Author accepted manuscript

Citation:

Caprotti, F. (2014) Critical research on eco-cities? A walk through the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, China. Cities 36, 10-17.

Critical research on eco-cities? A walk through the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, China

Abstract

This article uses the narrative tool of a walk through Tianjin Eco-City, China, as an entry point in raising and discussing key questions in contemporary eco-city research. Eco-city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent in policy and political-economic discourses in a variety of locations as new urban spaces where blueprints for low carbon economies can be trialled. In light of this, the article highlights the key necessity of, firstly, considering scale when analysing eco-city ‘futures’. Secondly, the article argues for the need to interrogate eco-cities’ definitions, as well as evaluation, performance and monitoring frameworks, as this will aid in critical analyses of the marketing, presentation and actually built urban environments in eco-city projects. Thirdly, the question of internal social resilience and the emergence of communities within newly-built eco-cities needs to be assessed: this is of crucial importance in light of the exclusive, gated nature of several flagship eco-city projects under construction at the time of writing. Lastly, the article argues that research on eco-city projects needs to consider not only the high-tech, new urban environments materialized as eco-cities, but also the production and reproduction of large, often transient populations of low-paid workers who build eco-cities and who form what the article calls the ‘new urban poor’, forming ‘workers’ cities’ on the edges of flagship ‘sustainable’ urban projects worldwide.

Keywords: eco-city; sustainable city; green urbanism; resilience

Critical research on eco-cities? Scale, definition, internal social resilience and the urban poor.

Introduction: eco-city as entrepreneurial experimental city

My journey into Tianjin Eco-City begins from central Tianjin on a wintry day when temperatures are so low, I do not want to leave the vehicle we’re travelling in. Downtown Tianjin is bustling as ever, but the winter feel is heightened by the white clouds of smog and haze, which reduce visibility to less than a mile this morning. The sun is a pallid puddle hidden somewhere above, and shimmers in unnatural orange-brown colours on this morning. In this context, I wonder about the construction of a new city branded as ‘eco’ in an area that contains one of the highest concentrations of factories in China. I have plenty of time to ponder these questions as we drive for over an hour on six-lane highways heading east towards the port city of Binhai: for Tianjin Eco-City is not in Tianjin proper, but near the centre of the Tianjin Binhai New Area (TBNA), a special economic zone and one of the centres of economic and technological development in the Bohai Economic Rim.

Flagship eco-city projects are being built across the globe. At the time of writing, several are already in advanced stages of construction. These include Masdar in Abu Dhabi (Cugurullo, 2013), Tianjin Eco-City in China, and Songdo eco-city in South Korea (Kim, 2010; Shwayri, 2013). Recent surveys have highlighted the increasing proliferation of eco-city projects globally, to the extent that over 170 eco-city initiatives at various stages of planning, design, construction and implementation were identified by 2011 (Joss, Tomozeiu and Cowley, 2011; see also Joss, 2010). In China, over 100 eco-city projects are now underway at a variety of scales (Wu, 2012).

The eco-city concept is currently being deployed largely as a focus for sustainability policy in an age concerned with climate change and other systemic risks such as Peak Oil and energy security: the rise of ‘eco-city initiatives is testament to…renewed attempts to experiment in designing urban futures’ (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2012, p.6). Thus, eco-cities are increasingly prominent in policy discourses worldwide, and have also become an important focus of research agendas, in various disciplines from urban studies and planning to urban geography. Eco-urbanism at a variety of scales – from ‘green walls’ (Gandy, 2010), to sustainable housing (Golubchikov and Badyina, 2012), to macro-scale eco-urban planning at the scale of cities projected to house hundreds of thousands of residents – has taken on a salient position in political discourses focused not only on the environment, but on economic and technological transitions:

‘In spring 2009, President Sarkozy of France announced that Paris would become the first ‘post-Kyoto eco-city’ as part of his ambitious plan to transform the French capital into an expanded, regenerated greater metropolis… Later that year, the British government published its decision to build four new ‘eco-towns’ across England… In the meantime, on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi the construction of Masdar City, the self-proclaimed ‘world’s first carbon-neutral

zero-waste’ city is underway, while China is reported to have embarked on an ambitious programme to build…new eco-cities’ (Joss, 2010, pp. 240-1).

