Dubai Expo City

Most Expos get dismantled within a year of closing, their pavilions reduced to a few nostalgic photos and an empty lot. Dubai, characteristically, decided not to let go. Expo 2020 — delayed a year by the pandemic, so it actually ran in 2021 and 2022 — has been converted wholesale into Expo City, a permanent mixed-use district that keeps most of the original architecture intact and repurposes it for offices, schools, and event space. I walked through it eighteen months after the Expo closed and had the disorienting experience of touring a World’s Fair that was still, in some structural sense, open.

The scale is what gets you first. This was built to host millions of visitors from nearly two hundred countries, and that ambition is baked into every plaza and boulevard — wide, shaded, oddly empty now compared to the crowds it was designed for. Walking down what used to be the main thoroughfare on a weekday afternoon, past pavilions that once represented entire nations and now house co-working spaces or sit half-used, felt like visiting a stage set after the play has closed but the set is somehow still standing, lit, and staffed.

Al Wasl Dome, still performing

The one piece of the original Expo that has genuinely kept its magic is Al Wasl Dome, a vast trellis structure at the heart of the site that functions as a 360-degree projection screen. At night it still runs light shows — sweeping animations and imagery projected across the entire dome, visible from a wide radius — and standing beneath it after dark, surrounded by a district that is otherwise fairly quiet, is a genuinely strange and beautiful experience. It is the Expo’s ghost, still putting on a nightly performance for whoever shows up.

Sustainability pavilions, second careers

The Sustainability Pavilion and Mobility Pavilion, two of the Expo’s showpiece structures, now anchor a district focused on green building and clean tech — a fitting second life, since they were designed from the start to demonstrate exactly that. Walking their repurposed halls, you can still see the Expo-era exhibits alongside newer signage for the startups and research groups now working out of the same buildings. It is one of the more sincere attempts I have seen anywhere to keep an Expo’s stated values alive after the cameras leave.

When to go: Year-round, but evenings are best for the Al Wasl Dome light shows. Winter months make walking the wide open plazas far more comfortable than the summer heat allows.