Expos and the Rhetoric of Sustainability

Abstract

The chapter discusses how world fairs are events endowed with a major and deliberate urban (re)branding impact. It reflects on how the Expo rhetoric of progress has been replaced with the rhetoric of sustainability in the Third Millennium, an ideological shift which is discursively observable in a selection of promotional and news texts in English about the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and the Expo Milano 2015. While media coverage of Shanghai 2010 reveals a gap between what is meant by eco-sustainability in China’s national English-language papers and the international press, in the case of Milan the sustainability topos, central to the city’s rebranding and the propaganda of the organising committee, encompasses a broad range of meanings, almost to the point of their mutual incompatibility.