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Dongtan. At the same time, the larger issues are much broader than the
“taste” or theme park critique. Rather, what is being worked out through
these projects is the ideological formation and construction of middle-class
Chinese consumers within the new suburban vision. h is vision and policy
work synergistically to create new ecological subjects within a broader
national, environmental, and social context, although whether economic
land-use development and environmental “harmony” can coexist remains
an unsettled and unsettling question.
Suburbanization and urbanization, in other words, are tightly interwo-
ven in Shanghai. Suburban developments in Shanghai are part and parcel
with “skyscraper” Shanghai, and representations of nature are one way in
which to understand this relationship. To understand suburbanization in
isolation from the global ambitions of the central city would be to misunder-
stand both suburb and central city. h e relationship and reconciliation
between suburb and city is managed through ecological desire, broadly
defi ned, and set against a “national” and “global” stage. Understanding the
how and why of Shanghai's One City, Nine Towns plan helps to set the stage
for the 2010 World Expo, which I examine in the next chapter. Ideologies of
nature and suburbanization are an important part of the moral discourse of
the city's urban development agenda and practice.
shanghai satellite city
development in historical context
h e One City, Nine Towns project fi ts within the broader urban and histori-
cal context in Shanghai. Shanghai has a long and complicated relationship
with satellite city development. In 1929, the Shanghai municipality created
a new downtown Jiangwan area, and shortly afterward issued the “Con-
struction Plan of a Big Shanghai.” In 1945, the Shanghai government issued
a plan to construct eleven satellite cities to relieve the population pressure of
the central city, although they were never built. Satellite city planning