The increasing, global proliferation of eco-cities can be placed in a variety of theoretical and interpretive contexts. On the one hand, eco-cities can be seen as a continuation of planning, architectural and design trends which have sought to reconcile nature and the city from the 19th century onwards, from Howard’s Garden City movement, to New Towns, to the ‘techno-cities’ of the twentieth century (Kargon and Molella, 2008), to the more dystopian ‘emerald enclaves’ conceptualized as green and sustainable islands in a broader global scenario characterized by environmental degradation and contamination (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Pow and Neo, 2010). It can also be argued that while eco-cities represent just one further step in the iteration of the nature-city relationship, nonetheless they also contain elements that are novel. In conceptual terms the eco-city’s identity can be seen as different from that of, say, Garden Cities in that the eco-city concept represents a complex range of factors which have coalesced around the eco-city as an emergent product of concerns around global environmental politics and governance arising from the 1980s and 1990s (Joss, 2010; Roseland, 1997).

In the context of these broader concerns, eco-cities have been conceptualized as materializations of trends towards developing and implementing urban socio-technical and environmental-economic experiments (Bulkeley et al., 2011; Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2012; Castán Broto and Bulkeley, 2013). In turn, these experiments can be seen as part of transitions-focused theories and management approaches which aim at economic and societal transition towards low-carbon economies and cities (Bulkeley, 2013). Although there has been some interest towards ‘alternative’ approaches to eco-urban development and low-carbon transitions (Pickerill, 2013), much of the recent focus on eco-cities and transitions has largely drawn on ecological modernization and on the role of specific techno-environmental ‘solutions’ to notions of urban, climate, and energy crisis. This is especially true with regards to the policy and planning spheres: as Joss and Molella (2013) have shown with regards to Caofeidian Eco-City, a new-build urban project near Tangshan in Hebei Province, China, ecologically modernizing strategies at a variety of scales have focused on the eco-city as a techno-social response to environmental and economic concerns in China’s modernization trajectory.

Furthermore, while eco-city projects can be seen as ecologically modernizing, they also need to be considered in the context of attempts to fashion urban techno-economic ‘fixes’ to the problems of environmental despoliation, energy insecurities and concerns over adaptation to climate change (Hodson and Marvin, 2010). Eco-cities are an example of new urban visions which see the joint involvement of entrepreneurial states and capital in the engineering and envisioning of urban environments:

‘Entrepreneurial governments from East and Southeast Asia to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are often initiators of mega-urban projects, drawing sovereign wealth funds for the makeover of old cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, or building totally new citadels in a desert landscape, as in Dubai’ (Ong, 2011, p. 10).

Seen through this lens, the eco-city is an entrepreneurial city, dependent on the ‘active remaking of urban environments and ecologies’ (While et al., 2004, p. 550) and based on the integration of states and financial markets in the financing of new urban and infrastructure projects (Harvey, 2012). The hybridization of concerns over both environmental and economic sustainability in the eco-city is a reflection of the economic-environmental nature of the risks and problems which eco-cities are designed to solve. Thus, while adaptation to climate change may be one of the driving logics behind the engineering of new eco-cities, economic transition policies and reforms enacted within and around these new urban projects are clearly concerned with economic sustainability: ‘we see a confluence of urban entrepreneurialism and eco-city building as they are both seen as pathways towards urban sustainability, with the former emphasizing the economic aspects of sustainability and the latter focusing on the environmental aspects’ (Pow and Neo, 2013, p. 4). This can clearly be seen in new-build eco-cities globally, as will be shown below in the case of Tianjin Eco-City. Building on this, it can also be argued that, when seen as an entrepreneurial city, the eco-city is also intimately linked to a conceptualization of new urban space as experimental space. Exemplifying this trend, a 2005 report on future cities by global professional services firm PwC argued that the ‘entrepreneurial prototyping’ (PwC, 2005, p. 17) of cities should act as a crucial initiator of wider societal change. This emphasis clearly connects the concept of urban entrepreneurialism with that of experimentation for transition. Thus, eco-cities can be viewed both as experiments for testing new technologies, and as places where ‘sustainable’ economic and environmental strategies and reforms can be rolled out.

This article takes the form of an urban walk through Tianjin Eco-City, a project which was started in 2007 and which is currently under construction. At a macro scale, a walk through the eco-city enabled a close look at the reality behind the marketing, blueprints and master plans which present projects such as Tianjin Eco-City as entrepreneurial, technological ‘fixes’ to environmental crisis. The urban walk can, in this context, be conceptualized as an excavation of these flagship urban projects, chipping away at the ecologically modernizing veneer through which eco-cities are painted as green, happy, harmonious, prosperous and environmentally amenable places. This builds on a broader tradition within urban scholarship of critical analysis of utopian and ‘top-down’ urban planning (Pinder, 2005), and on a more recent focus on interrogating East Asian forms of spectacular urbanism (Huang, 2004; Ren, 2011). At the same time, the walk also allowed for an initial enquiry into the potentially alternative and dystopian spaces and ways of shaping the material city which the elite planners of eco-cities, working within planning contexts often far from open and transparent, may not have envisaged (Davis, 1998; Harvey, 2000, 2003). These spaces are not only

