Introduction
āWhen you talk about the overall CO2 emission, we talk about EVs (electric vehicles) having an image. But if you look at where the power generation is coming from, and how itās generated, itās still producing a lot of CO2 before it gets to that EV. Of course, power generation with coal is giving off a lot of CO2, so you need to think about it in a very comprehensive wayā (Ichiro Hirose, Mazdaās head of powertrain development quoted in Tracy 2017).
If the engineers of Japanese car maker Mazda are right, Tesla electric cars despite their fashionable green image and āgruppieā (green yuppie) appeal, are in reality just conventional coal-powered cars if we take a well-to-wheel analysis that would require us to trace the total CO2 emitted from the initial extraction of base stock in oil wells that are used to fuel the power plants to generate electricity that eventually powers up supposed eco-friendly electric vehicles (Tracy 2017). In the United States, for example, where many power plants still rely mainly on fossil fuels to generate electricity, driving an electric car may not seem that ecological friendly after all if we adopt a comprehensive relational analysis of such purportedly eco-products and practices. Arguably, the example of electric cars holds much comparative lessons for ecological cities. In recent years, the latter has been held up as the answer to the looming urban environmental crisis that confronts cities and countries around the world. Yet to what extent are ecological cities the solution (or are they part of the problem) when we start to excavate behind their āgreenwashed imageā?
In the context of China, the alluring fixture of the āecological cityā in many ways speaks to the multiple anxieties, aspirations and ambitions of the Chinese stateās āecological civilizationā project that aims to build a āharmoniousā and sustainable society without compromising economic growth (see Geall 2015). This chapter highlights how eco-city building projects in China targets the urban environment as a ātechno-scientificā domain for building sustainable cities. As will be pointed out, such techno-scientific logic, however, rests on a narrow territorialist understanding that ignores the relational and scalar politics of urban sustainability . Specifically, the chapter argues that this āterritorial trapā is very much evident in eco-cities such as the Sino-Singapore Eco-city (SSTEC). In particular, the paper examines how the slippages and contradictions between the transnational/global versus territorial/local logics of the SSTEC project holds as much critical lessons on urban sustainability for planners in China as well as in Singapore.
Contesting (Urban) Sustainability
First popularized in the 1989 United Nations Brundtland Report, the concept of sustainable development is now a policy planning buzzword that straddles across a wide spectrum of diverse issues in society. With the world becoming increasingly urban as a result of rapid urbanization and ruralāurban migration, the question of urban sustainability means is especially pertinent even as debates about what constitutes sustainability are becoming more pluralistic. In fact, we now speak of multiple forms of sustainabilities (e.g. social sustainability, economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, etc.) to signal the different types of sustainability challenges that confront society and places.
However, it should be noted that despite widespread usage, there is actually no consensus on the definitive meaning of sustainability . The lack of a precise definition of sustainability points to two problems. First, sustainability is a protean concept as its meaning changes with context. For instance, the economic sustainability of a place (i.e. the ability of an economic system to sustain a desired level of economic production over time) can sometimes be understood quite differently from the goals of achieving other forms of social or environmental sustainability where social equity and ecological integrity of a place are accorded greater premium. In other words, the parameters for defining and understanding what counts as sustainable development shifts and morphs with different context of usage. Of course, this is not to suggest that economic sustainability is necessarily incommensurable with other forms of sustainability concerns.
This leads us to a second and more fundamental problem with the contradictory nature of the concept. To be sure, the term sustainability had emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s as an attempt to reconcile the multiple tensions between economic growth at all costs (which characterized much of the developmental trajectory of the world since the beginning of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century) and the increasing awareness on the need to protect the environment.
However, as the 1987 Brundtland Report commissioned by the United Nations noted, the call for sustainable development is not to reject economic growth at all. In fact, it is widely acknowledged that economic development is very much an integral part of global development especially in the developing Global South. What is being emphasized here is a qualitative shift towards considering more sustainable forms of development in order āto defend and improve the human environment for present and future generationsā while pursuing distributive economic growth that will benefit countries in both the developed and developing worlds. Thus according to many scholars, the concept of sustainable development is at its very core born out of an uneasy compromise between the dual tasks of the continued pursuit of economic development while simultaneously keeping the environmental costs of development to a minimum level that will not place an undue burden on the future generations.
Insofar as the concept has to serve the different ideological taskmasters, the idea of sustainable development has become an unruly concept as it lacks a clear definitive meaning and can be hijacked as a form of āgreenwashingā by different groups with vested interests from makers of electric cars, property developers, and other pro-growth advocates. To compound this further, when debates on sustainable development are being grafted into the urban context, these contradictions become amplified manifolds at the urban scale. To be sure, citi...