Of the Eco-City

February 12, 2012 Sze Paper/ work in Progress PLEASE DO NOT COPY OF CITE THIS PAPER WITHOUT PERMISSION This draft paper is submitted to the for Berkeley Environmental Politics Workshop to be discussed on March 2, 2012 Contexts for this paper: This paper (working title: “The Work of the Eco-City”) is being co-written with Gerardo Gambirazzio (Postdoctoral Researcher, USEPA) for an edited collection entitled Situating Sustainability, which is the product of a workshop convened by Anne Rademacher from NYU held in Abu Dhabi in November 2010. The main questions of the conference and volume are: How are notions and practices of sustainability defined, cultivated, and assessed at global scales, while also shaped by specific contexts? What are the consequences, of the movement of sustainability knowledge and technologies across diverse, and often assymetrical, social, political, and cultural conditions? I co- authored (with Gambirazzio) a shorter version, called: “Eco-Cities without Ecology: Constructing Ideologies, Valuing Nature” for an edited volume entitled Resilience in Urban Ecology and Design: Linking Theory and Practice for Sustainable Cities (edited by Pickett, Cadenasso and McGrath). Basically, the italics represent the material that will be expanded in this new version. I haven’t yet decided which parts to include from Dongtan, to symmetrically match the Masdar material. The Dongtan research comes from my book project (Fantasy Islands), which focuses on flows, fears and fantasies in contemporary urban and global environmental culture, with a sustained look at Shanghai in China. In it, I analyze Dongtan, a failed eco-city proposal, within multiple ideological and spatial contexts, including Chongming Island, suburban development, and the 2011 Shanghai World Exposition. Note: I showed this paper to my colleague Diana Davis (who knows this series well), and she told me it was too short, so I (neurotically) decided to add, my 5th chapter from my book, which is on the Shanghai World Expo. This material, which begins on page 13 of this document serves as additional context for the actual paper under discussion (YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS BUT IT’S THERE IF YOU ARE INTERESTED). Basically in both the paper on Masdar and Dongtan, and the book on Shanghai more broadly, I’m interested in the similar themes of the ideological “work” of particular iterations of eco-cities, ecological futurism, etc. The “Work” of the Eco-City (working title) Introduction In the last 5 years, prominent large-scale “eco-city” development proposals have emerged around the globe. While the development of eco-cities is in itself not a new trend, what is new is how the discourses of eco-city building and its concomitant ideas of sustainability 1 have developed and transformed, as well as the mechanisms by which eco-cities are developed, promoted, built (or unbuilt). “Eco-cities” has been applied to a number of different projects that embrace a broad array of ideological and ecological goals. This paper outlines the ideologies embedded in contemporary eco-city development through a case-study approach, focusing on two high-profile eco-cities in the United Arab Emirates and China: what values are enacted in the eco-city? Elsewhere, we show that this iteration of eco-city development is based on an ideological world-view akin to green, state-sponsored capitalism, and “eco-cities” are less about “ecological cities” than about enacting and supporting pro-capitalist ideologies, albeit with a green veneer (Sze and Gambirazzio, forthcoming). Here, we examine how neoliberal narratives of environmental clean production (zero carbon emissions) processes have shaped the creation of eco-cities, thus redefining the interaction of humans with nature. The contemporary narratives of the eco-city make a case for particular processes of consumption of nature. We analyze the “affective” properties of these particular eco- cities. What kinds of emotions, feelings, and aspirations are enacted within these eco- cities? Through a close reading of plans, promotional videos and experiences in both places, we argue that this iteration of transnational top-down eco-city development by its very definition- rejects any notion of local or situated sustainability. The two eco-city proposals we examine include one located in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates called Masdar and another one in Shanghai, China known as Dongtan. What ties Dongtan and Masdar together are their social, political and economic contexts. Both emerge from politically authoritarian regimes. Both of these eco-cities were supposed to be entirely zero-waste and carbon-neutral, and lauded in the global media. Both failed to reach their ambitious goals, in part because the following observation. If the central operating metaphor of ecology is about “interconnected” systems, eco-cities metaphorically (and often practically) fail because they erase interconnectedness in a crucial sense (Cadenasso et al. 2006). Contemporary eco-cities are conceptualized as an enclosed space through which to measure ecological virtue, such as zero-waste, and low carbon emissions. In sharp contrast to eco-city proponents who argue that the only way to measure inputs and outputs is through containing the eco-city into a particular place, theorists from urban socio-nature, radical geography, and political ecology reject any separation of the “urban” sphere from the “ecological,” and hence, the eco-city from the city itself. Thus, ultimately, we suggest that embedded within the ideology of the eco-city lie the seeds of its own failure. Although Masdar and Dongtan failed, the ideologies that shaped them remain ascendant, and thus important to analyze. Specifically, we argue that contemporary eco-city narratives present a new process of the consumption of nature, drawn from ecological modernization discourses. 2 Ecological modernization discourses are a set of concepts used to analyze environmental policies and institutions developed to solve environmental problems in a capitalist society (Mol and Spaargaren 2000; Spaargaren and Mol 1992). Central to the concept of ecological modernization is the idea that ecological crises can be overcome through technological advancement. For the proponents of ecological modernization, ecological crises are overcome via the efficiency of the market through economic growth, and technological advancement. Critics of ecological modernization argue that these ideas inevitably lead to a society whose environment is unsustainable in that human well-being depends fully on corporate sustainability schemes (Fisher and Freudenburg 2010; York and Rosa ; Young 2000). One of those sustainability schemes is the development of the eco-city. Although technologically laudable, the eco-cities analyzed in this paper, fall short specifically of addressing concerns about political governance and distribution of ecological burdens (Martinez-Alier 2007). Defining “Value” in the Eco-City: This section describes the evolution of the eco-city, from its countercultural roots, to its current iteration in Masdar and Dongtan. “Eco-city” was first coined by Richard Register in his 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley. Register is the founder of EcoCity Builders, an organization that is the hub of the ecocity movement in the United States, and an early founder of the International Eco City Conference Series. Since the term emerged, many initiatives have fallen under the rubric of eco-city development. In the U.S. context, eco- city development is allied with its early theoreticians, such as Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri and his acolytes (of whom Register is one). Soleri is the creator of a community called “Arcosanti” in Arizona, which began in 1970, and which is based on his concept of “Arcology,” what he calls the fusion of architecture and the ecology. From the countercultural roots in the 1960’s, eco-city proponents in the U.S. context in the last two decades have focused on green building and technological innovation at a relatively local scale (e.g. the building or street-level). In the last decade, the eco-city concept has gone global, and radically increased its scale from the local to the urban. This shift is evident in the Masdar and Dongtan projects, both of which aimed to create eco- cities where no previous city existed. One of the main characteristics of both projects is that their socio-political context is tightly controlled by their respective governing political structures. The question of why the United Arab Emirates and China are the site of the most seemingly aggressive “eco-city” development is a complex one. However, our immediate concern is to consider how humans and nature interact in these new urban spaces through an analysis of the ecological principles promoted by these two eco-cities. What are these principles and how are they deployed to overcome the environmental crisis in an urban space? 3 In what follows, we turn to the concepts dominant in contemporary discourses of eco- cities. The work of ecological economics, widely used in the development of the eco-city, conceptualizes how physical nature is transformed, first from nature to ecological functions, and then to production and consumption/ leisure functions. This transformation takes place through advancement of techniques of measurement and quantification that becomes part of an ideological construct that assigns an equivalent economic value to nature (Heinzerling and Ackerman 2002; Pagiola 2008; Sagoff 2000, 2011; Turner et al. 2003). This process is central

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