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Citation:

Caprotti, F. (2014) Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the

city? Antipode 46(5), 1285-1303.

Eco-urbanism and the eco-city, or denying the right to the city?

Federico Caprotti

Contact details: Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand,

London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected]


Abstract

This paper critically analyses the construction of eco-cities as technological

fixes to concerns over climate change, Peak Oil, and other scenarios in the

transition towards ‘green capitalism’. It argues for a critical engagement with

new-build eco-city projects, firstly by highlighting the inequalities which mean

that eco-cities will not benefit those who will be most impacted by climate

change: the citizens of the world’s least wealthy states. Secondly, the paper

investigates the foundation of eco-city projects on notions of crisis and

scarcity. Thirdly, there is a need to critically interrogate the mechanisms

through which new eco-cities are built, including the land market, reclamation,

dispossession and ‘green grabbing’. Lastly, a sustained focus is needed on

the multiplication of workers’ geographies in and around these ‘emerald

cities’, especially the ordinary urban spaces and lives of the temporary

settlements housing the millions of workers who move from one new project

to another.

Keywords: eco-city, sustainable city, transition, climate change, China,

political ecology


Experimental cities, climate change and Peak Oil: eco-cities as

‘technological fixes’

In recent years, there has been an increased level of awareness, anxiety and

public debate around rapid urbanisation. Much of the focus has been on the

link between urbanisation and continuing, or worsening, environmental

despoliation. At a macro scale, there have been attendant, broad systemic

fears about transnational and diffuse risks such as climate change and Peak

Oil scenarios, and questions around what these hazards will mean for the

world’s urban future (Newman et al 2009). The focus on cities as sites where

climate change and dwindling oil resources will take their biggest human toll is

presented as stark reality. And yet, it can also be argued that ‘[t]he work of

these doomsday predictions is to generate a climate of fear that enables a

shift in what is deemed of value, and authorizes methods of social control to

protect these new concerns’ (May 2011:119). Green capitalism, green

neoliberalism, market environmentalism and a host of urban and economic

interventions (from the UK’s new strategy for kick-starting a ‘green economy’

to the Obama administration’s ‘green stimulus plan’ to lift the US out of the

2008 financial crisis) (Bailey and Caprotti 2014) have been forcefully

proposed and justified through recourse to fears of crisis and change:

‘As issues of energy security and energy scarcity join climate change on the

list of energy predicaments facing society in the coming century, a range of

unlikely bedfellows – from the Chinese government to the Transition Towns

movement in the UK – are calling for a low carbon transition: a fundamental

change in the way we provide energy services’ (Bulkeley et al 2011:24).

A key feature of recent research on urban responses to climate change and

concerns around the hydrocarbon economy has been a sustained focus on

identifying specific urban ‘experiments’ in enabling the mitigation of, and

adaptation to, climate change (Bulkeley 2013; Bulkeley and Castán Broto

2012; Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013; Evans 2011). Some of these

experimental projects take place at relatively small scales, as is the case with

eco-neighbourhoods or even individual eco-buildings. Some are

operationalized across more geographically diffuse networks of actors, from

the government, municipal, corporate and other spheres.

The focus on cities as experimental locations in which to trial new

technologies, architectures, and environmental-economic reforms, is in large

part linked to a quasi-utopian approach to the city as laboratory, as an empty

and bounded container. This approach renders the physical environment of

the city as a single site of intervention, and conceptualises the urban as a

vessel of constrained socio-economic, environmental, and technological

relations. When viewed as an experiment, the city can thus be reduced to a

tabula rasa on which new technologies, transitional strategies, and other

approaches can be tried and tested, and subsequently rolled out across wider

scales. This is reflected in scholarship on socio-technical transitions which

highlights the role of specific ‘sites’ (such as cities) where successful

‘experiments’ gain momentum and can then be expanded across the wider

societal landscape (Scrase and Smith 2009; Shove and Walker 2007):

‘As a field site, the city exhibits a specific reality that is found, and that

possesses an incontestable, singular truth by virtue of its lived materiality. In

contrast, the city as lab becomes the cipher for any city, interchangeable and

controllable through the manipulation of variables, possessing a truth borne of

replicability’ (Evans 2011:226).

In turn, much of the recent focus on the search for urban ‘solutions’ to climate

change has been placed on the engineering of new urban environments, often

along ecologically modernising and technocratic lines. This is reflected in the

burgeoning number of eco-cities being proposed, planned and built across the

globe. While many of these projects exist only in marketing documents and

blueprints, several are under construction. These include eco-island

developments in San Francisco Bay (Joss 2011; Joss, Tomozeiu and Cowley

2011), solar-powered eco-cities such as Masdar, Abu Dhabi (Caprotti and

Romanowicz 2013; Cugurullo 2013), ‘smart cities’ such as Songdo, South

Korea (Kim 2010; Shwayri 2013), ‘sustainable city’ projects such as Lavasa,

India (Datta 2012), and over 100 eco-city projects throughout China (Wu

2012). Eco-cities are often conceived as experimental urban places, and as

sites of experimentation not only with technologies and ways of organising the

built environment so as to make it more adaptable to climate change, but as

key nodes where economic-environmental reforms can be trialled so as to

experiment with urban and peri-urban economic bases which make the city

the centre of transition towards a ‘low carbon’ economy.

