China's Eco-Cities as Variegated1 Urban Sustainability: Dongtan Eco-City and Chongming Eco-Island

Proliferating environmental sustainability policy frameworks suggest that sustainability and economic competitiveness are essentially interdependent and mutually enhancing. Under these policy discourses, cities are designated as strategic geographical locales for fulfilling the green capitalist goal of reconciling the contradictions between the environment and development that have long bedeviled capitalism. While most urban sustainability agendas are crafted based on the experience of post-industrial countries, the promise of green capitalism and sustainability faces different challenges where industrial production still dominates the economy. However, research on whether and how urban sustainability policies are geographically variegated is still sparse, particularly beyond western (post)industrial capitalism. Examining the Dongtan eco-city project and the associated Chongming eco-island project in Shanghai, we interrogate how sustainability is imagined and practiced on the ground within the distinctive Chinese context. The meanings of sustainability in Dongtan and Chongming reflect the context of Chinese urbanization in the Shanghai area. Both Dongtan and Chongming seek to develop green technologies as a way to resolve the dilemma of being caught between urbanization and agriculture. This approach is also shaped by Chongming's island geography as enabling a self-sufficient development trajectory, and its desire to attract a cosmopolitan population. Through these place-specific contexts, the ecology and economy of Dongtan and Chongming become intertwined, producing and reproducing a variegated form of urban sustainability, and of “green capitalism.”     

国外生态城市建设实践及其对中国的启示

本文从国外若干个生态城市建设案例出发，总结出国外生态城市建设的几条成功经验；指出生态城市是现代城市规划发展的必然趋势，也是中国城市可持续发展的趋势和方向，但国外的实践经验不能一味照抄照搬，应该结合中国的国情和城市发展现状循序渐进地进行。最后作者结合中国生态城市建设中存在的问题，总结了国外生态城市建设经验对中国生态城市发展的五点启示。