Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
environmental crisis as fundamentally about engineering, technology, and
architecture. h is worldview imagines profi t-making as a necessary by-
product of these innovations. h ese desires are enshrined in national gov-
ernment policy and practice, as well as by transnational architecture and
engineering fi rms of which Arup is typical, not exceptional. In other words,
although the project failed, there are still many lessons that can be learned
from it, even if those lessons are not the ecological ones that the proponents
sought to teach the world.
h ese transnational eco-desires are captured by procorporate, heavily
technologically mediated eco-city fantasies articulated by global planning,
engineering, and architecture fi rms, which have an especially strong pres-
ence in China. In this chapter, I look closely at two fi rms that have a particu-
larly strong hand in Dongtan, and on Chongming Island and Shanghai more
broadly: Arup (the Dongtan planner) and U.S.-based Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill (SOM, in charge of Chongming Island's master plan). h ese fi rms'
vision is arguably easier to dissect than that of their investors.
4
h eir world-
view is clear in their public materials, including the press releases their pub-
lic relations staff writes, interviews that the planners, engineers, and project
managers give, and the topics they publish. h ese actors have a dispropor-
tionately strong impact on shaping the transnational environmental dis-
course in the global imaginary, visions that have real-world impacts on local
landscapes and communities. h e same group of fi rms that develop eco-
cities also build world expo pavilions and Olympic parks. One reason eco-
cities resemble one another is that they share not only ideologies but also
builders.
Eco-desire also works on another level for international architectural
and engineering fi rms, in their investment, both capital and psychological,
in eco-authoritarianism. As one Arup staff member writes in a topic docu-
menting the fi rm's infl uence on contemporary Beijing, “China today repre-
sents a test-bed for progressive design. It off ers a
new freedom
to build in a