This highlights the role of the eco-city as a ‘technological fix’ based on an

assemblage of discourses around the a.) desirability of a transition to green

capitalism, and b.) the need to rework the city so that it becomes adaptable to

the environmental externalities caused by earlier (industrial, fossil fuel-based)

iterations of capitalism (Pow and Neo 2013). At the same time, it highlights a

hollowed-out vision of the city-nature nexus, as the urban becomes devoid of

human and political potential while being elevated to the role of stage on

which the interplay of technology and green capitalism can be unleashed in a

time of constructed crisis. As Swyngedouw (2009:602) has argued:

‘This is a politics that ‘legitimizes itself by means of a direct reference to the

scientific status of its knowledge’ (Žižek, 2006c: 188)...it is a politics reduced

to the administration and management of processes whose parameters are

defined by consensual socio-scientific knowledges. This reduction of the

political to the policing of environmental change...evacuates if not forecloses

the properly political and becomes part and parcel of the consolidation of a

postpolitical and postdemocratic polity.’

This paper highlights key issues connected with the emergence of

experimental eco-city projects. These issues are: a.) the intensification of

environmental and economic inequalities in the geographies of eco-urbanism;

b.) the deployment of discursive strategies of crisis which construct eco-cities

and new, decarbonised iterations of capitalism as the only hope of our

collective urban future; c.) the use and marketing of eco-cities as a foil for

economic strategies enabling the reproduction of neoliberal economies in the

guise of transitions towards ‘green capitalism’ and the ‘green economy’; d.)

the need to consider the mechanisms through which eco-cities are built and

governed: these include practices of reclamation and dispossession, although

there is also an urgent necessity for engagement with the geographies of the

‘new urban poor’, the tens of thousands of mobile and dispersed workers on

whose (cheap) labour eco-cities are built; and e.) the need for considering

grounded radical alternatives to current iterations of eco-urbanism. These

issues are discussed in turn in the rest of the paper.

Inequalities and the geographies of eco-urbanism

Many of the oft-strident debates on urbanization, climate change and Peak Oil

have focused on emerging economies. This is presented as appropriate for a

variety of reasons, not limited to the fact that while countries in the Global

North have been through industrial revolutions and post-industrial transitions,

the production of environmental externalities through emissions and

contamination are increasing rapidly and are seemingly unstoppable. The fact

that the increasingly environmentally polluting role of emerging economies is

intimately and directly tied to increasing levels of consumption in the ‘clean’

and ecologically modernising countries of the North is not often explicitly

stated. As a result, leading emerging economies are highlighted as the new

culprits of human-induced climate change.

China is a case in point: the country’s meteoric economic development –

linked in no small part to the opening-up of its labour reserves to international

industry in the reform era – is often identified as the future cause of global

environmental despoliation. As Kim and Turner (2007:np) have argued, ‘China

built its economic success on a foundation of ecological destruction.’ Highly

visible examples of the effects of environmental degradation in the country are

frequently pointed out, from the particulate-laden ‘Beijing smog’, to the ‘rivers

of blood’ (Davidson 2013) which flowed through Shanghai in March 2013 as

16,000 pig carcasses infected with porcine circovirus floated past the

gleaming skyscrapers of the Lujiazui international financial centre, symbol of

China’s economic rise.

This is in no small part due to the magnitude of the country’s rural-urban

migratory flows, and because of the breakneck pace of its rate of urbanization

(Liu and Diamond 2005). Indeed, by 2012, for the first time in history, the

country’s urban population became larger than its rural population, as the

largest rural-urban migration the world has ever known reshapes China’s

geography. From the ‘hollowed villages’ left in the wake of migrant departures

(Liu et al 2013), to the new and unstable geographies of rural-urban migrant

class and gender (Chang 2009), to the generation of new and exclusive gated

communities (Pow 2007; Wu 2005) in China’s entrepreneurial cities (Wu

2012), the processes of rapid urbanization have become a key socio-

environmental concern.

However, while a significant amount of interest in the city-environment nexus

in an age of climate change – an anthropocenic era, as some have called it

(Hodson and Marvin 2010) – has focused on China (Dhakal 2013), there is a

correspondingly wide body of scholarship on the potential impacts of climate

change and energy insecurity on cities in Western Europe (Coutard and

Rutherford 2013), North America and Oceania, much of it focused on the

complexities of governing ‘the economy’ at a time of climatic transition (While

et al 2010). What is also apparent is a parallel lack of research on the socio-

technical and economic-environmental shape of the urban future in the rest of

the world, particularly in the least wealthy parts of the globe. To be sure, there

is some research on sustainable urban transitions in the least developed cities

and states (Ahmed 2003; Laul 2003). However, much research on urban

futures has focused on emerged and emerging economies.

Similarly, it is evident when considering eco-cities, urban environmental retro-

fitting and brownfield eco-urban projects that the focus of many of these

efforts to re-engineer the city are deeply tied in with spatial and socio-

economic contexts where capital flows can actually be materialised. For

example, a recent survey uncovered the fact that while urban climate change

experiments are not confined to any one region of the world, 52% were

located in the Global North, while 46% were situated in emerging economies.

