appeal to many, especially in the United States, which would be relied on to provide millions of visitors to a Toronto fair.
"I think the declining interest, in the U.S. at least, in the Olympics is evidence of the way in which these kinds of international events have become obviated," he says.
The main thrust of Expos past has been to bring international technologies and cultures to people who, in all likelihood, would have had no other way of seeing them, Giberti says.
Rydell agrees that a daunting array of entertainment and information options has emerged to challenge the world's fair raison d'être.
On the other hand, he says, there's still a lot of life left in the concept.
One proof of life, he says, rests in the simple fact that some recent Expos have been enormously popular.
A small world's fair in Aichi, Japan last year, for example, was expected to draw 15 million visitors and ended up attracting almost 22 million.
"People were lined up for eight to 10 hours trying to get into the Expo grounds," says Rydell, who visited the fair. "And this in a high-wired, high-tech society if ever there was one."
He points out that the 1992 Expo in Seville, Spain drew 42 million people, while attendance projections for Expo 2010 in Shanghai are around the 75 million mark.
Expos, he says, have prospered almost everywhere but North America, where, after Montreal's iconic Expo '67, they have often been forgettable cultural and financial failures.
Lacklustre events in San Antonio, Spokane, Knoxville and New Orleans between 1968 and 1984 largely erased the world's fair allure established here by Montreal, which is often regarded as the century's best Expo.
Even Vancouver's popular Expo '86 — which drew more than 22 million visitors — failed to reignite interest on this continent, which has not held one in the ensuing two decades.
In other regions of the world, however, they've thrived, Rydell says.
A large part of this overseas success can be attributed to an innate desire to be part of the spectacle that events like a world's fair can provide.
"You can ask why anyone would (line up) in the 21st century when you can easily point and click," he says.
"But why do people go to baseball games? Why do people go to football games when they can turn on their television sets?"
The sights, smells and organized chaos of a fair still hold an allure for people, he says.
"There's still a kind of being-there-ness (attraction) of all of this that in some ways suggests we aren't as far removed from the 20th and even 19th century as we like to think we are," Rydell says.
As well, he says, an important goal of world's fairs since the 1880s has been the creation of new urban infrastructure — cultural, economic and physical — within the host cities.
That, he says, is still a legitimate and achievable purpose.
"Since the 1880s at least, world's fairs have been about building urban infrastructure, they've been about building museums," he says.
"And that's been pretty well-maintained through the 20th century as well."
Montreal's splendid subway system, a number of its major hotels and its international reputation can be traced back to the centennial year Expo.
Vancouver's Expo helped that city reclaim large tracts of its waterfront and left it with its popular Science World dome.
But Giberti says the goal of urban renewal — especially on derelict lands — should more legitimately be tied to ongoing city planning, rather than a one-shot Expo extravaganza.
"If urban renewal is the ambition, I can hardly believe that it's not more effective just to engage in that project than it is to use a world's fair as a lever."
Rydell also argues that fairs have often been showcases for new and innovative architecture, with Expo pavilions having represented some of the most striking design concepts of the 20th century.
But actual fair pavilions should not be counted on as a potential legacy, Rydell cautions.
Overwhelmingly meant to be temporary installations, the pavilions are almost invariably dismantled soon after the exhibition runs are completed, he says.
"The structures are intended to be ephemeral because of (upkeep) costs," he says.
In Montreal, for example, only the former French pavilion, now a casino, and the shell of the American pavilion, Buckminster Fuller's famed geodesic dome, remain on the actual Expo site.
Giberti, however, says the use of Expos to promote innovative architecture has been overtaken by a new push to build permanent, individual masterpieces into the fabric of urban centres.
This concept, first realized with architect Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has been copied in cities around the world.
Toronto is currently undergoing an architectural renascence of its own, with major renovations of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario (which Gehry designed) and other major cultural centres now under construction.
Giberti says the vast majority of Expos cost more than they bring in. But calculating the economic benefits cannot be limited solely to volume at the turnstile, Rydell says.
"Very few world's fairs over the years have been profitable in the sense that the people who have invested in them have made a significant return off the revenue intake," he says.
"But overwhelmingly, people who invest in these things make money from secondary (and) tertiary investments in transportation infrastructure, hotels, tourism and those types of things."
Surprisingly, Toronto has already benefited from long ago world's fair aspirations, says Keith Walden, a history professor at Peterborough's Trent University.
He says the city's old Industrial Exhibition, first held in 1879, had aspirations to become a world's fair and spawned a marked modernization of Toronto.
"It didn't hold a candle to the Parisian fairs, and certainly not to the 1893 Chicago fair," says Walden, whose book, Becoming Modern in Toronto, documents the changes brought here by the precursor to the Canadian National Exhibition.
"But Toronto had aspirations for greater things. As the 1893 Toronto program put it, `Not a world's fair, but nearly so.'">
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