Eco-city Planning

China has recently seen a proliferation of eco-cities. Their contribution to a sustainability agenda has been questioned due to their use of ecology as a branding tactic and the lack of social considerations. However, with increasing environmental concern and pressure for carbon control, is it possible for Chinese eco-cities to go beyond the ‘sustainability fix’? This research will examine Chinese eco-city planning through investigating two under-studied cases: Wuxi Taihu New Town and Chongming Eco-Island at Shanghai. The research will examine planning models and practices, low-carbon technologies, economic transition, and opportunities brought by eco-city planning to low-carbon transition. The research will provide a more nuanced understanding of Chinese environmental governance in general and eco-city planning specifically, and will contribute to the conceptual advancement of the sustainability fix by distinguishing an entrepreneurial use of nature and substantial low-carbon innovations.

The project went well and successfully finished with a series of research output. A selection of related publications are as follows.

• Zhang, F., & Wu, F. (2024). Green state entrepreneurialism: Building the park city in Chengdu, China. Transactions in Planning and Urban Research.

This paper uses the perspective of state entrepreneurialism to explore China’s environmental governance. The perspective illustrates how the Chinese state maintains its centrality, combining environmentalism and developmentalism while deploying flexible market development tools. This paper examines the Chengdu park-city model, an exemplar President Xi Jinping endorsed and widely emulated in China. The model combines the development of industrial and ecological spaces. It aims to deliver the central government’s vision for ecological civilisation and the local government’s economic development strategy. The development tools include land consolidation, financial mobilisation and an economic strategy that attempts to introduce ‘urban scenes’ into ecological spaces. This ecologically oriented development approach is more state-centred, contrasting with the neoliberal green growth machine.

• Zhang, F., Wu, F., & Liu, Y. (2023). China’s urban environmental governance. In Handbook on China’s Urban Environmental Governance (pp. 1-24). Edward Elgar Publishing.

This introductory chapter explains China’s recent turn to strengthened environmentalism and discusses the features of environmental governance. The chapter introduces the framework of this handbook, stressing the need to interrogate environmental governance at the urban level. Beyond environmental policies, the handbook examines environmental practices from the perspective of the interactions between the state, market and society across multiple scales. The core concern of this handbook is how to characterise China’s environmental governance: whether the governance aims to promote economic growth through environmental regulation or is invoked to implement ‘ecological civilisation’. We reveal the purposeful ecologic fix under ‘state entrepreneurialism’, in which the state vision of ‘ecological civilisation’ occupies the centrality. At the same time, market instruments are mobilised, and the society actors are primarily reactive in environmental contestation or campaigns. Examining state-centred governmentality across a series of environmental practices such as eco-city planning, waste management and low-carbon energy transition, we highlight the need for collaborative environmental governance and greater attention to social justice.

• Wu, F. (2022). Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban revolution and governance changes. UCL press.

Creating Chinese Urbanism describes the landscape of urbanisation in China, revealing the profound impacts of marketisation on Chinese society and the consequential governance changes at the grassroots level.

During the imperial and socialist periods, state and society were embedded. However, as China has been becoming urban, the territorial foundation of ‘earth-bound’ society has been dismantled. This metaphorically started an urban revolution, which has transformed the social order derived from the ‘state in society’. The state has thus become more visible in Chinese urban life.

Besides witnessing the breaking down of socially integrated neighbourhoods, Fulong Wu explains the urban roots of a rising state in China. Instead of governing through autonomous stakeholders, state-sponsored strategic intentions remain. In the urban realm, the desire for greater residential privacy does not foster collectivism. State-led rebuilding of residential communities has sped up the demise of traditionalism and given birth to a new China with greater urbanism and state-centred governance.

Taking the vantage point of concrete residential neighbourhoods, Creating Chinese Urbanism offers a cutting-edge analysis of how China is becoming urban and grounds the changing state governance in the process of urbanization. Its original and material interpretation of the changing role of the state in China makes it suitable reading for researchers and students in the fields of urban studies, geography, planning and the built environment.

• Zhang, F., & Wu, F. (2022). Performing the ecological fix under state entrepreneurialism: A case study of Taihu New Town, China. Urban Studies.

China’s eco-cities are often regarded as branding tactics of the entrepreneurial local state for economic growth and land revenue generation. However, it is not clear whether the ecological goal has been pursued at all. This paper fills this lacuna using a case study of Taihu New Town. Through an ecological fix perspective we suggest that ecological enhancement through the production of nature is attempted in conjunction with the production of the built environment. The ecological fix is not confined to an economic agenda. Under state entrepreneurialism, the central state maintains environmental governance in the name of ‘ecological civilisation’, while the local state performs the ecological fix. In Wuxi, the fixes include the removal of low-efficiency, polluting town and village enterprises (TVEs); creation of green space and infrastructure; the development of renewable energy; and low-carbon transition.

• Zhang, F., Chung, C. K. L., Lu, T., & Wu, F. (2021). The role of the local government in China’s urban sustainability transition: A case study of Wuxi’s solar development. Cities.

Recent studies on socio-technical transition have elaborated the multi-level perspective through a power-sensitive view of agency and a symmetrical approach to niche-regime relations. This paper adopts this modified framework of the multi-level perspective to unpack the mechanisms of urban sustainability transition in China. It develops two arguments through a case study of the role of the local government in solar development in Wuxi city. First, the evolving alignments between niche, regime and landscape processes of the socio-technical systems of Chinese cities are mediated by conflicts between local governments and their upper-level counterparts as they share power over urban development. Second, instead of being identified as either regime supporters or niche advocates, Chinese local governments are best described as embodying both roles in urban sustainability transition as they struggle to balance their economic and environmental objectives. These two arguments point to a need to examine sustainability transition in Chinese cities with attention to the leadership of the local government in aligning the actions of various actors in and beyond the city who can stabilise and disrupt existing socio-technical configurations.

For the full list of publications, please see here.