A Tale of Four Cities: Chapter 1

Epoch of Belief: Dongtan

The Story
The saga of Dongtan began in May, 2004, when consultants from McKinsey contacted Alejandro Gutierrez of Arup soliciting advice on a new development with the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC). The development was slated for the large alluvial Chongming Island at the mouth of the Yangtze River just north of Shanghai. The catch was that Chongming was one of the largest tracts of undeveloped wetlands in the region and a key habitat for migratory birds stopping over in the Yangtze River Delta; this sensitive habitat was exactly the reason that McKinsey needed Arup’s expertise. Though this was a new venture for Arup as well, Gutierrez and the firm were eager to accept as the potential of creating a landmark development in such an environmentally important location awed them [1].

After extensive field visits and nights of pounding their heads, drawing, redrawing, and creating plan after plan, the team at Arup finally came up with a new concept in city design: Dongtan Eco-City. In 2005, SIIC officially contracted Arup and formally announced the project. Under the pioneering vision of Peter Head, the gentleman I mentioned in my previous post who so eloquently described the “Ecological Age,” and the team at Arup, a vision was born of a medium density self-sufficient urban haven. The magnificent picture they painted was one of transformation for an 8,400 hectare Ramsar site with no infrastructure. From this land of agricultural fields and pristine wetlands, they envisioned what they called a “town of three villages” built with both a plan for the future to become carbon neutral and a mind for the past recalling traditional Chinese values [2].

From an environmental standpoint, the city took as its main agenda creation of a buffer city with swaths of green space, no less than 3.5 km wide, separating the people from the pristine wetlands which were to be preserved [3]. In the urban environment, the mission was not just to create a city powered by renewable energy or one that could boast carbon neutrality—the goal was, as Peter Head described, to create a sustainable city as measured by the ecological footprint of the residents. This meant tackling challenges of resource use ranging from water and energy to food, air and water emissions, and waste disposal. The goal was to create a society which achieved World Wildlife Fund’s predicted target for a sustainable world of 1.9 global hectares per person [4]. For those unfamiliar with the term, an ecological footprint is a measure of the biologically productive land and sea needed to generate the resources necessary for life and render harmless the corresponding waste [5]. To reduce this impact therefore required Arup to incorporate not just renewable energy strategies (notably wind and solar) and zero-emissions transit (both public and electric or hydrogen vehicles) but also stringent water treatment and recycling, waste reuse and recycling, and integration of agricultural productivity into the city fabric. Achieving all of these goals, however, required rethinking the city design and strategies for achieving these targets in the city.

The new city fabric Arup was trying to create required starting from a fresh slate—not just pasting “green” technologies onto an existing city design. However consideration of the technical challenges of achieving such a small footprint while also providing a high quality of life proved too complex for the firm to handle with their existing tools. But this didn’t stop the progress. Instead, they developed a new program called SPeAR to help map out various city layouts and play around with the location of residential, commercial, retail, and natural zones to maximize social benefit while minimizing environmental harm. The resulting plan was, as Roger Wood described, a “linear city” created as a “town of three villages” [2]. The idea was to create three separate but interconnected village centers clustered around a town center. In each village would lie all of the services that residents would need—dining, entertainment, shopping, and even some commercial and office space. The rest of the work space would be located in the town center, less than a ten minute walk from two of the village centers and under 15 minutes from the third. Smart, eco-friendly transit and pedestrian paths would connect these centers, creating an interconnected urban oasis.

By virtue of playing with the layout of the city until they had reached this model, the team at Arup had already set out on the path to low or no carbon emissions. The layout was chosen because it preserved the existing wetlands and green space, minimized the need for private transport, and enhanced the social benefit of the site thereby encouraging people to walk rather than drive even if they would be using hydrogen or electric vehicles. From there, achieving a low ecological footprint meant smart design in the buildings of the site and ultimately pasting on the high-technology to get the last mile to hit the targets. Together, these could create a city which reduced carbon 40-60% compared to a conventional city of a similar size [2]. As the master planner but not developer or architect of each building, Arup faced an interesting dilemma: though they had created an inherently low-carbon plan, the wrong technologies and buildings or careless design on the part of the developers could still destroy their ecological vision.

