Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Dongtan shoehorns Shanghai's ecological development into a particular
place, at the same time that the transnational builders and engineers
refuse to take off their blinders, despite their rhetoric about Dongtan as a
“Chinese eco-city for Chinese people” or that Dongtan “was about the
birds.” It was neither, and worse. Instead, Dongtan was an engine for real
estate development and regional transformation, to create economic value
and enhance real estate speculation in the guise of environmental and wet-
lands protection. Transnational architecture and engineering fi rms cannot
take Chongming Island seriously from the point of view of local places. In
satisfying the demands of their clients, SIIC and Arup accept the basic cal-
culation of a top-down and technocratic view of environmental
development.
In other words, eco-Shanghai = Chongming Island = Dongtan eco-city.
h e more concentrated the ecological place, the less ecological responsibil-
ity the rest of Shanghai city must take for environmental standards more
broadly defi ned. Some critics argue that Shanghai lost its chance from the
perspective of environmental benefi ts during a decades-long building boom
when environmental standards (on energy e' ciency, for example) were,
fi rst, not built into construction codes, and then not enforced.
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One of the other major reasons Dongtan failed, and why I think most
eco-cities as currently conceptualized are doomed to fail, is precisely
because they don't take their own ecotopianism seriously. I am not a pessi-
mistic critic of utopias. I like them, and might even consider living in one.
But we need to study Dongtan with these questions asked by one scholar of
literary ecotopias: “What can I learn from this utopia? What insights and
practical wisdom can be gained from it? What striking contrasts are evoked
by this utopia, to stimulate our imagination and possibly enable us to more
clearly refl ect on political issues? To what extent does it provide a useful and
challenging way of solving existing problems? Is this utopia a source of orig-
inal ideas, and does it indicate relevant ways for solving our modern social
