A tale of three cities: World Expo 2030

It is easy to mock the rivalry of cities to host events such as the Olympics or the World Cup. In anticipation, the stakes seem absurdly high. Grotesque sums of money are lavished on the bids, the buildings and the opening ceremonies. Yet once the global spotlight has moved on, too often the high hopes of urban renewal fizzle out. All that is left are redundant “legacy” structures: entire villages of crumbling white elephants cast in concrete, their erstwhile purpose now no more than a forgotten McGuffin.

World Expo 2030 is one such prize that promises the mirage of prestige: a world trade fair on which billions are already being squandered in the hope of putting the victorious city on the map — or preventing it from falling off. Some have already dropped out: the Russian invasion of Ukraine forced Odesa to withdraw, even before its glorious Black Sea promenades and Orthodox cathedral had been wrecked by Putin’s bombardment.

Now just three cities remain in the running: Busan, Riyadh and Rome. The choice will be decided by ballot of 179 states, voting in November. In June this year, the leaders of all three host states gathered in Paris to schmooze the representatives of this cosmopolitan electoral college. The South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol, was there to explain why Busan should not be seen merely as the poor relation of Seoul, but as a thriving port, high tech hub and symbol of Korean culture. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female Prime Minister, had abandoned her initial scepticism about the Rome bid and deployed her considerable charm, not to mention copious quantities of exquisite food and wine. And the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”) was there to remind everyone that the Kingdom has come.

Riyadh is, of course, the favourite. Long before the Expo 30 crowd descended on Paris, where the Bureau International des Expositions which runs Expo events is based, the Saudis had taken care to square Emmanuel Macron with aerospace deals worth billions of euros. Eyebrows have been raised in Rome at the French President’s mercenary attitude to his European neighbour. It is no accident that the Ukrainians have coined a verb, “to macronise”, meaning “to express emotion and sympathy without doing anything to help”. But the fact that Riyadh is willing to pay such an exorbitant price to secure the venue for Expo 2030 shows how high the stakes actually are.

For all its fabulous wealth, strategic importance and religious influence in the Sunni Muslim world, Saudi Arabia is desperate to shore up its precarious prestige in the West. Its failure to crush the Iranian-backed insurgency in Yemen, and even to prevent the civil war from spilling over the border to sabotage of its oil facilities, has reinforced the regime’s insecurities.

In its quest for allies, the Saudis have put out feelers to China, risking American wrath, and even opened talks about formal recognition of Israel — thereby stoking its undeclared war with Iran and its own barely contained legions of radical Islamists. At the same time, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has gone on an unprecedented spending spree in the West, buying up everything from Newcastle football club and the professional golf circuit to funding a new football Pro-league and investing in SoftBank’s Vision Fund. This is in addition to the ongoing obsession with state of the art weapons. In 2022 Saudi Arabian military expenditure overtook that of the UK, Germany and France to become the fifth largest in the world, having risen by 16 per cent in a single year. These are not the actions of a regime that is comfortable in its skin.

The grim reality is that no amount of splashing the cash can ever wipe out the stain of the Kingdom’s grisly human rights record. Its use of the death penalty, as prescribed by Sharia law, is notorious: last year 81 prisoners, many of them foreign citizens, were executed on one day. Many death sentences are imposed on migrant workers, particularly maids. In 2011 a Saudi woman, Amina bin Salem Nasser, was beheaded for “sorcery”. (Yes, it is a capital crime in the Kingdom.) Despite the formal abolition of the death penalty for minors (as recently as 2020), the Saudis continue execute people for crimes allegedly committed as juveniles. While annual rates fluctuate, last year it executed 196, according to Amnesty International. Among major countries for which data is available Saudi Arabia — despite a relatively small population — is exceeded only by China and Iran. Public beheadings and the routine use of torture to extract confessions from opposition activists belie Saudi claims to have taken the path to reform and modernisation.

Only this week it emerged that Mohammed Alhajji, a Saudi doctor and Snapchat influencer, had been arrested shortly before he was due to speak at an event in Riyadh. Alhajji was not seen as a dissident, but his arrest follows that of other influencers, including Mansour Al-Raqiba, who recently received a 27 year sentence for criticising the Crown Prince — in private. Alhajji had 385,000 followers on Twitter, who called him “Dr Mohammed” and devotedly followed his medical career in the US. Before his arrest, Alhajji had been given an award for his work on sickle cell disease, a common ailment in the Kingdom. What possible reason could the Saudi secret police have for “disappearing” the ingenious and innocuous Dr Mohammed?

