Les expositions universelles, une utopie touristique toujours d’actualité ?

• Main Author: Patrice Ballester
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université des Antilles 2017-11-01
• Series: Études Caribéennes
• Subjects: world’s fair; utopia; tourism; architecture; city-planning
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/etudescaribeennes/11239

Through the recent and past universal exhibitions and more particularly the world’s fair of Milan 2015 and Port-au-Prince 1949, we recall that this tourist practice of the pleasure trip in a large city dates back to the xixth century, it accompanies the origins of Our modern tourism, while becoming an instrument of geopolitics and tourist marketing of prime importance to cities and host countries. Exhibitions can be seen as an urban lever, but also a way to make travel and understand our world through a system of representation of local and global identities that always emphasizes scientific discovery and cultural experience through the national pavilion. These giant events are based on a staging and narrative based on a universal theme generally questioning the concept of sustainable development and the renewed attractiveness of the destination. Our analysis focuses on the most recent of the universal exhibitions and a forgotten exhibition belonging to the cultural area of ​​the Caribbean, which reveals three dynamics associating mega-event tourism with the utopia of initiatory journeys, namely: reinvent and regain a certain success of frequentation implying a redefinition of the fields and uses of a disrupted utopia; to make travel is an act both scenographic and symbolic through the pavilion involving artifices and more and more digital declensions, the quest for this sustainable practice of travel is confronted with its heritage and its memory at different scales and temporalities.