Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
even economic inequality” (emphasis added).
5
Arup would come up with
the “rules and standards” to “deliver a city.”
6
But the tide soon turned. h e
early wave of positive coverage, which focused on its boldness and vision,
was followed by critical articles that labeled Dongtan an “eco-Potemkin.”
h e Economist
reported in 2009 that its demise was a direct result of political
corruption by the plan's proponents.
7
To better understand the visions and desires that undergirded Dongtan
and the conditions that led to its ultimate failure (the subject of the next
chapter), we need to look at a whole suite of factors that shaped it. h ese
include why and how eco-fantasies take the form of eco-cities, and the
question of whether an eco-city can be an “ecosystem engineered.” But one
major factor, which got almost no attention in the media coverage of Dong-
tan, was the basic geographical fact of where it was located. Chongming
Island has gotten short shrift in the breathless evocations of a dawning of the
ecological New Age that Dongtan represented.
h is chapter corrects this omission by asking, How did Chongming
Island, long considered a rural backwater to Shanghai, become the tempo-
rary locus of the world's cutting-edge fantasies about technology and sus-
tainability? What does it all mean to local residents? h ese questions matter,
even though the Dongtan project failed. In fact, these questions are inti-
mately connected to the story of Dongtan, although few analysts of eco-
cities or journalists writing about the topic think about Chongming at any
length. Although Dongtan may never be built as initially imagined, ecologi-
cal development and planning on the Chongming Island continues unabated,
as it does elsewhere in China and in other ambitious eco-city proposals. h e
discourses that saturate Chongming and eco-island development set the
ideological contexts for the eco-city. Both eco-cities and eco-islands imag-
ine a pure and unpolluted ecological space that functions as the clean
counterpart to the polluting city—in this case, Shanghai. Discursively, the
idea of “ecological places” is an old one that depends on spaces of purity and
