Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
transnational firms and the marketing of
sustainability: eco-city 2.0
h e story of Dongtan, and of its particular iteration of the “eco-city,” is in
part a tale about the increasing entanglement of transnational architecture
and engineering fi rms with sustainable urban development and planning.
On Chongming Island alone, Arup's Dongtan plan was just one of more than
sixty development plans proposed between 2000 and 2005.
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h e complete
list is a veritable Who's Who of big global fi rms and big plans, almost all of
which engage the ideas and language of sustainability as their central
grammar.
h eir collective version of eco-cities is grounded in real-estate develop-
ment and branding, not in the traditional U.S. roots of ecological cities or in
ecotopian discourse. h e eco-city is linked to ecotopia, fi rst depicted in
Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel. h e eco-city and ecotopian ideas were devel-
oped at roughly the same time in the wake of the environmental movement
in the United States coming out of the 1960s counterculture. h e journalist
Jeremy Smith refl ected on Callenbach's
Ecotopia,
which he calls a “hippie-
dippie relic.”
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In the novel, Callenbach's narrator is a journalist who in
1999 travels to Ecotopia (roughly, Northern California, Oregon, and Wash-
ington), which had seceded nineteen years earlier from an ecologically dec-
adent United States. He gets to Ecotopia via high-tech magnetic propulsion
train. A matriarchy now runs the government and male bonding rituals
thrive. h e narrator goes native, convinced that the secessionists were right,
seduced by their open mating practices and a love aff air with an Ecotopian
woman. Smith notes that much of what seemed improbable in Callenbach's
time (e.g., recycling) is now standard practice.
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One scholar of literary eco-
topias suggests, “Utopians remind us that purposeful choices can be made
and that there is a prospect of a better or cleaner future. . . . [U]topias keep
ideals alive and can off er hope through futuristic visions.”
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Others argue