Only 2% were located in the world’s least developed states (Castán Broto and

Bulkeley 2013). This opens up real and pressing questions about the spatial

inequalities which are starting to be constructed in an age of climate change:

when 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty (World Bank 2010), and when

it has long been recognised that the world’s poorest will suffer

disproportionately as a result of the impacts of climate change (OECD 2003),

it is staggering to realise that 98% of the world’s urban climate change

experiments are aimed squarely away from the globe’s poorest citizens. Thus,

in light of climate change’s inequitable impacts on the global urban population,

there exists a need for sustained engagement with the question of how to

engage with the least wealthy urban agglomerations so as to generate fairer

socio-environmental conditions. This does not constitute a call to disengage

with broader debates around green capitalism and eco-urbanism, but a

recognition that steps can be taken to engage with already existing urban

conditions in the Global South.

Environmental crisis and the market

If unequally distributed eco-cities are being constructed around the globe and

marketed as ‘solutions’ to diffuse yet pressing systemic problems of climate

change, Peak Oil and energy security, a key question is the need for critical

investigation of the discursive justification of eco-city projects, and of urban

climate change experiments more broadly, through recourse to constructed

notions of crisis. In many ways, this is not a new concern. Indeed, the

deployment of concepts of environmental ‘crisis’ to justify specific

environmental and political projects and interventions has been a common

feature of critical research on the nature-society nexus (Fitzsimmons 1989;

Guthman 1997; Leff 1996). Much of this research has delved deep into the

mobilization of ideas of crisis, and associated notions such as scarcity, to

critically interrogate urban projects (Davis 1998; Kaika 2005; Swyngedouw

2004). As Yeh (2009) has shown in the case of Western China, discourses of

crisis often go hand-in-hand with ecologically modernising governmental

initiatives aimed at enacting specific visions of ‘sustainable development’.

Nonetheless, what is interesting in recent efforts to conceptualise cities as

climate change experiments, and in material efforts to construct eco-city

projects in a variety of settings, is an attempt to link cities directly with crisis,

and to propose new urban areas as repositories of (economic, technological,

architectural) solutions to selected crises.

An example of the construction of a crisis-based rationale for an eco-city

project is that of Masdar eco-city, in Abu Dhabi. Planned by Foster + Partners

and other members of the transnational architectural and planning elite, and

funded by oil wealth from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, the eco-city is

projected as a walled compound of (eventually) 50,000 residents: ‘A pattern

starts to emerge within which particular coalitions of social interests –

consultancies, architects and engineers sometimes with elements of the

green movement – are collaborating with particular place-based interests in

the development of new infrastructural fixes’ (Hodson and Marvin 2010:303).

Indeed, Masdar is planned as a container of innovative green technologies

and R&D, through the establishment of the new Masdar Institute of Science

and Technology (MIST) and the application of a range of high-tech ‘green’

solutions in the urban area.

At its heart, however, Masdar is based on the idea that the eco-city can

become a fulcrum for transition away from Abu Dhabi’s oil economy, by kick-

starting the development of a green R&D cluster. This means that the city is

conceptualised as sustainable in a primarily economic way, and that its

economic role lies within the foil of sustainability. Thus, Masdar can be seen

as a ‘sandcastle’ (Cugurullo 2013:34), ‘bereft of an organic society’ (Ibid:35),

with its urban identity deeply tied to market environmentalism and the linking

of the city to Peak Oil and economic transition. Furthermore, the city can be

seen as an example of conspicuous eco-urbanism. As Harvey has argued,

urbanization projects ‘have emerged in the Middle East in places like Dubai

and Abu Dhabi as a way of mopping up the capital surpluses arising from oil

wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful

ways possible’ (Harvey 2012:12). Although Harvey was referring to projects

such as the building of an indoor ski slope in Dubai, eco-cities such as

Masdar can similarly be interpreted as an example of a conspicuous urbanism

which is not only aimed at absorbing some of the city’s oil wealth, but at

turning oil capital into a way of constructing new ‘green’ markets and

positioning the emirate at a strategic juncture at which it will be able to take

advantage of the world’s increasing need for environmental technologies.

Thus, the city-nature nexus becomes, in the eco-city, a site where the

problematic of industrialisation and environmental degradation can be

reconciled with the imperative for sustained and rapid economic growth. With

their promise of economic and industrial incentives and reforms, eco-cities

have become the focus of economic and governance discourses which posit

the city at once as the site of environmental problems, and as the urban area

where new technological fixes can be applied to both real and constructed

notions of climate crisis and climate change. As Chen has argued in the case

of Chinese eco-cities, these new, ‘green’ urban projects are part and parcel of

‘interventions into global market-based solutions to climate change as integral

problems of Chinese national development and modernization’ (Chen

2013:102). The link between eco-urbanism and the market, and the

justification of eco-city projects through recourse to techno-socially

rationalised crisis discourses is thus a crucial topic for critical analysis, and is

closely linked to the deployment of ideas of crisis in justifications of green

capitalism.