But not all was lost—they still had control over the infrastructural systems for the whole city. This gave Arup the opportunity to explore systems-level solutions to sustainability challenges. It meant that rather than leaving the choice of electrical source up to building developers, they could add wind turbines throughout the city as design and energy elements to help ensure that the city was as green as possible. It meant that they could design an innovative waste collection system for the whole town whereby recycling would be effected in the outskirts of the city and whatever could not be recycled would be incinerated to provide district heating; very little would be landfilled. Developers then need only “plug-in” their building to the heat source and without trying would have offset a significant emissions load from combustion for heating. Water recycling and reuse would also be integrated at the city level with treatment plants strategically placed to optimize collection, distribution, and sanitary discharge [2].

Yet as any designer or engineer will tell you, it is a big challenge to manage energy systems sustainably from only a top-down standpoint. If demand is not also controlled, then sustainable energy becomes exorbitantly expensive to produce—more solar panels and wind turbines are needed at a high cost to provide energy for peak loads or even just the large business-as-usual base load. Yet demand management cannot be handled simply by smart infrastructural planning. Instead, Arup turned to the only tool in its master planning arsenal capable of ensuring that subsequent architects and developers would consider this aspect of sustainability when working on the project: key performance indicators (KPIs). As the planner, Arup had the power, with the blessing of SIIC, to add in requirements on each plot of land in the master plan for energy use, energy production, water use, and land use. This meant that any developer awarded a plot for development would not only have to conform to local building and energy codes, but also to the key performance indicators laid out in the master plan for the plot. In the case of Dongtan, this would require going above and beyond the codes and utilizing zero energy building principles [6]. Furthermore, these indicators were not the same for every plot. With their growing knowledge and new tools, Arup’s planners looked at each plot and simulated what they believed a reasonable expectation was for hot water production, renewable energy production, energy use reduction, daylighting, and other building performance aspects. Buildings were required also to be mid-rise so as to optimize daylighting, solar hot water, and efficiency gains from central systems. For each plot they integrated these metrics, the sum of which across all of the plots would achieve their sustainability goals—a 64% reduction in energy use, 83% reduction in landfilled waste, and a 43% decrease in water consumption compared to a conventional development of a similar size [2]. If developers were ambitious and exceeded the KPIs, all the better—this would help make up for variability in user behavior and ensure Dongtan would be sustainable [7].

With the KPIs in place and a city planned with a smart layout and sustainable infrastructure, Arup’s target was in sight. Yet they were not quite done. They wanted to sell the whole sustainable lifestyle, not just a carbon neutral and water-saving city. This meant including a host of walkable parks and green corridors with breathtaking views of the river converging with the sea. Curving paths flanked by vertical axis wind turbines provided a green eco-technical oasis, providing residents the opportunity to relax and understand their relation to nature and impact on it.

Second, a plan was formed to ban conventional cars. If you chose to drive to Dongtan, you’d have to check the gas guzzler at the door and hop aboard the city’s public transit or take a deep breath and exercise your legs to get to your destination. A light rail line connecting Shanghai with Dongtan was planned and scheduled for completion in 2009 with the idea of obviating the need for cars. After all, with the expansions to Shanghai’s already great metro system planned for completion by the Expo and for 2020, who would need a car to get to or around Shanghai? Finally, Arup put the final piece of the green lifestyle puzzle in: urban farming. As the project would remove a fair amount of productive farmland from use for the sake of development, something had to be done to replace it. Plus this would eliminate carbon emissions from food production at a distance from the city by producing large amounts of locally grown food. Large warehouses of several floors would grow food in artificial conditions, each encompassing 9 hectares of land but representing 1,000 hectares of flat land. Forcing a natural process indoors is not easy, so hydroponics and other innovative growing techniques would be the key to success of this endeavor. But should it succeed, the impact would be to complete the ecological lifestyle, addressing sustainability from an energy, carbon, water, biodiversity, waste, and food standpoint [8].