those of (now) empty apartments and streets: they are also the more fluid spaces ‘on the edge’ of eco-cities, such as the temporary cities of urban construction workers. Furthermore, an urban walk through Tianjin Eco-City as it rises from reclaimed marshland works well as an entry point into analysing the trends of rapid urbanization and environmental change which eco-city projects are meant to mitigate and adapt to. In this sense, Tianjin Eco-City can be situated within the context of an ‘explosive character of growth’ (Logan and Fainstein, 2008, p. 18) which has seen the economy, nature, and the city intertwine in ever more fluid and changing iterations since the opening up of China’s economy to the forces of globalization and international capital flows.

Figure 1 about here

Spending time visiting urban visions of the future such as Tianjin Eco-City highlighted queries which are central to urban geography, to studies of the nature-city link, and to analyses of the wider trend towards engineering new-build eco-city projects as experimental urban zones. Some of these concerns are mirrored in the literature on green urbanism and on the confluence of interest in enacting sustainable urbanism and sustainable urban and regional development (Gibbs and Krueger, 2007). However, there are other questions that seem to be more silent in recent research on eco-urbanism. In this article, I use the narrative tool of a visit to Tianjin Eco-City to suggest that eco-cities need to be the focus of sustained critical engagement which not only takes into account current concerns about eco-urbanism, but also focuses more clearly on the questions of:

a.) Scale, in that eco-city projects need to be considered in light of wider economic, political and ideological contexts which help to make sense of these new-build projects over and beyond a limited focus on eco-cities as ‘premium ecological enclaves’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2010);

b.) Definition, in terms of moving beyond the marketing and commodification of eco-city projects and towards a critical interrogation of what ‘eco’ means in the case of new eco-urban projects, and also in terms of analysing these projects according to transparent and replicable evaluation, performance, monitoring and auditing standards;

c.) Internal social resilience, recognizing the need to consider eco-cities not only as empty containers into which a new, ecologically sensitive urban ‘society’ can be inserted, but as potentially problematic spaces in that the social and political are often elided from, or glossed over in techno-rational plans for these new cities;

d.) The fringes of the eco-city, excavating the production and reproduction of a (sometimes new) class of urban poor as part and parcel of the same processes which produce the eco-cities currently held up by a range of actors as shining examples of green urbanism.

Scale

Coming from the UK, I am as always unprepared for the impact I feel when stepping into a newly-minted eco-city. I’m used to my local ‘transition town’, Totnes, with its ‘alternative’ businesses and green focus and, with a

population of around 23,000, a distinctly small-town feel. However, when we arrive in Tianjin Eco-City I am taken back to my high school days, when I indulged in large-scale (and mostly ill-fated) terraforming and urban planning projects using the SimCity game platform. Tianjin Eco-City feels (and is) vast, when compared to the green urban neighbourhoods and eco-towns I am acquainted with in the UK and Europe. It quickly transpires that Tianjin Eco-City is built on a structure of large urban residential blocks separated by wide, multi-lane highways flanked by pedestrian pavements and protected cycle lanes. The eco-buildings are significant in size, being mostly over 25 stories in height. The overall effect is of having arrived in a large but as yet empty city, and as we drive mile after mile past completed but not yet occupied residential blocks, I am struck by the thought that it would be difficult, in Europe, to find oneself in an empty city aiming to house more than 300,000 residents upon completion. The sheer scale of the place immediately brings to mind those smaller eco-town and eco-neighbourhoods I am more accustomed to: can a useful comparison exist between these two types of development which are so radically different in scale?

Figure 2 about here

Critically interrogating eco-city projects (and sustainable urbanism in general) without giving due consideration to questions around scale renders analysis of the application of ideas of ‘sustainability’, ‘green development’, ‘transitions’ and the like difficult due to the multiplication of studies across a range of scales and treating questions such as environmental governance, urban design and planning, and economic and social development at any level from a single street to macro-scale, metropolitan city planning. Indeed, in his survey of eco-cities, Joss (2009) identifies three categories through which eco-cities can be analytically approaches and segmented: type of development, the development phase, and the implementation focus. The first of these categories is inherently scalar, and Joss identifies three different scales of analysis: firstly, a city built from scratch; secondly, the expansion of an existing urban area; thirdly, retro-fitting existing urban structures and environments through sustainability-focused innovations and adaptation. It is key for work on eco-city projects to be explicitly aware of the scalar aspects of the projects under consideration, and of how the geographies of scale that are involved are in themselves interlinked with other scales, and with processes operating across scales.

