Eco-Cities and the Transition to Low Carbon Economies

Federico Caprotti

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137298751
• eBook ISBN: 9781137298768
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

The author examines the two most advanced eco-city projects: the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City in China, and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. These are the most notable attempts at building new eco-cities to both face up to the 'crises' of the modern world and to use the city as an engine for transition to a low-carbon economy.

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Eco-cities in the Age of Crisis

Abstract: Climate change, Peak Oil, energy security, and hyper-urbanisation are increasingly being identified as the ‘crises’ that define contemporary politics and policy. The chapter opens by investigating the ‘Age of Crisis’: the notion that the post-2000 period is one characterised by anxiety and constructed notions of crisis, and that these crises are focused on the city. The chapter moves on to consider the emerging trend of proposing the construction of new-build eco-cities as ‘experimental cities’ where solutions to multiple crises can be tested and found. The chapter closes with a critical gaze at how experimental eco-city mega-projects are being used to experiment with transition towards low-carbon economies.

Caprotti, Federico. Eco-Cities and the Transition to Low Carbon Economies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137298768.0004.

Introduction: living in the Age of Crisis

Certain words, phrases, or images are often seen as symbols of a particular age or period in history. Often, the images associated with such periods point to the development of new viewpoints, or to technologies that are believed to represent the spirit of the age. Examples include, but are not limited to, the new artistic perspectives of the Renaissance (14th–17th centuries); engines and trains during the Age of Steam (18th–19th centuries); jet aviation in the Jet Age (1940s onwards); and Sputnik rockets and their successors during the Space Age (late 1950s onwards). The images associated with these periods are seen as symbols of the nature, character and logic of specific epochs: some of them in the distant past, some which are rather more recent. Many of these images exhibit a certain fascination with aesthetics, speed, progress, and power over natural and other limits.¹

Technological developments and improvements have rarely been faster than in the early 21st century. We live in an age replete with wonder-inducing scientific and technological innovations, from advances in medicine and biotechnology, to the emergence of the internet and ubiquitous digital networks, to the first tourist space flights. Some have described the period from the 1970s onwards as the Information Age or, in more contemporary terms, as the Internet Era.² Others have argued that from the late 20th century on, we have been living in an as-yet undefined era beyond modernity, as evidenced by the proliferation of descriptors (such as post-modernity, post-modernism, post-industrial society, post-structuralism, and the like) which suggest, in the words of Anthony Giddens, ‘that a preceding state of affairs is drawing to a close’.³

Yet, increasingly, the most widespread symbols of the current age seem not to be technological, but apocalyptic. In the mid-2010s, it seems increasingly clear that rather than living in an age wholly fascinated by technological phantasmagorias, or concerned with transition to an as-yet unspecified era after modernity, the present period can be described as the Age of Crisis. The beginnings of the Age of Crisis can be easily seen in the dashing of expectations which followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall: the ‘end of history’ and the heralded age of stable, liberal democracy à l’Ouest has not materialised.⁴ Indeed, the 1990s seemed to have been characterised by unease, chaos and tragedy as much as by the development of a post-Cold War ‘New Order’. In terms of war, the First Gulf War (1991), the conflict in Bosnia (1992–95), genocide in Rwanda (1994), and the war in Kosovo (1998–99), as well as many other new and continuing conflicts, underlined the stark reality that the world after the Cold War was less than stable. The World Trade Center (1993) and Oklahoma City (1995) bombings, the Falcone and Borsellino mafia murders (1992), and the assassination of Israeli political leader Yitzhak Rabin (1995) – just to mention a few events – further disintegrated the notion that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world would somehow become a better, safer place.

It is the events of 9/11, however, that have become the turning point for popular, media and political discourses on crisis. The terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, were an attack not only on the United States, but on its financial and political capitals: a murderous but highly symbolic thrust at the urban heart of the global financial system, and an assault on the authority of the USA as the only superpower left standing after the fall of the Wall. The cultural significance of 9/11 cannot be fully explored here, but the importance of the attacks has resonated since; in addition, 9/11 has helped to make sense of the unease and turmoil that was brewing in the 1990s.⁵ The collapse of the Twin Towers focused the Global North’s attention on the notion of political-ideological and socio-cultural ‘crisis,’ and on the ‘need’ to develop techno-scientific and policy-based responses to crisis.

Most closely linked to 9/11 are, unsurprisingly, discourses which have emerged proclaiming a crisis of security: this has generated and legitimised the adoption of new and more intrusive technologies of surveillance for use in the War on Terror; the militarisation of spaces of mobility, especially airports; the rapid construction of new extra-territorial systems for the projection of state power and control, such as the Guantanamo prison camp, the international outsourcing of torture, and rendition flights. Furthermore, the sense of insecurity which has pervaded much political discourse (at least in the West) since 9/11 has also raised the spectres of menaces which Western powers, used to facing up to Cold War threats, are ill-suited to tackle.⁶ These include new and asymmetrical threats such as biological and chemical weapons; home-grown terrorism, as seen in the 2005 London bombings; and cyber-war, as exemplified by the massive cyber-attack on Estonia during the country’s 2007 election.