When added together, these solutions created a vision of a new city paradigm where people interacted daily with nature, understood and minimized their impact, and felt the importance of careful action in every aspect of their lives. The Chinese garden philosophy of man as a part of nature, not a dominating force, was given a modern makeover complete with solar panels, wind turbines, and state of the art modeling to incorporate natural lighting and ventilation in ways the Chinese masters only knew by intuition. For all its innovation and glory, however, the result still fell a hair short of Arup’s goal of meeting WWF’s sustainable footprint target. Clocking in at 2.3 gha per person, Dongtan still could not be classed as “sustainable” by the definition which Arup sought. However this did not make the project a failure by any means—the result was still a reduction of more than 50% from the 5.8 gha global average and provided a solid foundation for one day achieving the 1.9 gha laid out by WWF. With the foundation of a solid plan, it was only a matter of time before technology caught up with the innovators of Dongtan and provided the final push to drive the footprint down to the sustainable level.

Rightfully so, the plan and framework of Dongtan were lauded by the international press and politicians. Tony Blair and Wen Jiabao remarked publicly on the project, calling it a success for China and the world. The project was presented at venues around the world by Peter Head and the Chinese boasted about it at the United Nations World Urban Form as the first of four such projects to be designed and built by Arup [6]. England’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown even announced in January 2008 that Dongtan would be a model for up to 10 eco-towns in Britain [9]. An office was set up on the island in the midst of the wetlands and farmlands to alert tourists and locals to the project and ten large wind turbines were erected as a monument proclaiming the coming of the new city. With the World Expo and its theme of “Better City, Better Life” just a few short years away, the developers decided that Phase I of Dongtan was to be the centerpiece of the show—a real, working example of a better city providing a better life for its residents, human and animal [10].

Yet as sometimes happen, politics interfered and things took a turn for the worse…

Dongtan’s Downfall
Managing a project in the realm of Chinese politics, especially at the local level, is an intricate chess match requiring the right manipulation of guanxi, or connections, moving with the proper degree of discretion, and pushing the pieces at the opportune moment when a project meets the goals of those with the power to promote the politican. Oh, and a few nights in a backroom swimming with bai zhou doesn’t hurt either. These are the keys, from what I could glean, to getting a pet project like Dongtan through the proper channels. Failure on one of these levels, and the project could come crashing down. The September 2006 arrest of the project’s main patron, Shanghai Vice Mayor Chen Liangyu on corruption, embezzlement, and fraud charges provided this crippling blow to Dongtan. For rising politicians scrambling to take Mr. Chen’s place and rise above his status, even though Dongtan was not implicated in the sentencing of Mr. Chen on April 11, 2008, the project was poisoned. The guanxi was gone, and no one was willing to take up the torch for a project so closely associated with Shanghai’s Lucifer. As one anonymous source claimed, “Dongtan is a white elephant. There has been a lot of talking on Dongtan for the past four years but very little action. As it was the pet project of Chen Liangyu, I think it will happen later rather than sooner” [11].

As talk dragged on, farmers were asked to move and land was cleared, but the beginning of construction was pushed back first for two years from 2007 to 2009 with Phase I completion scheduled for 2012. By 2009, though, construction was not to be as SIIC had indefinitely put the project on hold, allowing construction and planning permits to lapse in the process. With the delays to the eco-city, the light rail to the island was also indefinitely delayed and so 2009 saw the opening of a vehicular bridge but no public transit aside from buses to Chongming Island [11]. Unceremoniously, all mention of Dongtan was stripped from materials, websites, and publications related to the Expo so as not to poison Shanghai’s debut to the world stage as well. The little visitor’s center proudly sitting in the shadows of the windmills was closed and boarded up, no longer heralding the arrival of the ecological age in Shanghai [12]. Today, the only reference to Dongtan available from China’s official websites is to the Dongtan Ecological Wetland Park, a free attraction that provides a natural respite from the concrete canyons of Shanghai.

