Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Despite these setbacks, in 2008 Arup announced that a scaled-down
version of Dongtan was moving forward and that the international bank
HSBC and Sustainable Development Capital Limited would be working on the
fi nancing of the real estate development with a new business model. Seeking
to emulate the development of Harvard University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, a memorandum of understanding
announced that a new research facility would ground the development of
Dongtan eco-city: the Dongtan Institute for Sustainability.
h e story of how Dongtan is represented as the ultimate promise to a
whole host of environmental problems is itself instructive. Dongtan was
always set up to fail, whether or not it was ever able to accomplish its original
technical goals, in part because it was always meant to represent more.
Dongtan was set up as an alternative, ecologically friendly narrative for the
“Chinese City,” and its failure from the perspective of the Western architects
and engineers is that it got caught in politics that they could not control or
understand. Although this explanation might technically be true, this nar-
rative absolves the transnational architects and engineers of any agency or
responsibility. h is failure narrative posits their contribution as politically
clean and technologically advanced, and has Dongtan derailed by complex
national and regional politics. It puts their contribution on the technical side
and cleaves off politics to the murky corrupt world of the Chinese, rather
than acknowledging how technology, engineering, and politics were inti-
mately woven together in Dongtan, in other Shanghai sites, and throughout
China.
shanghai, som, and sustainability
from above
But we do know that Chongming Island's eco-development continues,
despite Dongtan's failure, and ecological development (whatever that
means) in Shanghai remains both powerful ideology and material practice.