Reproducing green capitalism

Eco-cities are often the conspicuous centrepieces around which much bigger

economic-environmental transition projects revolve. This is because eco-cities

specifically (and eco-urban projects more generally) often serve the function

of highly visible symbolic ‘anchors’ for wider spatial economic and political

networks aimed at bringing about particular, often neoliberal and potentially

inequitable visions of socio-technical transition. In particular, there has been a

recent trend towards placing new-build eco-cities at the centre of highly

specialised Special Economic Zones (SEZ) where new transition economies

can be trialled and, if successful, rolled out on a wider scale. In part, this is

what can be seen in the case of Masdar, a city built within a new SEZ, which

is marketed as enabling:

‘Quick and easy set up with a one-stop shop for registration, government

relations and fast-track visa processing…Zero percent import tariffs…Zero

percent taxes on companies and individuals…No restrictions on capital

movements, profits or quotas…100% foreign ownership…No currency

restrictions…Hiring of expatriate staff…Gateway to the vibrant market

opportunities of the Middle East and Asia…’ (Masdar City 2011:np).

Thus, the eco-city becomes the node around which a new economy based on

‘green’ industries and unrestricted flows of capital can be built. Clearly,

Masdar is not the only example of this trend: for example, Banerjee-Guha

(2009) has investigated the link between expropriation, displacement and the

generation of inequalities and discourses of economic ‘development’ which

facilitate the formation of economic enclaves as part of the establishment of

SEZs in India.

In terms of economic transition, the rationale for linking eco-cities with

economic development is becomes apparent when considering some of the

largest new-build eco-cities currently underway in China. An example of the

link between national economic policy and planning and eco-city projects are

the flagship eco-city projects currently underway in the area of the Bohai Rim

in North-East China, comprising Liaoning, Hebei and Shandong provinces as

well as Beijing and Tianjin municipalities. The Bohai Rim contains c.18% of

China’s population, and is the third most important economic region in China

after the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta (Tianjin Planning

Bureau 2011). In economic planning and policy terms, the Bohai Rim contains

seven special economic development zones. These are: the Binhai New Area,

northern China’s major economic growth pole, located on the coastline near

Tianjin; Zhongguancun, a technology innovation zone in Beijing; Caofeidian

Economic Zone, focused on experimenting with environmental ‘circular

economy’ practices; the Yellow River Delta Economic Zone; the Shandong

Peninsula Marine Economic Zone; Shenyang Economic Zone, and Liaoning

Coastal Economic Zone. The Chinese government plans to integrate this

broad region in terms of both economics and transport, and infrastructure

projects are proceeding apace (Gu and Han 2010). The area currently houses

around 240 million residents and is widely referred to as the ‘Bohai

Megalopolis’ (Zhou, Dai and Bu 2013).

At the same time, the Bohai Rim exists as an area both of rapid development,

and as an uneasy assemblage of new corporations and economic practices

which have arisen as a result of economic reforms, coupled with the old heavy

industries which powered China’s early industrialization and which were the

direct result of centralized economic planning during the Mao era. This means

that the Bohai Rim region not only faces rapid urbanization and increasing

levels of economic and industrial development, but also a rapidly deteriorating

environment: ‘natural resource shortages and environmental pollution have

been caused by the incompatibility of heavy and chemical industry

aggregation with a sustainable environment’ (Lin et al 2011:3178). This is

reflected in the urban environment: in 2013, for example, two of the most

polluted cities in China were located in the Bohai Rim area. Beijing and Tianjin

were the second and sixth most polluted cities in the country, respectively (Na

2013). Overall, by 2007 the Bohai Rim area was assessed as exceeding its

estimated environmental carrying capacity by about 36% (Lin et al 2011).

Within the broader context of hyper-urbanization and environmental

despoliation in the Bohai Rim, two eco-city projects are currently being

marketed as emerald islands of sustainable urban living and green economic

development amidst the particulate-laden, surrounding murk. Tianjin eco-city,

China’s flagship eco-city project (officially known as the Sino-Singapore

Tianjin Eco-City) is being constructed near Binhai, on the coast near Tianjin

(Caprotti 2014). Less than 40 kilometres east of Binhai, Caofeidian eco-city is

a proposed (and currently on hold) project based on reclaimed land in Hebei

province (Joss and Molella 2013). Both eco-city projects are located at

strategic economic junctures: Tianjin eco-city is situated in the Binhai New

Area (BNA) special economic zone, and Caofeidian eco-city is located

between the new deep-water port of Caofeidian, and Jingtang, a large coal

port. Quite apart from any environmental credentials, Caofeidian ‘has the goal

of providing integrated support services for the port, port area, and port city

while supporting the expected increase in industrial development and

population’ (Zhou, He and Williams 2012:9). In their analysis of the planning

of the eco-city, Joss and Molella (2013) note the physical separation between

the eco-city site, and the wider, surrounding industrial development zone. This

leads to an interpretation of the eco-city as part and parcel of a large

‘industrial-technological complex’ that exhibits ‘certain tensions or

contradictions’ (Joss and Molella 2013:123) due to the city’s binary

justification both as an environmentally amenable urban centre, and as a

reference point for a regional industrialization strategy based on heavy

industries.

