Greenizing the Chinese city: urban regeneration, state developmentalism, and ecotopia in Shanghai Expo 2010

World Expos are both urban realities and urban utopias. In the 175-year history of World Expos, Shanghai Expo 2010 is the only one dedicated to a ‘city’ theme – ‘Better City, Better Life’. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Chinese government orchestrated a ‘city’ Expo in its prime city for considered reasons. The global event provided a golden opportunity to show (off) a global Shanghai and a rising China. It was also an arena for advancing innovations for an urbanizing country and an urban world. Local planners repackaged the Expo – an urban regeneration project of an inner-city precinct per se – into a world's fair of ecotopia. They proposed notions like ‘harmonious city’ and ‘eco-positive city' – despite acknowledged limitations in both conceptualization and applicability – to strike a chord with the then political rhetoric of ‘harmonious society’ and a pressing imperative for green development. In retrospect one and a half decades later, the Expo was an icon for re-imagining and re-narrating a state developmentalism – that had underpinned both the progress and problems of China's rapid and massive urbanization for decades – under a greenism hat, but with a compromised vision and mixed outcomes.