World's fairs, between eco-fictions and landscapes of progress? Dubai 2020 and Osaka 2025
Résumé
The landscapes of a world’s fair never provide a neutral and objective vision of the natural environment. To become a landscape, the environment is decomposed and then recomposed by politicians, architects, urban planners, and landscapers, who deform and translate a civilization according to their own aesthetic criteria; through words, languages, plastics, and especially a sensitive conjunction between perceived and lived, imagined and diverted, by the system of representations. Through an upcoming world’s fair, Dubai 2020, offering a portrait of a city that is difficult to sustain, and Osaka 2025, a world’s fair in the making, we approach the very foundations of an eco-fiction for world tourism plagued by the sacrosanct dialectic concerning the lasting effects of the ephemeral. The landscape of world’s fairs is in a way a sort of median, a trajectory, a trajective chain in mesology according to Augustin Berque, seeking to make an urban–nature environment an identity of its own, but with a universal and humanistic character. Nevertheless, they carry in themselves the seeds of their own end or of a principle of hope, one that is utopian and very often imperfect.