Tianjin eco-city, on the other hand, is located within the BNA, a large zone

aimed at being an industrial growth pole to rival Shanghai’s Pudong, as well

as Shenzhen. The eco-city itself is under construction and is aimed at

eventually housing up to 350,000 residents, although at the time of writing

only a Start-Up Area consisting of several city blocks, and associated

infrastructure, had been constructed. Thus, Tianjin eco-city can also be seen

as an ecological anchor for a wider industrialization and economic

development strategy, although some of this strategy is based on attracting

participants in the ‘green economy’: indeed, one of the completed parts of the

eco-city is a new commercial business park aimed at housing cleantech

companies and environmental services firms. Nonetheless, it cannot be

ignored that Tianjin eco-city lies within the broader context of the BNA, an

SEZ which has to date been able to attract over 250 Fortune 500 companies

including EADS Airbus, Motorola, and Tishman Speyer. Furthermore, as in

the case of Caofeidian, the eco-city is located close to a major industrial port:

Tianjin port is the fifth largest in the world in terms of cargo throughput, and is

a key connection point in the Bohai Rim’s exchange of commodities and

capital with the global economy.

Finally, Tianjin eco-city is also placed within transnational governance and

international relations networks due to its status as a joint venture (JV)

between the governments of China and Singapore. This places the city within

a much broader regional context, which encompasses the political economy

of China-Singapore relations and the significant use of new-build urban

development projects, such as Suzhou Industrial Park, as tools of

international relations (Phelps and Wu 2009; Yeung 2000). The JV includes

explicit participation by several private sector land development and

investment corporations. Indeed, the institution charged for developing the

project is the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Development

Corporation (SSTECIDC). The firm is a joint venture between a Chinese

consortium led by Tianjin TEDA Investment Holding Company (Tianjin TEDA),

and the Singapore Consortium, headed by the Keppel Group, a Singapore-

based conglomerate. Both consortia hold fifty per cent of SSTECIDC (Keppel

Corporation press release, 28 September 2008). Other firms involved in the

project include developers such as China’s Shimao, Vantone and Vanke,

Japanese Mitsui Fudosan, Taiwanese firm Farglory, and Malaysian developer

Sunway (SSTECIDC 2010). This points not only to the close involvement of

private actors in state-led eco-urban projects (Wu 2012), but to the wider

internationalization of the Chinese state (Gonzalez-Vicente 2011).

Therefore, it can be seen from the examples cited above that far from existing

in isolation as innovative and transitional urban areas where new forms of

consumption and urban life are being trialled, new-build eco-cities need to be

placed within the wider socio-technical and economic-environmental context

in which they operate. In particular, the siting of eco-cities within SEZs can be

critically questioned as a strategy based on the idea of the frictionless city ‘in

which the economy can perform optimally with minimal government

interference’ (Bach 2011:107). These eco-cities then take on the dual role of

global showcases as well as smooth, unobstructed spaces where capital can

flow freely and materialize in factories, urban environments, and industrial

economies:

‘With its pedantically designed residential and commercial spaces set

amongst sprawling industrial landscapes, a visit to the Zone conjures up an

odd assemblage of 19th-century Owenite utopian legacies and their

contemporary traces via Soviet ‘total planning’ cities, garden cities, company

towns, gated communities, and even aspects of new urbanism. The subjects

being created connect the image of Toulmin’s Cosmopolis with Marx’s

alienated inhabitant of the capitalist universe: people are secondary to

production, but they too are planned for, everyone is in their place, at the right

time, and everyone is to behave according to their role. Top managers live in

luxury apartments or villas, white collar employees in middle class high rise

complexes, workers in dormitories, and illegal migrants are marginalized to

the outskirts or unplanned remainders of the Zone’ (Bach 2011:109).

Shielded from the degrading urban environments around them through

technologies such as water filtration systems and air filters, and through more

pragmatic measures such as gating, security, and real estate pricing, these

cities can be seen as exceptions, ‘pearls in the sea of degrading urban

environments’ (Wong 2011:131). These exclusive developments provide

environmental ‘goods’ to those who can afford to live within the eco-city –

while little attention is paid to those who built it, or to those who live in its

shadow or on its fringes.

Reclamation, dispossession, and the ‘new urban poor’

Eco-city projects are often based on land that has been ‘reclaimed’: from

wetlands, to desert, to brownfield sites which are slated for decontamination

and subsequent development. The identification and use of reclaimed land for

eco-city development is, in turn, based on legal and economic rationales,

mechanisms and regulations that enable the materialisation of these projects.

At the same time, these cities are major construction projects necessitating

tens of thousands of workers engaged in laying roads, constructing buildings,

and building and maintaining infrastructure. On a representational level, eco-

cities are overwhelmingly marketed as central sites within often less than

democratic ‘transitions’ to ‘green’ capitalism, it is crucial to develop a critical

analysis of these cities that moves towards an investigation of the

mechanisms through which these cities are constructed and sited. This is a

useful inroad into a study of the eco-city which moves past the oft-touted

description of these urban projects as somehow exceptional or as shining

examples of 21st century urbanism. Indeed, the sort of analysis proposed in

the rest of this piece focuses on the eco-city as an ordinary city (Robinson

2006), highlighting the mechanisms through which the city is materialised on

the basis of property rights and coalitions of policy and corporate actors.

