Conference
Symposium ‘Beyond Expo: Sustainable Futures’
- Date
- Monday 24 November 2025
- Time
- Address
- Herta Mohr 1.30 (morning sessions) & Lipsius 0.02 (afternoon sessions)
In 2025, after 55 years, the World Exposition returned to Osaka. World Expositions have long provided a platform for the promotion of nation-branding, capitalism, innovation and technology. The politics of sustainability encompasses these core elements to enable governments and businesses alike to brand themselves as a leading and responsible stakeholders in managing the global commons, whilst simultaneously fostering new economic opportunities through technological development. Each World Expo provides an opportunity to showcase new approaches to address current global issues, not least the environment, and to shape the future. Yet, how innovative are these approaches and are they as sustainable as they purport to be? How were illusions of a sustainable future driven by capitalist innovation recycled at the Osaka World Expo 2025? This symposium assembles a group of practitioners, academics, and students to examine three key areas:
- To foreground questions of environmental sustainability in EU-East Asia relations, particularly as they connect with Japan’s relations with the Netherlands.
- To comprehend how World Expositions have been embraced in East Asia and to set out how these events can be researched and what they can tell us about the region today.
- To compare and assess the statements, activities, and exhibits of the Dutch and Japanese governments and businesses to brand themselves as committed to a politics of sustainability at the Osaka World Expo 2025.
The Osaka World Expo 2025 assembles public and private actors from around the world to construct international, national, and commercial pavilions for the public to experience. The theme of the Osaka World Expo 2025 is ‘Designing Future Society for our Lives’ and aims to provide innovative solutions to global problems in the 21st century. Environmental sustainability is at the heart of this theme, but sustainability has its own politics. Echoing previous World Expos, the emphasis of the Osaka World Expo 2025 is on capitalist enterprise driving technological innovation to solve the global environmental crisis. World Expos rarely challenge capitalist accumulation as a cause of the crisis in spite of the rising threats to human beings caused by global warming and environmental degradation.
It is not only the ‘sustainable’ visions, or illusions, propounded at the Expo that require analysis. The very act of hosting a World Expo raises questions of sustainability. Every mega event entails substantial infrastructure projects that may only be used for the event itself. The Sapporo Winter Olympics of 1972 was the first mega event to take environmental concerns seriously. This was largely due to the public backlash in Japan against industrial pollution caused during Japan’s high speed economic growth from the 1950s on, particularly in the wake of the Yokkaichi asthma and Minamata mercury poisoning scandals. Ever since, the organizers of mega events have emphasized using recyclable materials, reusing structures, and executing a long-term plan for the continued use of the site. Since the London 2012 Olympic Games, the organizers of mega events have sought to achieve the international standard for sustainable event management (ISO 20121) to demonstrate their commitment to the environment. Even with this standard, it is debatable whether any mega event can truly be environmentally sustainable.
Notwithstanding the environmental costs, World Expositions remain remarkably attractive for East Asian governments to host. The Chinese government sought to showcase their country’s emergence as a key global actor and advanced economic power at the Shanghai World Exposition in 2010. Busan bid to host the 2030 World Exposition only to lose out to Riyadh. In Japan, nostalgia towards the Tokyo 1964 Olympics and Osaka World Expo 1970 fuelled the ambitions of Japanese leaders to host the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which were ultimately held in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Osaka World Expo 2025. The 1964 Olympics and 1970 Expo signalled that Japan was becoming a state to be admired, if not emulated. For former Prime Minister Abe Shinzō these two events were central to Japan’s ‘renaissance’ and the revitalization of a ‘Meiji spirit’ amongst the Japanese people. The Tokyo 2021 Olympics were interpreted differently by the Japanese people themselves with many breathing a sigh of relief once the closing ceremony had ended. Others critiqued the ego-inflating infrastructure projects the Olympics spawned and the environmental impacts of the event. Similarly, in the run up to the Osaka World Expo 2025, many observers balked at the soaring costs of hosting the event, as well as raising concerns about pollution and construction delays. In the end, the Expo show would go ahead and even turned a profit. Yet, as the Expo is torn down to re-imagine the event space of Yumenoshima as an integrated tourist resort, controversially including a casino, questions remain as to how this event should be understood, both locally in the Kansai region, as well as more broadly in Japan’s history and that of the World Expositions.
Programme
| Room: | Herta Mohr 1.30 |
| 10:00-10:15 | Opening and Introduction (Lindsay Black, Leiden University) |
| 10:15-11:45 |
Environmental sustainability in EU-East Asia relations:
|
| 11:45-13:00 | Lunch |
| Room: | Lipsius 0.02 |
| 13:00-13:55 |
Researching Mega Events in Asia & Beyond:
|
| 13:55-14:00 | Break |
| 14:00-15:15 |
Expo Graduation Projects at Leiden:
|
| 15:15-15:25 | Coffee break |
| 15:25-16:45 |
Environmental Stability and the Osaka Expo 2025:
|
| 16:45-17:00 | Conclusions & Online Learning Module (Katarzyna Cwiertka, Leiden University) |