Changing Chongming - Fantasy Islands - page 43

h e features that made Chongming Island historically “backward”—its
natural and rural character, open space, underdevelopment, and lack of
industry—are now considered the island's main economic virtues. h e ecol-
ogy and beauty of the island is—now—the source of its natural capital. h e
concept of natural capital, taken from Hawkens, Lovins, and Lovins's infl u-
ential manifesto, 24 undergirds Arup's Dongtan plan. h e idea is that under
industrial capitalism, nature is perceived as abundant but without value.
However, new contexts of scarcity of natural resources transform this his-
torical, economic, and cultural view of nature. h us, companies and gov-
ernments that can recognize this paradigm of valuing natural capital are
positioned to profi t in the contemporary political climate.
Ecological economics is widely used in the theory of the development of
the eco-city. It conceptualizes how physical nature is transformed: fi rst
from nature to ecological functions, and then to production and consump-
tion/leisure functions. h is transformation takes place through the advance-
ment of techniques of measurement and quantifi cation, which becomes part
of an ideological construct that assigns an equivalent economic value to
nature. 25 h is process is central to the development of techniques that mea-
sure the ecological function of an ecosystem. 26 In the context of the eco-city,
the relevant ecological functions are those that maximize energy e' ciency
and minimize pollution of water, air, and land. h e measurement of ecologi-
cal functions in terms of economic infl ows, outfl ows, price, demand, supply,
and market and nonmarket natural resources illustrates how the ecology of
eco-cities is designed and promoted as economic function rather than as a
complex intermingling of the social with the natural, what political ecolo-
gists and radical geographers term “socio-nature.” 27
h e large-scale promotion of the eco-city as the technological solution
to urban and international environmental problems is the center of much
attention in global environmental discourse. A recently published World
Bank report titled “Eco 2 Cities” promotes the integration of what it calls a