A variety of excellent studies on the implementation of eco-city ideas at a variety of scales is already in existence: from the neighbourhood scale in eco-districts such as Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm, Sweden (Pandis Iverot and Brandt, 2011), to the Vallbona neighbourhood in Barcelona, Spain (Farreny et al., 2011), to studies of ‘eco-towns’ or country-level eco-town strategies, such as the 26 projects branded as eco-towns in Japan since 1997 (Van Berkel et al., 2009), to large-scale eco-city projects constructed from scratch for populations larger than eco-towns, such as Tianjin Eco-City (Baeumier et al.,

2009), Masdar, Abu Dhabi (Cugurullo, 2013), Caofeidian Eco-City, China (Joss and Molella, 2013), Treasure Island and Sonoma Mountain Village, in the USA (Joss, 2011), and the stalled eco-city of Dongtan, on Chongming Island, near Shanghai (Pow and Neo, 2010).

Therefore, it is key to analyse the scale at which eco-city projects are being fashioned in order to be able to adequately examine their functioning and planning and place them into a useful context. In their neighbourhood-level study of Vallbona, Barcelona, for example, Farreny et al. (2011, p. 1131) come to the conclusion that ‘the design of neighbourhoods in different locations will lead to different results: there is no unique path to achieving urban sustainability, or a uniform solution.’ Furthermore, they identified regulatory determinants and constraints that effectively link the local, neighbourhood scale to the wider metropolitan scale. Thus, the interaction of scales becomes key when considering eco-city projects, and at smaller scales it is analytically undesirable to treat local-scale case studies of green urbanism as stand-alone cases which can only be considered singly, abstracted from the chain of interaction and networks with regulations, politics, scientific and planning knowledge, and other inter-scalar processes.

When considering scale, however, the question of temporal scale also comes into its own. Thus, while it may be conceptually simple to separate an eco-neighbourhood from an eco-city mega-project, the question of cities’ organic temporal development muddies the waters. When viewed over a timespan of 30 or 50 years or more, construction of an eco-neighbourhood could eventually be seen as the niche, embryonic moment of rupture in a wider local urban transition towards an existing city becoming seen as an eco-city, if other neighbourhoods eventually follow the transition initiated by a single small-scale project. These questions may seem like they belong to the realm of futurology: after all, forecasting urban development over a decade is immensely complex at any scale larger than a local neighbourhood, let alone forecasting wholesale urban development over the course of half a century. However, I would argue that this is a critically important question, and one which opens up the potential for imaginations and visions of future urban development (whether green, social, architectural, or otherwise) to be debated, contested and enacted (Harvey, 2012).

In addition, it is crucial to ask the scalar question of how eco-cities integrate within their broader regional contexts, and to what extent their aims and marketing are amplified, modified, or diluted (or erased) when projects such as Tianjion Eco-City are considered within these larger scales. As Hodson and Marvin (2010) have argued, in a very real sense new-build eco-city projects risk taking on the characteristics of environmentally amenable urban zones for their residents only. Tianjin Eco-City is located in the Bohai Rim region, one of China’s foremost industrial areas. Its total population, of over 240 million, is contained in several cities including two of the country’s largest urban agglomerations (Beijing and Tianjin): the area has been called the Bohai Rim Megalopolis. The Bohai Rim contains several key special

economic zones, such as the Binhai New Area, and is of key economic importance: in 2010 it was responsible for 25.3% of China’s GDP (Tianjin Planning Bureau, 2011). Accordingly, the Bohai Rim also suffers from significant environmental externalities, in no small part due to the presence of a large concentration of heavy industries throughout the region. Cities such as Tianjin face both environmental and population pressures: between 2000 and 2005, for example, the city saw an in-migration rate of 9% (Shen, 2013). Thus, when considering questions of scale, it is important to consider the extent to which eco-cities as entrepreneurial ‘ecological enclaves’ are not simply becoming ‘pearls in the sea of degrading urban environments’ (Wong, 2011, p. 131). In order to do so, however, situating the eco-city within its wider scalar context is analytically useful.