The reversal of Dongtan’s publicity from heaps of praise in 2006 and 2007 to complete silence in 2008 and 2009 opened the floodgates for criticism and investigation by environmental skeptics into why the project failed. In popular and online media hope turned to hate as commenters accused SIIC, Shanghai, and Arup of greenwashing and overreaching their abilities. Simon Montlake of the Christian Science Monitor accused the project of trying to green China too quickly. For a country with such a drastic need of floorspace over the next 20 years and energy codes and knowledge still lacking, he viewed the project as trying to do too much too quickly for the Chinese market. Developers do not hold onto projects very long after completion and therefore do not reap the benefits from green investments. Montlake argued that without incentives for the developers to go green, there is little chance of projects like Dongtan gaining widespread popularity in the building community in China [13]. As I’ve learned in my research, the market is not yet developed to the point where sustainable buildings command a higher rent premium as is the case in America and Europe. Though an eco-city would likely command a premium for its “green lifestyle,” the amount is unmeasurable for such an unprecedented project—especially one so far from downtown Shanghai—and therefore would present risk to developers.

Another commenter took the opposite stance, claiming that Dongtan failed because it was not ambitious enough. The implied argument here is that perhaps if it had been more progressive, there would have been greater support for the project and it could have weathered the loss of its primary backer [12]. Others took the opportunity to cite the environmental question mark of building a city so close to sensitive wetlands. Though Arup had taken this into account in its master plans, commenters wasted no time in recalling the idea of paving paradise, especially when in 2008 the black stork, of which only 1,000 are left in the wild, was spotted on the island for the first time since 1929 [14]. Though it is unlikely that this contributed to the project’s demise, it was still worthy of consideration, at least by the press.

Commenters took the opportunity to attack the social side of Dongtan as well. Dai Xingyi, a professor at Fudan University, claimed that a “zero-emission city is pure commercial hype…You can’t expect some technology to both offer you a luxurious and comfortable life, and save energy at the same time. That’s just a dream” [10]. Mr. Dai continued that, “True zero-emissions comes with a big price tag. I doubt anyone would be willing to pay for it” [15]. Building on this as a haven for the rich and educated, locals felt ostracized and left out by the project. Not only did they have to give up their land, but they said they would supply food to the city but not live there as, in the words of farmer Pan Meiqin, “we are not educated and we would be useless” [15]. For these citizens, the definition of “ecological living” was described as a place with more trees [14]. Others complained that the project simply wasn’t Chinese—when most of China’s populations will live in urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing by 2030, what was the purpose of building a decidedly less dense, less compact city as a “model” for the future? It certainly was not a replicable model for Shanghai and other big cities [16].

For all of the noise made by commenters over the social aspects of the problem, a potentially more plausible contributor to Dongtan’s downfall came from those who examined the project’s economics. Some claimed that the 1.5 billion price tag for Phase I was too high to be realistic [17]. Others believed that the project would have 30-40% higher costs to occupants than comparable conventional developments and thus would not be attractive except to the wealthiest residents looking for a summer home near Shanghai. While Arup argued that the long-term benefit would outweigh the higher upfront cost, stories surfaced of internal disagreements between SIIC and Arup as to who would foot the bill for the costly ecological development [10]. One person familiar with the situation was quoted as saying that Arup believed they had been brought in as a consultant and master planner for the funding agency while SIIC thought they were getting a free eco-city [18].

The real reason behind the demise of Dongtan may never be known to the press. It matters not, however, as these commenters got plenty of publication and enjoyment out of investigating every angle and sharpening their frustration and channeling it into a careful dismantling of Dongtan’s image and hype. If any good came out of this dissection of the project and the resulting disillusionment spawned by the critics, it was the exposition of a number of issues glossed over in previous laudatory articles on the city. Building on this criticism and the words of Arup and others who praised and believed in the project, it is possible to draw lessons from Dongtan that may benefit future eco-city planning.