The Age of Crisis has undoubtedly played into the hands of non-democratic and opaque regimes, such as China and Russia, by enabling them to enact policies and restrictive measures aimed at reducing the risk of domestic ‘terrorism’. The proliferation of crisis discourses has also enabled the achievement of political, military, and industrial agendas rooted in the industrialisation of fear and responses to it: from the technological leaps and bounds involved in pilotless drone technology, to cyber-espionage, to ready justification for conflicts from Iraq to Afghanistan. This industrialisation of fear and prejudice extends to a legalised suspicion of domestic, alien or non-resident ‘Others’: from Latino immigrants in US cities, to construction workers from China’s north-western provinces in the country’s urbanising seaboard, to the furore around immigrants and non-EU students in the UK. The years since 9/11 have seen a widespread and still-simmering climate of global insecurity and fear.

One of the common characteristics of the ‘crises,’ which have occupied centre stage since 2001, is their largely diffuse and systemic nature. The Age of Crisis is a fearful age, where crisis is not easily defined or contained within geographically delimitated space(s). Rather, it cuts across borders and affects the global arena in unpredictable ways. In this sense, Ulrich Beck’s post-Chernobyl ‘Risk Society’ has become a ‘Crisis Society,’ where crisis is depicted as vague but ever-lurking; a pressing concern yet only resolvable through the individualisation of risk and impacts on the one hand, and through the increasing concentration of power, violence and surveillance by the state and its agencies on the other.⁷

Nonetheless, there are two other characteristics of the Age of Crisis that set it apart from previous times of insecurity. Firstly, the crises that have been identified since 9/11 are largely focused on the city. Indeed, the events of 9/11 placed the city – as the threatened pinnacle of society – at the centre of discourses of crisis. In some ways, there was nothing new about the city being the focal point for crisis. The hopeful decade of the 1990s had the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall as its symbolic, urban root. The darker, less hopeful side of that initial post-Cold War decade was rooted in an equally powerful and deeply urban event: the massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in the same year. After 9/11, the crises of terrorism, biosecurity, SARS, finance, the subprime mortgage crisis, urban unrest from London and Paris to the Arab Spring, the ‘problem’ of demographic change and rural-urban migration, and other crises, have been largely urban in character. The city is the stage on which the Age of Crisis is playing out, and it is one of the places where crisis becomes most visible and concentrated.

Secondly, one of the major trends of the Age of Crisis is the focus on environmental crisis. This has roots in the environmental movement from the 1960s onwards, and also has deeper foundations in earlier unease about the alienation of humanity from ‘nature’.⁸ However, environmental crisis had become wholly accepted and institutionalised as a leading discourse from the 1990s onwards. Key turning points were events such as the 1992 Rio Summit; the formation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 and the issuance of the first of its series of climate change reports from 1990; and the yearly series of UN Climate Change Conferences which began in 1995.

The environmental crisis is, therefore, one of the most diffuse, cross-border, and potentially destructive crises that have gained media, political and cultural attention in the past 20 years. It has been characterised by the sense not only that the environment is being damaged through the workings of our current oil-addicted, capitalist consumer society, but also by an explicit assumption that the environmental crisis that we are now facing is, in some ways, the crisis to end all crises. This is because climate change, rising sea levels, and the effects thereof are constructed as somehow (and perhaps appropriately) millenarian and apocalyptic, being deeply rooted in the changing character of late modern society.⁹ At the same time, environmental crisis is often depicted as deeply urban: Peak Oil scenarios are seen as having the greatest impact on urban agglomerations; rising sea levels threaten to swamp cities; the increased frequency and severity of climate hazards such as storm surges and floods place the city, and with it modern society, directly in the firing line. Indeed, the IPCC’s 2014 assessment of climate change impacts will, for the first time, include an evaluation of the changing climate’s effect on cities.¹⁰

The link between environmental crisis and the city has been underlined to a great extent by some of the great urban environmental disasters which have occurred since 9/11: Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans (2005), the tsunami and associated nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan (2011), and typhoon Haiyan’s destruction of Tacloban city in the Philippines in November 2013, among others. At the same time, cities (especially those in emerging economies such as China and India) are seen as straining under the environmental burden of increasing levels of consumption, waste and contamination. The prospect of ‘climate refugees’ flooding into well-protected, wealthy urban areas, and of millions of displaced and dispossessed urban dwellers from coastal areas in the Global South suffering from overwhelmed and unequally distributed infrastructures, as well as the depiction of the city as a focus for perilous outbreaks of new and existing diseases (from cholera to H5N1) as a result of climate change, paint a picture of an urban world in peril as the result of a developing environmental crisis.

These twin aspects of the Age of Crisis – the city as the locus of crisis, and environmental crisis – have therefore become largely linked. The environmental crisis, diffuse and trans-border in character, is most readily identifiable in its impacts on urban areas. This is in part reflected in the resultingly wide range of recent depictions of the environmental destruction of the city in popular culture. From the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which cities such as New York are shown being encased in ice as a result of hyper-rapid climate change, to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), a film which highlighted the trends converging towards climate crisis, to the 2009 on-screen adaptation of McCarthy’s bleak The Road, in which a nuclear war-in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Eco-Cities in the Age of Crisis
• 2  Experimental Eco-Cities in China
• 3  Peak Oil and Eco-Urbanism in Abu Dhabi
• 4  Conclusion: Re-thinking the Eco-City?
• Bibliography
• Index