Public Presentation

The Canada Pavilion offers visitors a feeling of life in a vibrant, diverse, and green Canadian city. Each individual experience is unique. Every journey through the Living City is personalised by visitors’ imagination and creativity, much the way urban lives are shaped by each individual’s decisions and contributions to the city.

The animation and interactive elements of the public presentation are complemented by music and a rich soundscape throughout.

Founding Memories pays tribute to the special relationship the Chinese people have to writing, while at the same time expressing the principles that guide Canadian urban development. The walls of words are fundamental and solid, like the steel on which they are carved. They also reflect an evolving dialogue in urban lives.

Neighbourhoods are the Urban Heart of the city where community identity is formed. Cities are living, changing hubs, celebrated through movement, colour and vitality. This panorama of images from Canadian neighbourhoods reflects our multicultural heritage and the diversity that gives Canada its pulse and its hum. It is a towering multi-faceted portrait of the cities that inspire the country’s energy.

Aqua Magika pays tribute to Canada’s imaginative youth, with the use of water as the life-force of a sustainable city. The interplay of water and light reminds us that our cities depend on nature and make room for the green spaces that nurture us. As visitors dip their hands in the basin, animated images appear as if children dreamed the city; their laughter punctuates the dream-like music, in harmony with the pitch and beat of the Urban Heart.

The depth of Canadian creativity and the energy of cities are demonstrated through Velocity – a bike ride through the best Canadian urban practices. Visitors pedaling the whimsically-designed, interactive bicycles control their journeys through the animated cityscape.

As they speed up and slow down, so do colours and sounds of the images in front of them. For the inclusion of all visitors, hand-powered bicycles are also available. And over it all, a stylised, sculptural tree unites the interactive elements of the public presentation; a common link between city and nature.

As a thoughtful finale to the journey through the Living City, visitors are immersed in a unique cinematic experience created by Canadian film-maker, Jean-François Pouliot and the National Film Board of Canada on a 150-degree screen. Glimpses: A Human View of the Living City pays visual homage to an ordinary day in the life in a Canadian city. A panorama of images takes visitors on an incredible journey across four seasons. These Canadian moments were captured by Serge Clément and Claude-Simon Langlois, who travelled the country with a small crew in order to capture close to 57,000 unstaged images of people and places, shot over several hours and sometimes even days. The film evokes a personal story, unique to each viewer.