What Dongtan Can Teach Us
Expo 2010 closed three weeks ago, and Dongtan is still just a distant dream for a better city. But just because the project has not come to fruition does not mean that it is a failure. As a Natural Resources Defense Council representative told me, even if these projects never make it off the drawing board, they “are important because they get people to begin thinking about eco-cities” [19]. In the case of Dongtan, this has been especially true as the project has both provided lofty goals by which other eco-cities are measured and examples of perils that projects must avoid to be successful. I want now to take a look at some aspects of each category. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and I encourage the reader to consider other lessons from Dongtan based on the history I have presented, the links below, and any personal research that curiosity may spur.

Perhaps the single most important lesson from Dongtan is that sustainability begins at the master planning stage. By integrating sustainable design principles up front, the folks at Arup proved that it was possible to effect 40-60% reductions in resource use and carbon emissions. They chose to give equal consideration in planning to environmental, economic, and social goals. This set up a mindset whereby they designed and redesigned outside of traditional rules until they came up with a plan that worked. While design and redesign is always a part of architecture and planning, it usually is done mostly at the conceptual stage. Expertise on environmental issues may be applied, but quantitative measures are more difficult to implement in iterative design simply due to the time and labor intensity. For Arup, though meeting their targets was important enough to create assessment tools to ensure that the solutions they came up with were optimal and met the planning and infrastructure targets they set out.

The idea of setting goals for design up front is really a key point from which other projects can learn. Arup created from the beginning Key Performance Indicators for each focus area of the plan and then broke these down to the level of individual plots. By doing this, Arup took away the ability of individual developers to decide how sustainable to make each building—they instead mandated the levels that had to be achieved. Use of KPIs in this manner is something that all master planning projects can take and adapt. Arup certainly has done this—I was told that they don’t even use the word “eco-city” anymore in their master planning projects internally. Instead they just do the practices that they developed for Dongtan. For instance, a development in Beijing will be the first in the world to incorporate extensive energy and water KPIs for each plot if it gets approved by the Central Committee. Mind you, this is no small feat in China where master plans are finalized by Local Design Institutes that lack the capacity to model performance indicators to the level of Arup or other firms [7]. The fact that this idea, which has the ability to be integrated into numerous projects worldwide, and the associated modeling is a product of Dongtan makes the eco-city, in my opinion, not a failure even if it never gets built.

Another consideration regarding these KPIs is that while many of the reductions in emissions and environmental damages from Dongtan came from smart infrastructural planning that is difficult to implement wholesale in existing cities, KPIs can help make gradual change possible. KPIs integrated with a good city master plan can help existing cities change over time to a more sustainable mold. Fast growing existing cities change infrastructure and development between 1 and 5% per year [20]. At that rate, a comprehensive, well-considered, adaptable plan can transform a city from its business-as-usual case to a low-carbon model in 20-50 years (optimistically). KPIs can help ensure that the plan works as developers and city leaders change. The KPIs will continue to inform development and track it toward a logical state of sustainability without pushing projects beyond what they can achieve. The KPIs must only be created once and reviewed every few years to be effective thereby reducing the burden on planners to reinvent the wheel with regard to sustainability each time a project is proposed. So to those who claim Dongtan is not a sustainable model because it does not look like a Chinese city, I must agree, but I think also digging a little deeper, Dongtan has important lessons for existing cities in China and elsewhere.