Furthermore, the argument here is that it is crucial to focus on what happens

‘in the shadows’ of shiny new eco-city projects, on the edges of the vast

construction sites which are taking shape from China to the Gulf. What

happens on the fringe of these cities is the formation of temporary cities

housing the urban construction workforce. The workforce coalesces around

construction sites and then moves on within the city or across thousands of

miles to work on the next large project. The geographies of these ‘new urban

poor’, which include migrants to the peripheries of new city developments as

well as the workers who build them, is significant. For example, in China,

construction workers alone number about 50 million, of which 90% are

migrant workers (Cockrell 2008).

In terms of the siting of eco-city projects, it is interesting to note that several

new-build projects are located in areas previously deemed unsuitable for

habitation. Tianjin eco-city, for example, is located on a wetland site, while

Masdar is being constructed in a desert environment. These examples point

to the discursive construction and socio-technical justification of the building of

‘positive’ and ‘green’ urban environments on the site of previously ‘negative’

and ‘unproductive’ land (Renes and Piastra 2011). In some cases, eco-cities

are being built on reclaimed land, thus effectively injecting a new parcel of

land into the market for available land. This is the case, for example, with Eko

Atlantic, an eco-city being developed on reclaimed land near Lagos, Nigeria,

and Hulhumalé Island, an eco-island being reclaimed from the sea in Male

archipelago within the territory of the Maldives.

Constructing eco-cities on land previously thought of as unsuitable for urban

development, or on formerly rural land also has the effect of enabling the

symbolic devaluation of (existing, negatively constructed) land and thus

justifies its re-engineering or conversion into a different (positive)

environment, in a modernist process of destructive creation. This process is

based on the assignation of specific values to land: thus, if an area of land is

devalued because it is seen as being of little interest to existing actors, then

that land can become highly vulnerable to arbitrage. This is because if the

land is selected for development of a flagship eco-city project, its having been

identified as an area of little intrinsic value means that land and property

developers stand to gain from redeveloping low-value land into high-value,

executive eco-living space. And in turn, what gives the redeveloped land its

value is the use of a large workforce of low-paid construction workers, who

often labour with few rights, and certainly little hope of ever being able to

partake in conspicuous eco-consumption.

The way land markets are organised is central to the development of eco-

cities, and to the establishment of a profit motive for developers and policy

actors alike. As Cugurullo (2013) has argued in the case of Masdar, the eco-

city is primarily a business and, in the case of eco-urbanism, sustainability

most often means economic sustainability of a particular, neoliberal and

deregulated kind. In China, for example, land use rights and land ownership

are separate. While the government retains ownership of all land, local

governments are able to expropriate land formerly classified as rural, or re-

classify other types of land, and lease it to residential, industrial and other

developers through public tender, negotiation, and auction processes (Lin

2009). This process ‘provides many lucrative opportunities for land

transactions through the conveyance of land use rights in a market affected

by local manipulations’ (Lin and Yi 2011:69). In the case of eco-city

construction projects, these manipulations can be termed ‘green grabs’

(Corson et al 2013).

Building on this, it can be argued that one of the ‘ordinary’ geographies least

visible in current urban research is that of the mass of construction workers on

whose labour new flagship projects are built. Eco-cities, built on areas of low-

value land and sometimes on areas subjected to ‘green grabbing’ practices,

are intended as green utopias for their target demographics and for

transnational capital. The ways in which these projects generate temporary

urban environments encircling rising steel and glass ‘eco-buildings’ and ‘eco-

towers’ has not been the focus of significant critical attention. This is a key

concern for critical, activist and participatory urban geographies, since these

workers, who are often undocumented migrants, form temporary workers’

cities around these new emerald cities, but will never afford to live in these

large-scale gated eco-communities – and often are not even able to access

basic services, such as healthcare, in the municipalities which attract labour to

work on construction projects within their administrative borders (Trieu 2009).

Thus, there is little work done on these ‘new urban poor’ who not only build

these new eco-cities, but who belong to fluid flows of labour which coalesce

around urban projects and then, at completion, have to move on and find the

next construction site, sometimes very far away. In his recent book Rebel

Cities, David Harvey has noted the juxtaposition of flagship urban projects

with the ‘ordinary’ yet fluid city of migrants and workers on whose labour and

blood these shining examples of 21st century urbanism are built:

‘Vast infrastructural projects…are transforming the landscape. Equally vast

shopping malls, science parks, airports, container ports, pleasure palaces of

all kinds, and all manner of newly minted cultural institutions, along with gated

communities and golf courses, dot the Chinese landscape in the midst of

overcrowded urban dormitories for the massive labor reserves being

mobilized from the impoverished rural regions that supply the migrant labor’

(Harvey 2012:11-12).

Thus the eco-urbanism marketed to bright-eyed executives and constituted by

slick and supposedly public spaces is the result of the fluid and unequal

spatialities of a green urbanism which both serves to absorb low-paid migrant

labour and to serve the transitional needs of countries and urban areas which

are attempting to respond to diffuse notions of crisis and risk by enabling

technological ‘solutions’ and the exploitation of newly created markets in

environmental technologies and services.

