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- Paul French, China Editor, 3 February 2009
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Features:
China’s eco-towns: Green communities – To go eco, think small
Supporters of eco-towns should learn the lesson from the many experiments in China: smaller scale changes are often more effective
But so far the concept of the eco-town – designed to minimise a community’s impact on the environment – has proved rather illusive. And in some instances, planners and developers have been, to use the late UK politician Alan Clark’s famous phrase, somewhat “economical with the actualité”.
China has been the focus of much of the eco-town buzz in recent years. Beijing has pronounced that it likes the idea of eco-towns; several have been planned, widely announced and promoted; and a couple of projects have actually got off the drawing board, although more have stumbled than stood up and walked.
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Comments:
You forgot one important site - Thomas Hahn, 7 Feb 2009
The most promising and most advanced eco-city (planning-wise) in China isn't Dongtan or any of the other places mentioned, but the Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city. Ground was broken there by Wen Jiabao personally in September 2008, and the project is as ambitious as it is ably managed. It is also, significantly, programmatically embedded in the Binhai Special Economic Area, an important new economic development zone with implications for a huge region in northern China. For more information see http://hahn.zenfolio.com/p732824044 .
Thomas H. Hahn
Cornell University
Dept. of City & Regional Planning
Pride cometh before the fall - Shannon May, 9 Feb 2009
Paul, I completely agree with your argument that the projects that will do the most to green our cities are not the spectacular model eco-cities and eco-towns, which are often more performative than productive, serving more as tourist sites than places of sustainable living, but the projects that take small but scalable steps to change energy use and patterns of pollution.
Notably, Rizhao's changes began from changing the building codes: new buildings could not be approved without integrating solar water heaters. Rob Watson at Eco-tech has been leading the charge to change building codes in China since 1997.
Shannon May
www.shannonmay.com
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