One other important topic that comes out of a discussion about planning and KPIs is that sustainability must be integrated up front as it was in Dongtan. This is nothing new to many planners, but too often it seems that sustainability, especially in China, is an afterthought for developers and building owners. I heard several times in my meetings that once a building had been designed, an owner would turn and ask for LEED to be added on simply so he could get the branding for marketing. While LEED, BREEAM, GreenMark, and other rating systems do lend themselves to being commoditized in this fashion, their intent and true spirit is to catalyze thinking on sustainability. Like Dongtan, they seek to promote the environment as an important consideration throughout the design process. Though Dongtan was to be a costly project, it would have been much more so if Arup had designed a traditional city and then tried to “fix” it by slapping on solar fields, wind turbines, and water reclamation plants. Laying the infrastructure up front is very important. If you don’t believe this from the Dongtan example, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce experienced similar cost savings by including an extra set of pipes when they had to redo their plumbing to carry graywater. Though they didn’t have the money for the graywater system at the time, it was much cheaper to put in the pipes when they were redoing the other piping anyway rather than tear up the wall again later. In the end, when they did get a graywater system, the cost was significantly less and paid off in less than a year [21]. As the Dubai Chamber found, having a long-term plan is key to making “green” save green (and red and blue depending on where you are!). It is more economically and environmentally sustainable to plan ahead and can help ensure on both a building and city scale that updates occur when they are most feasible. After all, the most sustainable and efficient development is not doing what you don’t have to.

Another lesson to be learned from the Dongtan project is that the key to success lies in having a large network of stakeholders. Students who took Tropical Forests: Policy and Practice with me at Harvey Mudd College may remember the lecture from Paul Steinberg about building a network of stakeholders across geographic, political, social, and economic levels to ensure that your support would be a web—if one link fails, the rest will support it. Dongtan is the perfect example of what happens when a project does not have this varied support. When Mr. Chen fell from grace, Dongtan was doomed. With only foreign backers at that point, there was no way the project could succeed in the closely controlled political atmosphere of China. There was not even local support for the project in the country. If you recall, locals felt they would not be worthy of living in the development and therefore avoided it and all discussion of it. This is not the way to build a small project let alone a city. In this I think the blame can be placed on Mr. Chen, SIIC, and the Shanghai government. Publicity for the project was limited to garnering praise for the country and municipality from foreign officials—it was a dog and pony show. They never sought commercial or public interest or investment in the project on a wide scale. Had they done so, then the fall of Mr. Chen may not have left Dongtan and Arup stranded without public support, buy-in from companies interested in locating in Dongtan, central government support, and NGO support. The lesson here is to bring in multiple partners early on to ensure that a project gets started well, accounts for everyone’s interests, and continues even if some of the stakeholders waver or falter.

One subpoint to make here comes from an old adage: “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” With the amount of publicity Shanghai, SIIC, and Arup drew to Dongtan with their presentations and pronouncements hailing a new ecological age in China, they set themselves up for the harsh criticism endured when the project stalled. Had an adequate stakeholder network been present, perhaps the hype would have been justified considering that the project would have been on more stable footing, but even then it is questionable whether the publicity was warranted considering that construction was still far off when the hype began. For such a pioneering project, the hype may have been unavoidable, which underscores even more the necessity of a strong network to keep the project from failing under the spotlight.

Perhaps a second cautionary tale is warranted here as well again thanks to the decisions of the landowner. Given the abundance of land around Shanghai, I think it is worth questioning the wisdom of locating the city on Chongming Island. Considering its distance from Shanghai is greater than some other available land and that it was on an alluvial island home to an estuarine environment and numerous waterbirds, why would it be selected for development? Consideration should perhaps be given more thoroughly to alternate locations when picking the site of a project, especially an eco-city. In this respect, Arup did the best they could with the resources they were handed. However wetland preservation in city development is not as sustainable as not touching the wetlands at all. No one can really know the impact that locating a city 3.5 km from the bird habitat might have—perhaps none, perhaps some. So rather than risk this, perhaps a better option would have been to look at any one of a number of older manufacturing sites around Shanghai for remediation and redevelopment into town clusters for housing and work. The agriculture then may not have been as obvious, but that is an easier problem than quantifying the effect a new city might have on neighboring wetland habitats.