Finally, the lack of attention to the ordinary lives of workers building the eco-

cities of the future should perhaps not be surprising. It is true that workers on

these projects form a necessarily unstable facet of these ventures, as they

settle near construction sites and then move on after project completion.

Nonetheless, the lack of focus on the geographies of the builders of the eco-

cities is also unsurprising because the social is generally an afterthought in

the master plans, marketing, high-level pronouncements and policy

documents which accompany the envisioning and planning of many of these

cities. As has been noted in the case of the failed Dongtan eco-city near

Shanghai, the social dimension is ‘conspicuously absent’ (Pow and Neo

2010:101) from the intricate sets of plans, economic incentives, blueprints and

glossy brochures for expensive apartments in these new ‘eco-communities’.

Sustainable cities as urban fantasies need to be envisioned, visualised, and

airbrushed so as to be made safe through recourse to spectacular visions

(Davidson 2012). Should it be a surprise, then, that those on the fringes of

these projects – the workers – are almost invisible? After all, on completion of

the project, the temporary ‘workers’ cities’ are swept away, and their

communities disperse, following the cranes, bricks, architects and planners

who need their labour to be able to build, newer, higher, shinier – and more

‘eco’ urban developments for the future.

Conclusion: critical research on eco-urbanism

It is clear that increasing levels of urbanization and economic development do

not only cause a rise in the production of environmental externalities, but also

in the deepening of socioeconomic inequalities which accompany the

progressively rapid societal shifts towards urban ‘green’ capitalism. The ever

more central place of experimental eco-cities within the contemporary

development of eco-urbanism opens up opportunities for critical and radical

urban scholars to engage, firstly, in theoretical debates on eco-urbanism, and

secondly, with the urban worlds being produced and configured today. With

regards to the former, the established and developing theoretical and

empirical research fields of urban political ecology and studies of socio-

technical transitions and transition theory can usefully be drawn into

conversations and enquiries on the role of eco-urbanism and eco-cities in

shaping both contemporary urban projects, and the experimental eco-cities of

tomorrow. In terms of the latter, theoretically informed scholarship that moves

towards uncovering the mechanisms and processes of eco-urbanism while

displaying a concern with the citizens and workers who populate and build

eco-cities can have broader societal impact.

Firstly, in terms of the unequal geographies of eco-urbanism, the paper has

argued for a need to cast a critically engaged eye not just towards flagship

eco-city projects, but towards those urban spaces and places which do not

figure in the glossy brochures and professional networks of the majority of

eco-city designers and policymakers. Drawing on urban research which has

tried to focus more clearly on those cities and urban spaces overshadowed by

the current overwhelming concern with ‘world’ and ‘global’ cities (McCann

2004; Pirie 2010), there is an opportunity here for urban political scholarship

to engage with cities and urban contexts in the least developed parts of the

world: precisely those urban areas which, as is widely recognised, will suffer

the most from the effects of climate change, and which are the least prepared

for its impacts. In terms of radical and grounded alternatives, critical scholars

can not only engage with the conditions which have enabled the production of

socio-environmentally unjust environments in the least developed cities of the

world, but also focus on moving from critiques to the identification of

pragmatic alternatives in these areas (Harvey 2000). This presupposes a

close engagement with the urban communities in question, and is therefore

an opportunity for enabling wider agency and giving a ‘voice’ to the least

advantaged. Work along this vein requires a focus on the vital, human

contexts of communities facing specific risks. This type of critical scholarship,

informed by broader theoretical issues and an understanding of the workings

of green capitalism and of the ideology of transition (Bailey and Wilson 2009;

Markard et al. 2012), has a great potential for impact: whether through the

raising of awareness, proposing specific techno-social solutions, elaborating

policy and community ‘toolkits’ for identifying and dealing with specific climate

risks, or enabling context-specific community voices to inform research.

The second issue discussed in the paper is the grounding of eco-city projects

in discursively constructed notions of crisis, real or imagined. The

identification of crisis as a basis for the development of eco-cities is often

based on technocratic, ecologically modernising and depoliticised discourses

which identify the market and technologies as the repositories of solutions to

crisis (Caprotti 2012; Hulme 2008a, 2008b). This turns the city into a

normative dyadic entity composed of market and technology. By applying the

insights of urban scholars who have focused on the political ecology of

constructed socio-environmental crises and associated techno-economic

strategies (Davis 1998; Loftus and Lumsden 2008; Giglioli and Swyngedouw

2008), an opportunity opens up for critical and radical scholarship on eco-

urbanism to build on the recent focus on the proliferation of eco-cities and

urban socio-technical climate change experiments, This will shed light on the

often disturbing ways through which economic and technological interventions

are justified and rationalised not for what they frequently are – speculations,

for-profit investments, and projects devoid of socio-political equity – but as

shining examples of high-tech responses to crisis.

