Overview

“Expo 2020 Dubai” was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from October 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022, one year later than planned because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A registered Expo (International Registered Exhibition) under the International Exhibitions Bureau (Bureau International des Expositions, BIE), it occupied a 438-hectare site in Dubai South and ran for 182 days. It is commonly described as the first Expo in the Middle East, but that is accurate only for its category: it was the first registered Expo in the region. Two special exhibitions, a smaller category, had already taken place in Israel: Expo 1953 Jerusalem and Expo 1956 Beit Dagon. Expo 2020 Dubai took place during the UAE’s Golden Jubilee year and recorded 24,102,967 visits.

Origins and the bid

By 2011 the UAE had decided to bid for Expo 2020, with a desert site in Dubai South as the venue, and in 2012 the bid team began work on the master plan. The United Arab Emirates was elected host on November 27, 2013, by the BIE Member States at the General Assembly in Paris. Four cities competed: São Paulo, Brazil; Dubai; Ekaterinburg, Russia; and Izmir, Turkey. Dubai led every round of the secret electronic ballot, with 77 votes in the first round, 87 in the second, and 116 in the third and final round, against 47 for Russia. The original plan called for the Expo to run from October 20, 2020, to April 10, 2021.

In 2020, with participating countries struggling to prepare during the pandemic, the UAE asked to move the dates. Under the BIE Convention, such a change requires a two-thirds majority of Member States. Remote voting by the delegates of the BIE’s 170 Member States opened on April 24, 2020, reached the required majority on May 4, and closed on May 29, 2020, approving new dates of October 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022. The Expo kept the name Expo 2020 Dubai.

Theme and subthemes

The theme, “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,” was divided into three subthemes: Opportunity, Mobility and Sustainability. Each gave its name to one of three thematic districts, arranged like petals around a central plaza, and each district had its own thematic pavilion: Mission Possible for Opportunity, designed by AGi Architects; Alif for Mobility, designed by Foster + Partners with a partly open-air 340-meter track; and Terra for Sustainability, designed by Grimshaw with a large overhanging roof, solar panels and “Energy Trees.”

Each district had its own color and shape, rooted in Islamic geometry: orange and a rectangle for Opportunity, blue and a triangle for Mobility, and green and a circle for Sustainability. Terra, certified LEED Platinum and designed to produce as much energy as it consumes, carried 4,912 solar panels on its canopy, while 18 rotating Energy Trees followed the sun. Over the six months, 10 Theme Weeks of the Programme for People and Planet, adopted by the UAE Cabinet in April 2021, carried the theme into talks, events and the World Majlis, a meeting space for open discussion modeled on the traditional Arab majlis.

The site

The site lay in Dubai South, about 35 kilometers from Dubai and 115 kilometers from the center of Abu Dhabi, on undeveloped desert once used as a camel farm and for military training, about 15 minutes from Al Maktoum International Airport and the port of Jebel Ali. The master plan took the form of a Venn diagram, with Al Wasl Plaza at the center and the three thematic districts as petals around it. Country pavilions lined the avenues, and green spaces separated the districts. In 2014 the whole plan was rotated 90 degrees to allow for the airport’s planned expansion.

The central plaza, Al Wasl, joined the three districts under a domed steel trellis designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, whose pattern echoed the Expo logo and which served as a 360-degree projection surface. HOK prepared the site masterplan, and Asif Khan designed the three 21-meter-high entrance gates. The gated area also held multiple stages, parks, public spaces and more than 200 food and beverage outlets, while the Expo Village, logistics areas, transport links, hotels and a public park lay outside the gates.

Named after Dubai’s historic name, Arabic for “the connection,” the Al Wasl dome rose 67.5 meters and spanned 130 meters; companies from 13 countries worked on it, and its 550-metric-ton crown was lifted into place in September 2019. According to the organizers, the shade of the trellis kept the plaza up to 9 degrees Celsius cooler than its surroundings. The thematic districts, designed by Hopkins Architects and built by the UAE’s Al Futtaim Construction, drew on old Dubai: clusters of small buildings on narrow, self-shaded streets, with facades recalling traditional wind towers. Asif Khan’s carbon-fiber entrance portals reinterpreted the mashrabiya lattice. The Dubai Exhibition Centre, 300 meters from Al Wasl, offered 60,000 square meters of halls and received visitors arriving by metro. The Expo Village, 15 towers with 2,100 apartments, housed more than 12,000 participants’ staff during the Expo.

