Smart and eco-cities have become important notions for thinking about urban futures. This article contributes to these ongoing debates about smart and eco-urbanism by focussing on recent urbanisation initiatives in Asia. Our study of India's Smart Cities Mission launched under the administration of Narendra Modi and China's All-In-One eco-cities project initiated by Xi Jinpin unfolds in two corresponding narratives. Roy and Ong's [2011. Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell] "worlding cities" serves as the theoretical backdrop of our analysis. Based on a careful review of a diverse set of academic literature, policy and other sources we identify five process-dimensions for analysing the respective urban approaches. We show how the specific features of China's and India's urban focus, organisation, implementation, governance and embedding manifest both nations' approaches to smart and eco-urbanism. We argue that India's Smart City Mission and China's All-in-One project are firmly anchored in broader agendas of change that are set out to transform the nation and extend into time. The Indian Smart City Mission is part of a broader ambition to transform the nation enabling her "smart incarnation" in modernity. Smart technologies are seen as the key drivers of change. In China the framework of ecological civilisation continues a 5000-year historical tradition of civilisation excellence. By explicitly linking eco-urbanism to the framework, eco-cities become a means to enact ecological civilisation on the (urban) ground.

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Even in the twenty-first century, myths of preindustrial forms of energy utilization are woven around watermills, waterwheels, and traditional millscapes. Along German watercourses, many grinding shops and hammer mills held on to waterwheels and delivered mechanical rather than electric power well into the twentieth century. It is not the case that the days of these “old technologies” (Edgerton 2008) were numbered as soon as hydroelectricity and “modern” hydraulic turbines appeared in the 1880s. When analyzing the dominating contemporaneous discourses around hydropower, it is easy to overlook these tendencies of historical persistence. This is not surprising, considering that scientific, literary, and preservationist narratives around 1900––actively and subtly––propagated and spread the idea of Muehlensterben, or the myth of dying watermills that has been rehearsed over and over again in reflections on hydropower history. In this article, we challenge the popular imaginaries of “old” and “outmoded” watermills in a two-step approach. Firstly, we contrast the well-known transition at the advent of hydroelectricity with hydropower activities, which took place simultaneously in Germany’s traditional commercial landscapes. Here, waterwheels remained in good use, despite the electrification and scientific development of hydraulic turbines. Secondly, we deconstruct the romantic bias towards the preindustrial symbolism of the waterwheel by analyzing different arguments in professional journals as well as romanticizing and nostalgic literature. We combine approaches and empirical material of both historical and literary sciences to gain a better understanding of how different narratives reinforced the image of watermills and waterwheels being outdated. In this respect, the interdisciplinary approach contributes to the emerging field of the Environmental Humanities.

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