Shanghai Daily News

Organisers of World Expo 2010 in Shanghai should consider building more bicycle paths, a visiting US professor told a forum in the city yesterday.

"When organisers design the plan for the Expo, they should take the future into consideration," Saskia Sassen, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, said.

"For example, they should think of future traffic in Shanghai, instead of traffic simply during the Expo.

"One key issue here is that we have to be economical about resources and energy. I hope the organisers will consider using solar energy and building more paths for bicycles."

Sassen told the Forum 2006 -- Expo 2010 Shanghai China that Shanghai is amazingly neat and orderly for a city undergoing such a major revamp.

"Shanghai is building roads, metro lines and other facilities at an incredible speed, but the city is still running well," said Sassen. "In comparison, some other foreign cities are in a mess while they don't have any new developments."

To Sassen, the most attractive part of World Expo is that it provides space for people to imagine. It is not only for participants to showcase their national pavilions or exhibits, but also present to the world new directions for evolvement.

She suggested Shanghai use all kinds of international activities to promote the Shanghai World Expo.

For example, the ongoing Venice Biennale of Architecture has served as a good platform. The Biennale selected 16 world-renowned cities, including Shanghai, and introduced them on big billboards in a 300-meter-long corridor near the exhibition site.

"Three thousand registered reporters from all over the world have come to the event to write about it. If they notice the billboard of Shanghai and see the information of World Expo on it, it will certainly raise global awareness of World Expo," Sassen said.

Saskia Sassen is the author most recently of "Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages" (Princeton University Press 2006). She has now completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in more than 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [http://www.eolss.net ]. Her books are translated into 16 languages. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences has just published her book "The Global City" in Chinese. Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Vanguardia, Clarin, the Financial Times, and others.