ShareThisSACRAMENTO, Calif. - When California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger visits the Shanghai World Expo later this week, he'll make a pitch for the Bay Area to host the world's fair in 2020, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Schwarzenegger, scheduled to depart Thursday for a six-day trip to China, plans to attend the exposition and will meet with event leaders to sell the idea of hosting the world exhibition in Silicon Valley, said Aaron McLear, the governor's spokesman.
"That's a large part of why we're going" to the expo, McLear said. "The governor's going to give his pitch that they should look at" the Bay Area.
Schwarzenegger will be joined in China by leaders of the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy organization.
The World Expo, formerly known as the World's Fair, is governed by the Bureau International des Expositions in Paris. The Expo 2010 Shanghai has attracted nearly 50 million visitors since it opened 132 days ago. It continues through October.
The event is held every five years and will take place in Milan in 2015.
The United States last hosted the event in New Orleans in 1984. The Bay Area has hosted it twice in San Francisco, in 1939-40 on Treasure Island and in 1915 in the Marina district. The Palace of Fine Arts is a remnant of the 1915 event, formally called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the Bay Area Council, floated the idea last month in an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News. He wrote: "Apart from cultural and symbolic reasons, organizing countries -- and the regions hosting expos -- can use the event to share their best thinking, companies and culture on a global stage. China has certainly done this. Silicon Valley and California can and should, too."
Wunderman wrote that the international pavilions built by participating countries would be buildings the area could keep and that infrastructure upgrades for the event would benefit the region for decades. His piece did not specify locations.
Other U.S. cities are interested in hosting the expo, said Urso Chappell, a San Franciscan who is helping coordinate a panel discussion next week in St. Louis on bringing the event back to the United States. He said people in Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles have expressed interest, though none has had such a high-profile official as Gov. Schwarzenegger take up the cause.
Official bids for the 2020 expo probably will be made to the governing body beginning next year. Cities from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to Ankara, Turkey, have shown interest, Chappell said.
Chappell called the Silicon Valley bid an "excellent idea," especially because it probably would have the most space for the large event that requires from 400 to 800 acres.
"There are a lot of benefits, both substantive as well as sort of philosophical," said Chappell, who runs a website devoted to expo history.
One significant hurdle is that the United States stopped paying its dues to the Bureau International des Expositions in 2002 and no longer is a member of the 157-nation organization. Congress would have to approve spending the money to rejoin.
Even then, Silicon Valley would compete against other U.S. cities for the national bid and then against other world cities. Once a nation makes an official pitch for one of its cities, all others have six months to do so.
London hosted the first World Expo in 1851. The Bureau International des Expositions governs World, International and Horticultural expos. Some that were held in the United States include:
1876: Philadelphia
1904: St. Louis
1915: San Francisco
1939: New York City
1939-40: San Francisco
1968: San Antonio
1984: New Orleans
Source: ExpoMuseum
(E-mail the Chronicle's Wyatt Buchanan at wbuchanan(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
