China's Emerging Eco-Cities

China’s national agenda has set a goal of sixty percent urbanization by 2030,which means that each year about 16 millions of the country’s rural residents– equivalent to the total population of the Netherlands – are moving into citiesof different sizes. This trend has continued for more than a decade in this“largest mass migration ever seen in human history” (David Harvey). Amid thisdramatic demographic shift and the resulting construction boom are ambitiousplans throughout China to create new towns to house swelling population andto sustain economic growth. These projects are often conceived as exemplarypiece of urbanism, showcasing the latest design and environmental technologiesin town building. A series of prototype eco-new towns have been proposedand designed in this wave of mass urbanization, prominently among themDongtan Eco-city in Shanghai, Binhai Eco-city in Tianjin, Caofeidian Eco-cityin Tangshan, and Guiyang Eco-city.These ambitious eco-city projects represent a new chapter in China’s continuingattempt to pursue organized urbanization as a strategy to addresscomplex economic and environmental issues. China has in many ways becomethe world’s laboratory for new technologies and designs where globaltalents seek to realize their futuristic visions, and thus initiated many recenteco-city experiments with significant involvement by big-name internationalfirms and organizations. A number of large-scale eco-city projects wereplanned and promoted, and several were carried out, with mixed outcomes,while some never got off the drawing board. Looking into these successes orbankruptcies will provide invaluable insight into the design, environmental,and socioeconomic aspects in the development of sustainable city.This paper will examine the planning and development of these eco-newtowns through the lens of urbanism and utopianism. These ambitious projectshave national influence, and represent consistent effort in pursuing comprehensiveenvironment to promote cities in the global economy. At the centerof my investigation is the relationship between place making and socialdevelopment. It raises a number of important questions about these urbanvisions. Has this growing awareness of sustainability become a driving forcefor innovative design of ecological cities, or does it remain political rhetoricfor the marketing of an entrepreneurial governance? How does the increasingstratification of social structure, as a result of the market economy and changingdemographic pattern, make an imprint on new urban forms and socialspaces? In what aspects are these Chinese urban experiments different fromtheir Western and Middle-eastern counterparts? Studying the emerging newtown movement from both design and environmental perspectives, this papertries to present a general picture of ongoing urbanization in China throughthis eco-city phenomenon. This study will contribute to the understandingof new patterns of urban growth in our globalized era, and shed a new lighton the pressing issues of sheltering the world’s growing urban population andstrategies of dealing with the current environmental crises.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1