When walking through Tianjin Eco-City, the importance of questions of scale and comparative analysis was clear. Mega-projects such as Tianjin Eco-City can be seen as attempts to largely redesign the city according to models of ‘sustainable’ urban development which may vary in ideology and practice across different national contexts (Haughton, 1997), but which share the common characteristic of being largely based around the idea that a ‘blueprint for sustainability’ can be elaborated through expert scientific, social and planning knowledge(s), and that new eco-urban materialities and societies can be constructed at a macro scale as a result. These eco-cities can be described as mega-projects due to several of the characteristics which they tend to display, including their scale, strategic positioning within national environmental-economic transitions and ecological modernization strategies, and their roles as key mediators of urban and national imaginations (Jackson and Della Dora, 2011). These projects sometimes, but not always, appeal both to global city imaginations, and attempt to incorporate elements of the ‘local’ in the projection of visions of new cities (Huang, 2004; Johansson, 2012; Yeoh, 2005). In many other cases, such as in retro-fitted eco-neighbourhoods, the imbrication of different scales and processes of governance and design make for an apparently more ‘messy’ unit of analysis, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that a critical understanding of these multiple processes and their openness (or not) to questioning and contestation may be fruitful.

Definition

Walking around the empty eco-city, I am struck first and foremost by how different, indeed how ‘normal’, the city looks compared to the images I had constructed in my mind about what an eco-city should look like. In my mind’s eye, no doubt influenced in part by marketing videos and brochures I had perused, the eco-city was meant to look clean, airy and technologically advanced. I had expected to see serried ranks of wind turbines turning in the onshore breeze, solar panels glinting on the outskirts, and plenty of green space all around. What I find instead is a city which looks remarkably like any other contemporary Chinese residential development: tall residential apartment blocks, and a clear focus on the car as the means of getting from area to area and to the newly-constructed commercial ‘blocks’ housing empty

supermarkets and cinemas. I spot some solar panels on slanted roofs, but wonder how much energy these panels can really produce when they sit atop a thirty-storey building. In one residential block I see some micro-turbines, and outdoors lighting powered by small solar panels. On the other hand, I also see air conditioning units outside many apartments, and large air filters inside them. I do see some wind turbines, but very few in comparison to the size of the city – although I realize more may be built later. I also see a solar array, although the panels are all thoroughly coated in a layer of dust that, I’m sure, doesn't do much to ensure their efficiency. Some of the buildings have an eerie feel to them – I peer into one commercial building and see, amid the dust of new construction, a gleaming new yacht. Perhaps this is going to be a boat showroom for the nouveau riche who will move into the eco-city? I see very little grass – everything here has been uprooted and decontaminated, as this was formed salt marsh and industrial land. Turning a corner, I finally see two trees with bright red leaves on them – splashes of colour amid the grey of concrete and the haze which surrounds us. Happy to see some plant life, I walk up to the trees. The leaves are plastic, stuck carefully on to the branches with tape.

Figure 3 about here

Defining what is ‘eco’ about an ‘eco-city’ is a key question in any study focused on green urbanism and on tracking its impact and performance across a range of indicators. However, holding eco-city projects up to scrutiny according to existing standards is crucial for critical analysis and commentary of these projects. In part, this is due to the flagship nature of many of the current eco-city mega-projects under construction. For example, while China is widely recognized to be the state which is most heavily engaging in eco-city construction projects, it has been argued that:

‘In China, eco-cities are not sold by motivated citizens to their peers and governments as major contributions to sustainable production and consumption, but by local governments to future developers, high-tech corporations, and highly educated inhabitants as attractive green areas where they can generate extra GDP, produce new technologies, and live comfortably and safely’ (de Jong, Wang and Yu, 2013, p.110).

This points to a broader need to engage with the issue of defining ‘eco’. At the most basic level, this definitional emphasis can be based on performance indicators. Analysing eco-cities according to their stated and marketed performance targets in terms of sustainability, energy usage, and the like helps critical analysis in that it casts the spotlight on the actual environmental performance behind the often glitzy branding and marketing which accompany eco-city projects. Some large-scale eco-city projects, such as Masdar, were planned with specific sets of performance indicators integrated within the blueprint for these new urban areas. In the case of Tianjin Eco-City, the project is based on a set of 22 quantitative and four qualitative indicators, focused on the natural and built environment, urban lifestyle and the city’s economy. Environmental indicators include air and water quality targets, and many of the city’s lifestyle indicators are also environmental, such as the focus on the goal that at least 90% of journeys within the eco-city should be by public transport by 2020.

The importance of performance monitoring for eco-city projects can be seen by the fact that some of these projects are careful to establish monitoring and reporting frameworks, which communicate a degree of transparency not only to policymakers, but also to investors, potential residents, and other contemporary and future stakeholders. In the case of Masdar, for example Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) exist not only at the level of city planning, but also at the level of contracts for work and services which contribute to the construction of the city. Carbon tracking and carbon auditing are stated as key parts of the planning and construction process, and environmental auditing is carried out by external, third party firms (Masdar, 2012). In addition to this, reports produced about the eco-city’s environmental performance are checked by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), a global non-governmental organization which provides sustainability reporting frameworks which enable the measurement, reporting and comparison of sustainability performance across different firms, projects, and countries.