The Dubai Roads and Transport Authority’s Route 2020 extended the Dubai Metro’s Red Line by 15 kilometers and seven stations, ending at an Expo station shaped like golden wings, and the main road past the site was renamed Expo Road. All 123 permanent buildings were certified under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED system, seven of them at the Platinum level, including the UAE Pavilion and Terra.

Building the site took more than 240 million work hours, with up to 45,000 workers on the ground on a single day. Three workers died in work-related incidents during construction. The Workers’ Monument by Asif Khan, in Jubilee Park, carries the names of the 257,524 people who built the site and remains in place today.

Pavilions and international participation

The Expo welcomed 192 countries, and the BIE counts 200 participants in all. For the first time in Expo history, every participating country had its own pavilion, and countries were placed according to the subtheme they chose rather than by geography. At the heart of the site, the UAE Pavilion by Santiago Calatrava, modeled on “a falcon in flight,” connected to the central plaza.

The organizers counted 218 participants: 200 official participants, made up of the 192 countries and eight international organizations, plus 18 non-official participants, among them civil society groups, corporate partners and universities. Countries built 65 pavilions of their own, 23 occupied rented pavilions and 104 took pavilions in the thematic districts, where an assistance program paid for construction, fit-out and operating costs for developing countries. Every African country took part. According to the organizers, the African Union, ASEAN, the League of Arab States, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie and the Gulf Cooperation Council all took part in an Expo for the first time.

Calatrava’s design for the UAE Pavilion was chosen in a competition of 11 concepts from nine firms. Covering more than 15,000 square meters, the building had 28 movable wings that opened by day to expose the solar panels beneath them, and its exhibition, “The Land of Dreamers Who Do,” told the story of the country. Two other host pavilions drew wide attention. The Vision Pavilion, a tribute to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai, was kept secret throughout its construction and recorded the highest visitor satisfaction of any pavilion, 96%. The Women’s Pavilion, created with Cartier, explored women’s contributions throughout history and welcomed 342,234 visitors.

On BIE Day, an international jury of nine experts presented 51 gold, silver and bronze awards to official participants. Among the largest self-built pavilions, Saudi Arabia won gold for architecture and landscape, Japan for exhibition design and Germany for theme interpretation.

Culture and entertainment

The Expo staged more than 30,000 events over its 182 days. The Opening Ceremony at Al Wasl Plaza on September 30, 2021, the evening before the gates opened, featured tenor Andrea Bocelli, singers Andra Day, Ellie Goulding and Angelique Kidjo and pianist Lang Lang, while the flags of the 192 countries unfolded one by one around the plaza.

Participants held 195 National and Honor Days at Al Wasl, with flag raisings, anthems and cultural performances; the last was BIE Day, on March 30, 2022. The UAE marked its National Day and Golden Jubilee from December 1 to 4, 2021, with free entry for everyone on December 2. Expo 2020 Dubai formed the all-women Firdaus Orchestra, 50 musicians from the Arab world mentored by composer A.R. Rahman and conducted by Yasmina Sabbah, and commissioned “Why? The Musical,” directed by Shekhar Kapur with eight songs by Rahman, which premiered at Al Wasl in January 2022. Jubilee Park, the largest venue, held up to 6,800 people under COVID-19 limits.

Permanent public artworks by artists including Olafur Eliasson, Yinka Shonibare, Haegue Yang and Monira Al Qadiri stood across the grounds, and 42 bronze medallions around Al Wasl, one for each year from the founding of the UAE in 1971 to the Expo award in 2013, told the country’s story.