By far the most notorious case was, of course, the extrajudicial execution of a journalist, Jamal Kashoggi. The enduring impact of this crime is explained by the fact that the victim was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, that diplomatic immunity was exploited to facilitate his murder and the disposal of his dismembered remains, and that the evidence — gathered by the CIA in a published report — points overwhelmingly to the hit job having been carried out on the orders of the Crown Prince himself. What lends permanent resonance to Kashoggi’s assassination, however, is the fact that he was a journalist working for, among other newspapers and TV networks, the Washington Post. This means that his death was intended as a warning to critics of the regime, whoever they are, wherever they may be and whatever organ they represent. It was a direct assault on the freedom of the press.

These inescapable facts explain the increasingly frantic manoeuvres of Mohammed bin Salman to distance himself from the Kashoggi affair. He has had some success. The British Government chose the dog days of August to announce that the Crown Prince had been invited to London for the first time since the murder. On his visit he will almost certainly be royally entertained, not only by Rishi Sunak at Downing Street, but also by King Charles III at Buckingham Palace or Windsor. Red carpets show no bloodstains.

Although a total of 76 individuals connected with the murder have been banned from the United States, the prince himself has been received by Joe Biden, though not without fierce criticism of the President for doing so. But the fact remains that the US no longer sells arms to the Saudis, that repression continues unabated in the Kingdom, and that in the international media its de facto ruler drags the sobriquet “Bone-Saw” behind him like a ball and chain.

All this makes it much more difficult for Mohammed bin Salman to realise his grand project, known as Saudi Vision 2030, which is intended to diversify the Kingdom’s economy away from oil. Since the murder of Kashoggi, a long list of global companies have withdrawn from Vision 2030’s Investment Forum, including JP Morgan Chase, BlackRock and Google. Richard Branson, who had a strategic role in creating a Saudi tourism industry, has followed suit.

What of the Crown Prince’s vaunted “reforms”? The lifting of the ban on women drivers, welcome as it is, has merely reminded the world of just how misogynistic Saudi law and culture still are. The notorious male guardianship system remains in place, bolstered by Absher, a government-sponsored app that gives husbands digital control of their wives’ movements. And there are still cases such as that of Salma Al-Shebab, a Leeds University student, who in 2021 was arrested on holiday in the Kingdom for following and retweeting dissidents. Given six years by a Saudi court, she appealed, but her already draconian sentence was then increased to 34 years. She, like many others, was a victim of the We Are All Security app, which enables a culture of surveillance and denunciation. For freethinkers, especially if they are female, the “reformed” Kingdom of Mohammed bin Salman is a digital dungeon.

The most utopian of the Crown Prince’s plans is the mega-city of Neom, a shimmering line of mirror-encased skyscrapers on the Red Sea island of Sindalah. Unlike the nearby Egyptian resort city of Sharm El Sheikh, however, Neom would be teetotal. Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Neom would include bars at which tourists could buy alcohol — strictly banned elsewhere in Saudi Arabia under Sharia law. But these reports have since been denied. Like other princely schemes which depend on foreign investment and tourism, Neom increasingly resembles a mirage.

In any case, if the Saudis were to host World Expo 2030, it would not take place in a new city but in Riyadh. However much oil revenue is diverted into improving facilities in the capital over the next six or seven years, it will not compare with Dubai, the unrivalled business hub and tourist destination in the region. Though the government claims that seven million visited Riyadh during its new entertainment “Season” and that 28 million people will visit the Kingdom in 2023, these figures seem highly improbable. The Saudis are still much more accustomed to pilgrims for the Hajj than to the more complex demands of Western tourists. The mere fact that women must dress “modestly” or risk arrest and that homosexuality is still a capital offence are major deterrents for non-Muslims. In any conflict of interest between the Crown Prince’s claim to be an enlightened ruler, opening up the Kingdom to the world, and his role in maintaining the Saudi royal family as “Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina”, the puritanical Wahhabi version of Islam trumps reform every time.

A Saudi Expo 2030 would attract all of the human rights criticisms made of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, plus many more. And that is before considering the near certainty of a repetition of the bribery and corruption that marred the Qatari-FIFA nexus. President Macron may not care a fig for humanity or the rule of law, but most Westerners (including his compatriots, who see the “rights of man” as their creation) undoubtedly do. There is a serious risk that an Expo 2030 in Riyadh would be a commercial catastrophe.