Nonetheless, two areas of concern exist with regards to the definition of ‘eco’ in eco-city projects. Firstly, where projects are less than transparent in their performance monitoring and evaluation, there is a potential corresponding rift between marketing and actual performance standards. In the case of Tianjin Eco-City, a key question is the extent to which air standards can be ensured when the project is being built in close proximity to densely industrialized areas of the Bohai Rim. At worst, this rift becomes glaring when projects are modified, or when they falter and fail. For example, Dongtan Eco-City, a 500,000 resident project announced in 2005 by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation in partnership with Arup, a global design and engineering consultancy, was halted by the end of the decade (Chang and Sheppard, 2013). An article by the Danish Architecture Centre underlined the risks involved in heavily marketing an eco-project which fails to come to fruition:

‘Dongtan consists today of 10 wind turbines - no buildings, water taxis, water cleansing plant or energy centres. Construction was to have started in 2006 but nothing has happened yet. The project's project coordinator in the Communist Party has been jailed, charged with corruption, and consultants Arup have since been criticised for participating in numerous dodgy sustainable construction projects. The Dongtan project seems to have lost its momentum, and because of the delay it has been given a mixed reception’ (Danish Architecture Centre, 2012).

Secondly, even where performance standards are transparent and attained, this does not necessarily make for urban environments which are socially sustainable (more on this below). Much of this is due to design, and to the lack of recognition of the complex web of socio-cultural and economic processes which link the lived environment of the city to its environmental characteristics. As Wong and Pennington (2013) have argued with regards to Tianjin Eco-City:

‘Wide tarmac roads designed for cars dwarf the narrow bike lanes and sidewalks running alongside them here. And while many of the city’s tall slimmer buildings are clustered together to increase walkability, these giant blocks are about four times the size of a typical block in

Manhattan and make pedestrian and bike journeys cumbersome...It is this lack of a human scale in the basic urban plan, which will be nearly impossible to change once the city is fully built, that has drawn the most criticism.’

Thus, appropriate evaluation, monitoring and auditing standards and frameworks are necessary for holding eco-city projects up to their own marketing and to wider, internationally recognized standards of design and sustainability. There is also a need to consider eco-cities in light of aspects of social sustainability, at a variety of levels from urban public spaces, to the social and socioeconomic composition of the eco-city itself.

Internal social resilience

Above all, after a few hours the feeling that sticks with me is of walking through an eerie post-apocalyptic landscape. I walk block after block of new buildings and construction sites, surprised when I hear the clanging of workers or see a spark from a welder on a high floor in the distance. Seeing, and being seen by people in this vast urban vastness is, unnervingly, a very animal encounter: I spot policemen and construction workers half a mile or more away in the residential areas or crossing empty highways, and all of us turn and freeze for a moment, and then carry on. It’s as if we’re all surprised to be locking glances in this empty city. The city’s designers want it to be a social place – perhaps. After all, there are plenty of playgrounds and open, landscaped areas within the residential blocks, although the blocks themselves are separated by wide avenues. Furthermore, the fact that every residential block is raised one level by the construction of ground-level, enclosed car parks for every residential development means that every block is, essentially, not only a gated community, but a walled community: the walls being the sides of the ground-level car parks. Every block can only be accessed through gates, where (sometimes empty) guard posts stand ready for security personnel to police entry. How does community grow in these residential areas? How does it change over time? And how is it connected to the provision of infrastructure? How do the already high property prices – set by the private development firms from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore which are building the ranks of apartment towers in this eco-city – affect who lives here and the resultant community and its cohesion?

Figure 4 about here

What will urban environments like Tianjin eco-city look and feel like in 5, 10, 20 years’ time? How will communities develop within the built infrastructure of high-rise apartment blocks, transport networks and cultural and commercial spaces? It is unlikely that Tianjin Eco-City will become yet another example of top-down urban dystopias such as Pruitt-Igoe. However, the proposed social character of the city as a ‘harmonious’ (read: stable, quiet and politically disengaged) environment is by no means a given. It is at this juncture that questions of social resilience become crucial. The concept of resilience generally refers to the ability of social systems and communities to withstand shocks and return to a state close to ‘normal’. However, most studies of social resilience concern already-existing communities, cities, and social contexts.

Focusing on new eco-cities such as Tianjin, which are (at the time of writing) empty infrastructural containers waiting for an influx of residents, what I would argue with regards to social resilience as applied to new eco-city projects is that resilience needs to be thought about in the context of the successful emergence of community (or communities) in the first place. Following the creation of communities in these new city spaces, then the question as to whether eco-city spaces are socially resilient in socioeconomic, economic-environmental and other terms can be researched. This leads to concerns not only over the future shape of new-build eco-city projects, but also over the mechanisms through which communities can be expected to form in these areas. The key question, therefore, is to investigate and engage with the facet of social resilience at the outset, as communities are forming.