The BIE-Cosmos Prize was awarded to the N/a’an ku sê Foundation, and the closing ceremony at Al Wasl Plaza featured performances by Christina Aguilera, Norah Jones and Yo-Yo Ma before the BIE flag passed to Japan for Expo 2025 Osaka. A team led by Franco Dragone created the ceremony, and a final fireworks display at 3 a.m. on April 1, 2022, ended the Expo. BIE President Jai-chul Choi said the Expo “has shed light on the world of possibility that awaits future generations.”

Visitors and services

The Expo relied on a volunteer force of 30,000 people and, according to its organizers, reached 251.2 million people virtually through a 3D re-creation of the site and 360-degree tours, along with about one million school visits. The BIE called it the largest global gathering since the start of the pandemic.

The gates opened at 10 a.m. on October 1, 2021, and closed for the last time at 3 a.m. on April 1, 2022. A one-day ticket cost 95 dirhams (about $26), a multiday pass 195 dirhams and a season pass 495 dirhams. Visitors under 18, people 60 and older and people of determination entered free, and UAE airlines gave free tickets to international passengers. Season passes accounted for 70% of visits, and 49% of visitors came more than once. Attendance built toward the end: February and March 2022 brought half of all visits, 8.1 million in March alone. Visitors came from 195 nationalities, and India was the largest international market, with 20% of international visitors.

The Expo’s metro station could carry about 22,000 passengers an hour in each direction, and Expo Rider buses, free with an Expo ticket, linked the site with 15 points in Dubai and nine in other emirates. On site, restaurants served more than 50 cuisines, a smart-queue system let visitors book time slots at up to 10 pavilions a day, and 152 robots modeled on the mascot Opti greeted visitors. The top souvenir was the yellow Expo Passport, sold for 20 dirhams and stamped at each pavilion; almost two million were sold.

Mascot, logo and media

The ring-shaped logo, unveiled by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum at the foot of the Burj Khalifa in March 2016, was based on a ring about 4,000 years old found at Saruq Al Hadid, an archaeological site in the Dubai desert; its pattern reappeared in the trellis of the Al Wasl dome. The mascots, designed by an Emirati team and unveiled in 2019, formed a family: the siblings Latifa and Rashid, Salama the wise ghaf tree, and three robot “Guardians” for the subthemes, Opti, Alif and Terra. Salama recalled a real ghaf tree that Sheikh Mohammed spared by moving the site slightly during an early visit.

The theme song, “This Is Our Time,” played each morning as the entrance portals opened. Expo TV, launched in November 2019, carried Expo programming across the UAE, and the organizers reported 747 million broadcast views of the Opening Ceremony in 175 countries.

Publications

The organizers delivered their final report to the BIE in March 2023. Titled “The Expo 2020 Dubai Story,” it completes a trilogy with the bid dossier and the registration document and is also published online. Official publications also included “The Definitive Edition”; books on Al Wasl Plaza and on the Alif, Terra, Mission Possible and Vision pavilions; “Site, Themes, and Architecture”; “Children’s Tales from Around the World,” in English, Arabic and Braille; and the official visitor guide.

Legacy

Legacy was planned from the start. At closing, the site was set to become a new neighborhood, first announced as District 2020, with about 80% of the Expo’s built infrastructure to be repurposed as a “15-minute city.” Renamed Expo City Dubai, it opened to visitors on October 1, 2022, the anniversary of the Expo’s opening, with Al Wasl Plaza, the Surreal water feature, the Garden in the Sky observation tower, Alif, Terra and the Vision and Women’s pavilions among its attractions.

Expo City Dubai also kept the Dubai Exhibition Centre, the Workers’ Monument and the Firdaus Studio, the recording studio built for the orchestra, and the Closing Report announced that Mission Possible would become a museum of Expo 2020 Dubai. In late 2023 the site hosted the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP28. Third-party research cited by the organizers estimates that Expo 2020 Dubai and Expo City Dubai will add 154.9 billion dirhams (about $42.2 billion) in gross value to the UAE economy between 2013 and 2042.

Held after a postponement approved by the BIE Member States, Expo 2020 Dubai showed how the event could adapt to a global crisis and plan for the reuse of its site well before opening day.