As Shanghai brings the 2010 World Expo to a close, another city is already gearing up for the next. Shanghai officially handed the World Expo today to Milan, which will host the next world fair in 2015. Shanghai ends its expo tonight after a six-month run.

At a press conference yesterday in Italy Pavilion, Milan Mayor Letizia Moratti said Milan 2015 will be "different" than Shanghai. "It won't be as big," she said.

Initial forecasts put the estimated number of visitors at 20 million with 29 million visits – compared to more than 72 million people who have passed through Shanghai Expo's gates – and Moratti said she hoped that about 10 percent of them would be foreign visitors. (Then again, Italy has only a population of 60 million.)

Milan's Expo site will cover a 1.7 square kilometers, a scant portion of Shanghai's 5.28-square-kilometer Expo site. It was designed by world-renowned architects Stefano Boeri, Richard Burdett, Joan Busquets, Jacques Herzog and William McDonough and will sit in easily accessible northwestern Milan. Construction is set to begin late next year, starting with the Expo site.

"I'm really looking at your expo as a benchmark for our expo," Moratti said. Even though Milan 2015 will be on a smaller scale than Shanghai, which has broken world fair records left and right, Moratti said she hopes to recreate the atmosphere of Shanghai's event.

"We want to make it popular and have strong participation," Moratti said. "We also want it to be a place where families like to come with their children."

Organizers hope to integrate cultural and scientific events into the expo to draw in visitors, like Shanghai did. But a major difference is that these shows will not be just at the expo, but also at different locations in the city.

"We want to make people feel they need to be there," Moratti said. "We hope to attract people who will not be able to experience the things at the expo otherwise."

The next world expo will continue exploring the underlying theme of recent expos, innovation in sustainability. Shifting Shanghai's focus on environmentally conscious development in cities to food – the main part of the theme is "feeding the planet" – Milan hopes participating nations and organizations will display their most promising technology in sustainable agriculture and the food industry.

Moratti said a major innovation of the Milan expo is that all pavilions will be strongly related to the theme. "The concept and theme will be seen in all the sites," she said. In particular, she wants to showcase how countries produce, transform and distribute their food and create a sort of "planetary table" that will display those techniques using innovative tools in each and every part of the expo. "So people can have the experience of eating food all over the world," Moratti said.

So far, Italy is still working to get international cooperation. Countries are not allowed to officially sign agreements until the end of next month, but organizers are already expecting some 150 countries to participate.

According to China Daily, more than 50 countries have already approached Italy about joining the expo, and many countries at this year's expo are eager to join the next, including India, Germany and Turkey.

China, as part of the reciprocity agreement to host the expo this year, is the first country to officially commit to a pavilion. Several Chinese and Italian universities have also already signed cooperation agreements as part of Moratti's plan to involve younger people and artists – "different type of communities" – in the Milan expo.

(China.org.cn October 31, 2010)