However, it is also possible for communities not to form. As Davidson (2009) has argued in the context of the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on Dubai’s urban development, crisis conditions can coalesce quickly and literally freeze urban development, almost overnight. In their analysis of three urban projects in Shanghai (including Dongtan eco-city), Shen and Wu (2012) have noted how even high-profile developments which have been built in peripheral urban areas have struggled to attract residents. In this context, questions remain as to the long-range financial as well as social resilience and sustainability of eco-city projects. As the example of Dongtan, mentioned above, shows, eco-city projects are always inherently unstable, even when backed by leading political groups and multinational corporations. Furthermore, there is clearly a gap between the imagineering of eco-city living and the wider, scalar urban-industrial reality. This is exemplified by the contrast between the high-quality and high-rise residential developments which characterize eco-urban developments such as Tianjin eco-city, and the wider urban, environmental, political and socio-economic context of the Bohai Rim Megalopolis. To be sure, the imagineering of eco-cities like Tianjin Eco-City draws heavily on commoditized visions of pan-Asian executive urban living, with associated high levels of quality of life. This, however, entails a high level of risk for new eco-city projects, since resilience is built into a city in part through ensuring social diversity, understood as the existence and interaction of a wide range of stakeholders from different backgrounds in the urban arena and in the urban development process (Tidball and Krasny, 2009). These factors are glaringly absent from the Tianjin Eco-City project.

In the case of Tianjin Eco-City, it is abundantly clear that the question of constructing social resilience based on community formation is conceptualized at a high level: there seems to be little evidence of detail past paeans to building a ‘harmonious society’, as presented in planning and marketing materials. Within these materials, the idea of ‘harmonious’ appears synonymous with ‘wealthy’, a not unsurprising link in the local context. Furthermore, much of the emphasis is understandably placed on the physical and material facilities which are meant to be occupied and used, and which are meant to enable the new, urban ‘harmonious society’ of the city. These include residential leisure areas such as playgrounds, green spaces, and other built facilities such as areas for shopping and leisure. However, the built

environment can only mediate, not form, communities, whether resilient or not (Dovey, 2008). In this sense, it could even be argued that in constructing eco-city spaces based on visions of glass and steel pan-Asian executive urbanism, eco-cities such as Tianjin Eco-City are being built as ‘non-places’, generic cities defined by their temporality and lack of persistence (Koolhas, in Dovey, 1999, p.48). Building on this, one wonders whether these new exemplars of eco-urbanism are not simply successfully constructing an atomized consumer urban society in which few ties bind neighbours to one another, and in which there is little common or shared interest between residents as members of the urban polity. Thus, a key question (and a future longitudinal study) regards the ways in which community or communities will take shape in the city, and whether they will be resilient – or whether communities will take shape at all. In this sense, any such study will need to focus not only on the macro-scale aspects of resilience at the systemic level, but also on the micro-mechanisms through which community and resilience are built: from the appropriation of ‘empty’ spaces as ‘social’ spaces, to the use of gardens, park and green areas as places for exercise, dancing classes and other pursuits, to the formation of identities in the eco-city. Finally, the internal social resilience of new urban areas such as Tianjin will only be known when – as in New Orleans in 2005 – a systemic shock tests the capacity of the urban sphere to rebound and reshape itself into a city.

The urban poor

Having lunch in an empty city is a real challenge. We head to the only place which shows signs of life in this eco-city: the workers’ city. Here, blue-roofed pre-fabricated housing units house the mass of migrant workers whose labour is being used to raise this city from the saltmarsh into the sky. The workers’ city is well-ordered and set out over a large space, a far cry from the way in which workers’ housing often appears. Basketball courts provide some recreation options for the workers, but on this freezing-cold day, the biggest sign of life is to be found in one of the eating places which cater to the workers. Listening to some of the workers eating near our table, my translator explains where they’re from: ‘This guy is Uyghur from Xinjiang, these others are from Yunnan.’ One thing seems certain: the workers who have built this city, and who represent the vast stream of rural populations moving to the city on China’s seaboard, are not the intended inhabitants for this supposedly green idyll. What does this mean for those who construct these ‘flagship’ urban environments, and what does this mean more generally for the urban poor, especially recent migrants, on whose backs new eco-cities are built, but who are unlikely to be granted access as residents of these new urban centres?