What of South Korea? Until this summer, the Busan bid had a great deal going for it. Then came the fiasco that was the World Scout Jamboree. Some 43,000 scouts aged 14-18 gathered in Seoul on August 1 and were bused to the “world’s largest campsite” at Saemangeum on the Western coast of Korea. The event was an unmitigated disaster, ruined by lamentable organisation and drainage, but above all by the choice of location. A grim, featureless flatland adjoining the world’s longest sea wall, frequently flooded, Saemangeum is humid, with temperatures in the mid-30s, plagued by swarms of mosquitoes and vulnerable to storms blowing in from the South China Sea. Typhoon Khanun arrived in Korea during the jamboree: a predictable hazard in the region but apparently unforeseen by the authorities, who were unprepared. The entire camp had to be evacuated after thousands of scouts fell victim to a plethora of diseases, including Covid and even cholera. The heat and insects were exacerbated by the abysmal lavatories and other facilities. Bear Grylls, the UK’s Chief Scout, took one look, delivered his opening address and promptly left.

The Korean media lamented this “national disgrace”, as well they might. Thousands of teenagers had worked hard to save £4,000 apiece to attend the jamboree. The organisers had had six years to prepare and a budget of $89 million. Yet they still failed to get the basics right: the facilities would have shamed a refugee camp.

What will almost certainly make this fiasco fatal to the Busan bid for Expo 2030 is one simple fact: the World Scout Jamboree was intended as a dry run. Even worse: the site at Saemangeum was reportedly being seriously considered for the world fair in the event of a successful bid. The delegates and the Expo officials in Paris will almost certainly take a dim view of the South Korean bureaucrats for planning to use such an obviously inhospitable site for a major international gathering. If they couldn’t manage 43,000 scouts, how could the Koreans hope to accommodate numbers of an entirely different order of magnitude? Some 28 million visitors are expected at the 2025 Osaka World Expo and the 2030 event may be even bigger. But Osaka has hosted two world fairs in the past half century; South Korea none.

So much for Riyadh and Busan. What about Rome? There is no point in denying that the Italian capital has been badly run in the recent past. Its urban decay was symbolised by piles of rubbish on the streets as the waste collection system broke down. It is unfortunate that after the defeat of her Five Star Party the glamorous outgoing mayor, Virginia Raggi, was given the presidency of the commission for Rome’s Expo bid. As Jason Horowitz of the New York Times puts it, “For many Romans, Ms Raggi’s name became synonymous with the city’s degradation.”

Fortunately, however, other factors are working in its favour. The new mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, is a centre-Left Keynesian economist who has brought Rome’s chaotic finances under control. Money is being pumped into the decayed infrastructure by the European Union’s pandemic recovery fund, which had appeared to be at risk when a Eurosceptic populist, Giorgia Meloni, was elected Prime Minister last year. In practice Ms Meloni’s government has pursued much the same policy of fiscal consolidation as her technocratic predecessor, Mario Draghi, and she has thrown herself energetically into the Expo 2030 campaign. Meanwhile the Vatican is preparing for a huge influx of pilgrims in the Holy Year of 2025, which should give the tourism industry a shot in the arm.

But the real question is not whether the capital could manage the logistics of World Expo — if Milan could do it in 2015, surely Rome could too in 2030. What remains to be seen is whether this archetypal European metropolis is able to harness its unique history to become once more a beacon of humanistic values.

The signs are that Rome is rising to the challenge. Matteo Gatti, the technical director of the project, envisions an Expo site centred on the derelict building known as the Sail, built for the World Aquatic Championships but left unfinished in 2007 when the city ran out of money. With a budget of €10 billion (£8.6 billion), this time Gatti plans to create a huge new complex, with a restored Sail building connected by rail to the Colosseum. Long before the Expo 2030 grounds are built, Mayor Gualtieri has promised to revamp Rome’s public transport and restore its architectural heritage by 2026.

If Rome is chosen for the World Expo, it will require four very different individuals — Gatti, Gualtieri, Raggi and Meloni — to work together harmoniously. Given the notorious volatility of Italian politics, that might be asking too much: all four players could well have been substituted long before 2030. But the fact that the success of a Rome Expo would not depend on any individual leader is actually a strength — especially when compared to Saudi Arabia, where the entire project is wholly reliant on one royal personage.

Rome would have something else, something that no other city could offer: the aura of eternity. Edward Gibbon responded to it when he recalled: “It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.” The truth is that no other place on earth has witnessed so many declines and falls, yet also so many rebirths. “Rome is everyone’s homeland,” the 19th-century German historian Alfred von Reumont concluded his magnum opus on the city. “In Rome the German and the Briton, the Frenchman and the Spaniard relive a part of their own history…”

The 179 men and women of all nationalities who make up the selectorate for World Expo 2030 have a heavy responsibility. It is a commercial event, certainly, but world fairs have always been about much more than that. Human rights and humane values, practical experience and technical competence, ethical integrity and aesthetic imagination — they all matter no less than the bottom line. Is it too much to hope that these electors will weigh Riyadh and Busan in the scales and find them wanting? Rome, by contrast, represents humanity, ancient and modern. It is humanity, not the sovereignty of wealth, that should be the decisive factor.