Blackwell Reference Online

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World's Fairs or International Expositions are short-term attractions officially organized by a nation-state with exhibits, pavilions, tourist venues, and other spectacular displays of socioeconomic progress, technological development, and cultural advancement. Unlike local festivals or small-scale tourist attractions, World's Fairs are associated with costly investments in infrastructure development, extensive and intensive formal planning, and the use of sophisticated revitalization strategies for urban reimaging. The first World's Fair took place in 1851 in London and other nations followed with expositions that left lasting residual products, including the Eiffel Tower created with the Paris Exhibition of 1889. Since their inception during the mid-nineteenth century, World's Fairs have excited much debate and discussion over their multitude of roles and cultural meanings, impact on architecture and urban form, and trajectory of historical development. Walter Benjamin (1978 : 49) claimed that nineteenth-century World's Fairs “are sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish” that express the emerging values of profligacy and excessiveness in the growth of a broad-based consuming public organized around the fetishism of commodities. For Leo Tolstoy, the 1893 Chicago World's Columbia Exposition was a “striking example of imprudence and hypocrisy; everything is done for profit ... log in or subscribe to read full text