Eco-cities in China and other locations are examples of the materialization of flows of capital, knowledge and ideology in the urban arena. The buildings, roads and infrastructure which constitute eco-cities such as Tianjin are, however, constructed by large workforces of mostly migrant labour. These new eco-urban centres, with their glittering executive apartments and commercial office blocks, and with their ample provision for middle-class

urban living, are nonetheless being built from scratch by low-paid workers, building eco-cities in which they will likely never be able to afford to live themselves. These workers constitute the subjects of temporary (and sometimes fixed) geographies of migration-fuelled displacement, from the temporary ‘workers’ cities’ to the settlement of workers in low-rent areas close to construction sites, to the geographies of inequality which often see workers denied access to schooling and healthcare (and the trans-generational extension of these inequalities to workers’ offspring and relatives who migrate to China’s coastal mega-cities). This constitutes, I would argue, the generation of a class of ‘new urban poor’ on the fringes of flagship eco-cities and other spectacular urban developments.

There are promising recent research trends which have focused on critically investigating the underbelly which is often hidden under the glitter, corporate marketing and eco-hype which surrounds recent urban mega-projects. Mohammad and Sidaway, for example, have recently analysed the place of migrant workers in the construction of Abu Dhabi’s ‘spectacular urbanism’ as the Emirate attempts to shape its urban centre into a ‘global hypermodern image’ (Mohammad and Sidaway, 2012, p. 607). Although their study did not focus on the Masdar eco-city mega-project on the outskirts of the main urban area, they nonetheless highlighted they key issue that although much recent work has attempted to place Gulf cities within networks of global capital, finance and service industries, the need to temper this focus with ‘vantage points embodying capital and labour circulation and attendant modes of street-level socio-spatial interaction remains substantially unmet’ (Mohammad and Sidaway, 2012, p. 622). There is ample ground for critical urban analysis on these topics.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to grasp the material realities of workers’ cities on the fringes of flagship and spectacular eco-urban projects in China. This is for several reasons, firstly because while urban growth in China is necessarily fuelled by flows of transnational capital and by local and international socio-technical networks, eco-cities themselves are built by a large and predominantly migrant labour force. At over 50 million, this labour force is significant in size, dwarfing the population size of many countries. Over 90% of these urban construction workers are estimated to be rural-urban migrants (Cockrell, 2008). A great number of these migrants do not appear in official statistics due to the fact that they are often undocumented, and because in many urban locations they are unable to access services such as healthcare and education. As Trieu (2009) has shown in the case of migrants’ access to healthcare, for example, there is still widespread exclusion of migrants from local health services due to the fact that health insurance cards are tied to residency status within specific municipalities. This is coupled with the fact that while many cities tolerate migrants because they are necessary for urban expansion, at the same time these same migrants often face an uphill battle when trying to gain residency status within the city they are working in:

‘according to registration status, laborers in China are differentiated into three types: (urban) hukou holders as native residents, migrants relocated through formal channels (and hence possessing the urban hukou entitlement) as elite residents and non-urban-hukou migrants as “outsiders” […]. Discriminatory housing policy, the location of less expensive rental units, and

job sites in peripheral industrial areas probably all contribute to this phenomenon’ (White, Wu and Chen, 2008, p.130).

Rural-urban migrants are also largely elided from official urban demographic data, thus making it difficult to gain a perspective of the geographies of construction workers in Chinese cities. This is evident when considering the use of official statistics, based on urban population data, to investigate questions of urban poverty. Appleton and Song (2008), for example, aptly discuss the use of surveys by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASS) which show that ‘there is no real suggestion that migrants as a group have impoverished themselves by moving to the cities…the presumption is that migration has provided a means by which they can escape poverty…the CASS surveys imply that this has not translated into a worsening of real income of those at the bottom of the income distribution’ (Appleton and Song, 2008: 49). These conclusions are reached, however, by excluding rural-urban migrants from analysis.

When visiting the ‘workers’ city’ in Tianjin Eco-City, I could not help but wonder what would replace the pre-fabricated workers’ dwellings, their noodle shops and basketball courts. Furthermore, I could not help wondering about this potentially transient, low-paid, shifting population which would presumably go on to form parts of other ‘workers’ cities’ as individual workers move from site to site, constructing and adding to the megacities which already dominate China’s eastern and southern seaboard. The brand new apartments that were being built in Tianjin Eco-City were only a few hundred metres away from the confines of the workers’ area where I had lunch. And yet, they seemed a lot further away, across what amounts to a socioeconomic chasm. This is the story of rapid urbanization, a story which has been told many times before across a range of different national, political and economic settings. Urban geographers and others concerned with the contemporary urban condition have a lot of critical work to do on the emergent landscape of new urban futures in a supposedly decarbonizing society.

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