Thirdly, this paper has built on the focus on critically interrogating notions of

crisis by calling for critical enquiries into the sort of low-carbon and green

economy transition pathways that are envisioned by governments and

industry (Bailey and Caprotti 2014), and which see eco-cities as strategic

centrepieces and enablers of these pathways. There has been much debate

in recent years on the transition to a low-carbon economy, and on the

determinants, enablers, and indicators of such a transition: this is an issue

which has been tackled most centrally by transition theorists (Geels 2004;

Schot and Geels 2007) and by scholars of socio-technical change (Coenen et

al. 2012). A critical approach to eco-city projects in the context of changing

economies in an era of climate change, hyper-urbanization and Peak Oil re-

opens the debate around the environment and the city, and asks the question

of what cities and societies ‘we’ want to live in. In so doing, critical analysis

moves away from a tacit acceptance of logics of transition as currently (post-

politically) expressed and marketed, and towards a re-engagement with the

city as a space replete with political, cultural and economic potential for its

inhabitants, and shaped by its inhabitants.

In turn, a concern with the eco-city as a space which can be prised open and

re-interpreted necessitates detailed and critical engagements with the place-

specific mechanisms of regulation, reclamation, dispossession and the like

which often enable the construction of these flagship projects of eco-

urbanism. Building on and leveraging a wide tradition of critical urban enquiry

in this vein, especially in urban political ecology (Bickerstaff et al. 2009; Cook

and Swyngedouw 2012; Harvey 1996), this will allow for investigation and

exposition of the production and reproduction of environmental and socio-

economic inequalities in and around eco-city projects, thus moving on from a

needed, but at times limited and technocratic focus on the techno-social

specifics of the eco-city (from infrastructure networks, to master plans and

economic development targets), and towards a critical analysis of the ways in

which certain ‘ways of doing’ (legal, political, cultural, economic, technical and

industrial) lend themselves to the constant reproduction of inequalities.

However, the paper has also argued that there is a pressing need to engage

with the geographies and biographies of the armies of workers who represent

the oft-unseen side of the eco-urban coin. These workers – often displaced at

the end of specific eco-city projects – represent the blood and sweat on which

eco-cities are built. Scholarship on eco-urbanism can usefully interrogate and

bring to light the biographies of these workers, thus shedding light on the

individuals who built these cities, brick by brick. It is at this juncture that

research on eco-urbanism becomes concerned with urban environmental

justice.

Pragmatically, a critical approach focused on radical alternatives will also

focus on how workers’ conditions can be improved, and on how these workers

can be empowered to visibly engage with the urban environments which they

are charged with constructing: whether through political action, proposals to

change policies and economic conditions, or through enabling workers to gain

a stake in the cities they are building through the provision of adequate

housing and appropriate conditions for workers within eco-cities. This

represents a radical move away from eco-cities conceptualised as ‘eco-

enclaves’, and signifies recognition of the urban construction worker as a key

and worthwhile citizen in the city.

In conclusion, this paper has argued for analysis of the juncture between the

emergence of green capitalism and the materialisation of flows of capital in

spatially uneven eco-city projects justified through recourse to notions of crisis

and a need for continued green growth. In so doing, the paper has argued for

critical attention to be directed to the geographies of eco-urbanism: analysis of

eco-city projects shows that they often form highly visible ‘green’

excrescences of ‘industrial capitalism as usual’, emerald islands in highly oil-

addicted wider regional contexts (Huber 2008). It is essential to analyse the

various mechanisms – from the workings of land markets, to land reclamation,

appropriation and dispossession – through which these projects are

envisioned and materialised. Finally, the paper has called for a focus on the

everyday geographies and built environments of the less visible, but still

extensive and certainly highly temporary and fluid ‘workers’ cities’ that

accompany every eco-city project. This will continue the strong tradition, from

Engels (1987/1845) onwards, in urban studies and cognate disciplines, of

focusing on the lived conditions of emerging cities. In contributing to this vein,

as urban scholars we can start paying some attention to the lived, everyday

experience of construction workers in the shadow of eco-urbanism.

Finally, an argument that knits together the issues discussed in the paper is

the contention that critical urban scholars can not only analyse but also

propose and aid in the enactment of radical and critical alternatives to current

iterations of eco-urbanism. This is a crucial issue: one that has no easy

answers. However, as seen above, it is clear that eco-cities and other

iterations of eco-urbanism both link to systemic and transnational issues such

as climate change, and to lived realities which are much smaller in scale, the

‘street level’ pointed to by Mohammad and Sidaway (2012) in their analysis of

workers constructing Abu Dhabi’s world city image (see also Malecki and

Ewers 2007). Nonetheless, if eco-cities are conceptualised as experimental

urban environments, then as citizens and scholars we are called to do just

that: experiment. This is because ‘experimentation...undoubtedly offers up a

potential space for more playful or insurgent political engagements’ (Evans

2011:233). Politically, this is a crucial opportunity, because ‘it matters who

gets to experiment, and how’ (Ibid:233). In conjunction with communities of

citizens and workers, this could mean different things: from a valorisation of

alternative eco-developments, to support for local initiatives and interests, to

investigation of policies and processes which will enable more grassroots

innovation, sustainable urban living, and resilience.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Erik Swyngedouw and Alex Loftus for comments on an earlier

version of this paper, to three reviewers for their supportive and constructive

comments, to Ping Gao for translation, and to Jenny Pickerill and Andrew

Kent for their editorial assistance.

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