China's "Eco-City" Dongtan Boasts Organic Farm, Six Wind Turbines, Nothing Else - Gone From Expo Web

[hatrack]

Three years ago, I crossed the world to see it: the site for the world's first eco-city. Shanghai, one of the fastest growing megacities on the planet, was setting aside a giant island in the Yangtze river to create an eco-city for half a million people. British eco-engineers and green-minded architects and town planners were designing the renewably powered, car-free, water-recycling city of Dongtan as a model for the world. And its first 25,000 citizens would be living the good life there in time for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, at which it would be by far the largest exhibit, reached by a new tunnel and bridge.

Well, it is now exactly a year until the start of the Expo. The tunnel and bridge are about to open. But of the eco-city there is nothing except half a dozen wind turbines and an organic farm. No houses, no water taxis, no sewage-recycling plant, no energy park. Nothing. And all mentioned of it has disappeared from the Expo website (slogan: "Better city; better life").

This week, Peter Head, the man behind the project at the London-based consulting engineers Arup, who drew up the master plan, told me his clients at the city's Shanghai Industrial Investment Company had "gone quiet. We just don't know if anything will happen or when. The project office is shut."

There is a persistent rumour that the project has been a casualty of the political fallout from the conviction of the city boss Chen Liangyu, jailed last year for corruption. Not so, says Head. The problems are more fundamental.

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/23/greenwash-dongtan-ecocity

[XemaSab]

1. Greenwash: The dream of the first eco-city was built on a fiction

That was the original headline.

Truth in advertising.

[XemaSab]

2. And PS

Cow manure, when it comes out, is typically green. x(

[phantom power]

3. Potemkin eco-topia.

[GliderGuider]

4. When I'm not singing Kumbaya

I still sometimes think grimly to myself that most ecotopias ... hell, most environmental projects ... are Potemkin phantasms, whether their authors are aware of that fact or not.

Then I take another tab of soma and everything is fine again :hippie: