The Expo As Change Agent

Seattle is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair. The 1962 Century 21 Exposition is remembered as a great space-age fair of the New Frontier-era that inspired The Jetsons, popularized monorail, and spread the idea of revolving restaurants to the world. The first U.S. world’s fair after 1940, it also now serves as an excellent reminder that expos can be powerful agents of urban transformation. Century 21 left a permanent legacy of infrastructure and attitude that continues to shape Seattle to this day.

World’s fairs are a bit of a misnomer: while they attract international visitors and exhibitors from around the world, they are largely driven by local development agendas. They are hosted by cities, sometimes regions, for specific purposes beyond publicity and tourism. They can be fun places to gobble Belgian waffles, but they can also lay down roadmaps for how and where urban development takes place. While largely ephemeral—designed to be showcases of limited duration—expos can help leverage improvements and permanent amenities. A sampling of these include legacy structures (the Space Needle, the Eiffel Tower), shaping parks (Balboa in San Diego, Corona in Queens), downtown make-overs (Spokane, Vancouver, BC), new neighborhoods (the Marina in San Francisco), man-made geographic features (the Bay Area’s Treasure Island), even sewer system upgrades (St. Louis).