Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
possible to propose a city of a half million people and promise no ecological
harm?
h e answer (yes, in case you had any doubt) is evident in the focus on the
experiences and benefi ts to the imaginary residents of, and visitors to,
Dongtan and to the “environment” itself, specifi cally the birds. h ese ben-
efi ts constitute the central transnational and corporate desires in the Dong-
tan project, to imagine a massive development that not only does no ecologi-
cal harm, but actually produces environmental benefi ts. h ese hopes
undergird the central desires underlying Dongtan: that a built environment
can be at the cutting edge of technology, sustainability, and modernity
through a profi table lifestyle transformation. In Dongtan, nature is improved
through technology. In some ways, this transformation echoes Levi Strauss's
arguments about cooked and raw images, and specifi cally Marxist analyses
of how nature images are deployed as ideologies in advertisements.
29
In other
words, the nature of Dongtan wetlands is “cooked” to create a new symbolic
order of Dongtan eco-city that improves on the
nature of nature
in Dongtan.
Additionally, Wood added that Dongtan was intended to “provide
employment” for local impoverished fi sherman and that Dongtan was
planned to be a mixed-income city rather than a wealthy suburb of Shang-
hai.
30
But when I asked him whether there would be any specifi c provision
for a mixed-income population, he admitted that was not to be. In the topic,
images of birds form the backdrop to these stated questions: “Do we want
Dongtan to be a city with a large number of high-rise buildings? Should we
simply follow the usual steps of urban-industrial development? Ought
Dongtan's economy be allowed to develop at the cost of its environment?
Should we forge ahead in an unsustainable way?”
31
Rather than replicating
Pudong's skyscrapers, Arup argued for building Dongtan on fundamentally
diff erent premises.
32
Shanghai Dongtan: An Eco-City
combines a number of diff erent genres—
part policy manifesto, part coff ee table photo topic, travel brochure, and,
