Eco-urbanism and the Eco-city, or,

Denying the Right to the City?

Federico Caprotti
Department of Geography, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK;
federico.caprotti@kcl.ac.uk

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, first
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. Second,
the paper investigates the foundation of eco-city projects on notions of crisis and scarcity.
Third, 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

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1286 Antipode

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 2013; Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013;
Evans 2011; Rapoport 2014). 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 operationalised 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 “exper-
iments” 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 incon-
testable, 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 manipu-
lation 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

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

in San Francisco Bay (Joss 2011; Joss et al 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 through-
out 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 tran-
sition towards a “low carbon” economy.
This highlights the role of the eco-city as a “technological fix” based on an assem-
blage of discourses around the desirability of a transition to green capitalism, and
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, quoting Žižek, 2006:188) argued:
This is a politics that “legitimizes itself by means of a direct reference to the scientific sta-
tus of its knowledge” … 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 the intensification of environmental and eco-
nomic inequalities in the geographies of eco-urbanism; the deployment of discur-
sive strategies of crisis which construct eco-cities and new, decarbonised iterations
of capitalism as the only hope of our collective urban future; 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”; 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 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 urbanisation, climate change and Peak Oil have
focused on emerging economies. This is presented as appropriate for a variety of

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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 en-
vironmental externalities through emissions and contamination are increasing rap-
idly 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 despoli-
ation. As Kim and Turner (2007:np) 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 migra-
tory flows, and because of the breakneck pace of its rate of urbanisation (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 mi-
gration 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 entrepre-
neurial cities (Wu 2012), the processes of rapid urbanisation 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 in-
security 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 un-
covered 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

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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 cli-
mate 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 dispropor-
tionately 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 capital-
ism 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 investi-
gation of the discursive justification of eco-city projects, and of urban climate
change experiments more broadly, through recourse to constructed notions of cri-
sis. 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 in-
terventions 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 mobilisation of ideas of crisis, and associated notions such as scar-
city, 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 inter-
esting 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 inter-
ests 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.

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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” (2013:35), 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 argued, urbanisation 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 problem-
atic of industrialisation and environmental degradation can be reconciled with the
imperative for sustained and rapid economic growth. With their promise of eco-
nomic 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 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 modern-
ization” (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 spe-
cifically (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 (SEZs) 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:

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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 compa-
nies 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) investi-
gated the link between expropriation, displacement and the generation of inequal-
ities 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 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 pro-
jects currently underway in the area of the Bohai Rim in North-East China, compris-
ing 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 et al 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 industrialisation and which were the direct result of centralised eco-
nomic planning during the Mao era. This means that the Bohai Rim region not only
faces rapid urbanisation and increasing levels of economic and industrial develop-
ment, but also a rapidly deteriorating environment: “natural resource shortages and
environmental pollution have been caused by the incompatibility of heavy and chem-
ical 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-urbanisation and environmental despolia-
tion in the Bohai Rim, two eco-city projects are currently being marketed as emerald

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islands of sustainable urban living and green economic development amidst the
particulate-laden, surrounding murk. Tianjin eco-city, China’s flagship eco-city pro-
ject (officially known as the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City) is being constructed
near Binhai, on the coast near Tianjin (Caprotti 2014). Less than 40 km 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) SEZ, and Caofeidian eco-city is located between the new deep-
water port of Caofeidian, and Jingtang, a large coal port. Quite apart from any en-
vironmental 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 et al 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 industrialisation
strategy based on heavy industries.
Tianjin eco-city, however, 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 industrialisation and eco-
nomic 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 inter-
national relations networks due to its status as a joint venture (JV) between the gov-
ernments 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 de-
veloping the project is the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Investment and Devel-
opment Corporation (SSTECIDC). The firm is a joint venture between a Chinese
consortium led by Tianjin TEDA Investment Holding Company (Tianjin TEDA),

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

conglomerate. Both consortia hold 50% of SSTECIDC (Keppel Corporation press re-
lease, 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 internationalisation 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 consump-
tion 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 oper-
ate. 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 materialise 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 alien-
ated 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 technol-
ogies 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

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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 mecha-
nisms 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 ur-
ban projects as somehow exceptional or as shining examples of twenty-first 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 hous-
ing 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 mi-
grants 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 con-
struction 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 con-
spicuous 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.

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Eco-urbanism and the Eco-city 1295

As Cugurullo (2013) argued in the case of Masdar, the eco-city is primarily a busi-
ness and, in the case of eco-urbanism, sustainability most often means economic
sustainability of a particular, neoliberal and deregulated kind. In China, for exam-
ple, land use rights and land ownership are separate. While the government retains
ownership of all land, local governments are able to expropriate land formerly clas-
sified 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 transac-
tions through the conveyance of land use rights in a market affected by local manip-
ulations” (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 vis-
ible 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 signifi-
cant 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 ex-
amples of twenty-first 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 tech-
nologies and services.

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1296 Antipode

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 pro-
jects form a necessarily unstable facet of these ventures, as they settle near con-
struction 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 be-
cause 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 dis-
perse, 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 urbanisation 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, first, in
theoretical debates on eco-urbanism, and second, with the urban worlds being pro-
duced and configured today. With regards to the former, the established and devel-
oping 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 shap-
ing both contemporary urban projects, and the experimental eco-cities of tomor-
row. In terms of the latter, theoretically informed scholarship that moves towards
uncovering the mechanisms and processes of eco-urbanism while displaying a con-
cern with the citizens and workers who populate and build eco-cities can have
broader societal impact.
First, 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

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Eco-urbanism and the Eco-city 1297

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 pre-
supposes 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 con-
texts of communities facing specific risks. This type of critical scholarship, informed
by broader theoretical issues and an understanding of the workings of green capital-
ism 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, propos-
ing specific techno-social solutions, elaborating policy and community “toolkits” for
identifying and dealing with specific climate risks, or enabling context-specific com-
munity 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 mar-
ket 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; Giglioli and Swyngedouw 2008; Loftus
and Lumsden 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.
Third, 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 the-
orists (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 chang-
ing economies in an era of climate change, hyper-urbanisation 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)

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1298 Antipode

expressed and marketed, and towards a re-engagement with the city as a space re-
plete 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 en-
able 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 repro-
duction of environmental and socio-economic inequalities in and around eco-city
projects, thus moving on from a needed, but at times limited and technocratic fo-
cus 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 inequal-
ities. 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 be-
comes 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 capi-
talism 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 ac-
company every eco-city project. This will continue the strong tradition, from Engels

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Eco-urbanism and the Eco-city 1299

(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 sys-
temic 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 po-
tential 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” (2011:233). 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; the three reviewers for their supportive and constructive comments; Ping Gao for the
translated abstract; and Jenny Pickerill and Andrew Kent for their editorial assistance.

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