One last lesson to be pulled from Dongtan is that of taking a holistic approach to sustainability. Often planners, designers, and operators get caught up in the idea of energy efficiency or carbon footprint and forget that sustainability, as Arup clearly demonstrated, is about a lifestyle in the end, not just one or two metrics. In the end, as one friend in Shanghai put it, sustainability comes down to can you live continuously on a piece of land with the resources available to you? Smart design has the ability to help reduce resource use in every aspect of life by infusing into users principles of sustainability that cannot easily be communicated by the presence of a solar panel or LED light bulb. Infrastructure is key as is the interaction of occupants with nature, daylight, and the sustainable systems driving their world. Arup showed that in a city it was possible to address the whole life-cycle of environmental issues from production of water, food, and energy to end-use management and finally disposal management. Lessons from their approach can be infused into the designs I talked about previously to manage not just energy and water but negative effects from biodiversity loss, agricultural production, and waste disposal. It is important not to get too caught up in LEED, BREEAM, and their requirements and lose sight of the broader picture of sustainability across disciplines.

Dusk for Dongtan?
The history of Dongtan is interesting in its meteoric rise which inspired worldwide hope for the dawn of the “Ecological Age” and its subsequent fall from favor in the environmental community. I hope my assessment did not join the chorus of disgust for Dongtan—I intended merely to present a balanced view of the project and what lessons it can teach for future city planning both in existing and new cities. After all, it is yet too soon to dig the grave of Dongtan. Chongming Island is currently undergoing a revision of its master plan, and as of the most recent iteration, Dongtan still held onto its place at the tip of the island. This means that in time there is still hope for this green city to emerge from the fields of the island [7]. Even if it eventually gets written out of the plan, the spirit of Dongtan and the lessons it holds both for smart design principles and avoiding the perils of a prominent project will live on. For those who have already written off Dongtan as a failure, I remind you that I could fill a whole page with quotes about failure all of which boil down to this: it is from our failures that we learn the most. So whether Dongtan succeeds or not is perhaps not as important as ensuring that for a first attempt at a completely sustainable city we learn from the good and bad and ensure the success of subsequent projects. That at least is Arup’s approach, and is perhaps one of the reasons they are still a global leader in sustainable design. After all, when has anything ever worked properly the first time?

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[1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.05/feat_popup.html
[2] http://www.arup.com/_assets/_download/8CFDEE1A-CC3E-EA1A-25FD80B2315B50FD.pdf
[3] http://www.designbuild-network.com/projects/dongtan-eco-city/
[4] http://www.scribd.com/doc/40498306/ECO-CITY-A-Case-Study-of-Dongton-Pune-and-CAOFEIDIAN
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_footprint
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongtan
[7] Personal Interview, Arup. September 13, 2010.
[8] http://www.arup.com/_assets/_download/8CFDEE1A-CC3E-EA1A-25FD80B2315B50FD.pdf
[9] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/3223985/Chinas-Dongtan-demise-is-mirrored-by-bad-news-for-Britains-eco-towns.html
[10] http://shanghaiist.com/2008/06/24/whatever_happened_to_dongtan.php
[11] http://www.building.co.uk/news/corruption-scandal-delays-dongtan-by-two-years/3117554.article#
[12] http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7330/
[13] http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Living-Green/2008/1223/in-china-overambition-reins-in-eco-city-plans
[14] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/3223969/Chinas-pioneering-eco-city-of-Dongtan-stalls.html
[15] http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/48952/story.htm
[16] http://sustainablecities.dk/en/city-projects/cases/dongtan-the-world-s-first-large-scale-eco-city
[17] http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/carbonfree-living-chinas-green-leap-forward-435208.html
[18] http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2138
[19] Personal Interview, NRDC. October 13, 2010.
[20] http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Responsible-Tech/2008/0606/hurdle-for-future-cities-human-habits
[21] “Greening Offices and Clients” Panel Discussion, INDEX 2010, Dubai.