The urban sustainability agenda is engaged at some levels with the two concepts of ecological modernisation and urban entrepreneurialism. While they share certain important commonalities (for example, the emphasis on what is normatively understood as ‘right’ policy-making), each has largely progressed on its own intellectual trajectory. It is suggested that the concepts of ecological modernisation and urban entrepreneurialism are crystallised and concretised in the idea(l) form of the ‘eco-city’ through the search for an ‘urban sustainability fix’ in urban China. Although the idea of constructing an ‘eco-city’ has been mooted since the 1980s, the concept remains somewhat elusive and controversial for a number of reasons. First, while its physical form and design appeal have often been promoted by urban planners, architects and government officials, the deeper normative tenets of building an eco-city are surprisingly ignored. Secondly, the lack of an ‘actually existing’ or successfully implemented eco-city project suggests the considerable amount of resistance and difficulties (in terms of planning, politics, economic costs, etc.) that the concept encounters in practice. To that end, the paper examines various green urban initiatives in reform China before focusing on the example of Shanghai’s Dongtan eco-city project (an entrepreneurial urban prestige-project jointly developed by the British and Chinese governments) to examine the challenges and contradictions of an urban sustainability fix in the guise of eco-city building in China.

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Nature conservation efforts are often reactive to encroaching development plans and systematic conservation planning that is integral with development is not only uncommon, but is often fraught with difficulties even where it is actually attempted. Such obstacles to conservation are especially apparent in developmental states where state legitimacy is largely derived from the state's ability to develop the country. Among other things, developmental states place a premium on physical and economic development. This paper critiques, through the standpoint of nature conservation, the inadequate conceptualisation of 'development' in the developmental state thesis. Specifically, this paper argues that the seemingly value-free (but ultimately economically based) underpinnings of development goals pushed by the developmental state needs to be tempered with a broader concern for the ethics of development. To that end, I draw on two case studies of nature conservation tussles in Singapore to show how alternative extra-economic visions of development have been articulated, notwithstanding the developmental state's monopoly on the discourse (and practice) of progress and development. The case studies, set in the heady economic growth of the early 1990s, will critique two related aspects of the developmental state: its 'amoral' economistic conception of development and its use of growth and materialism as legitimacy.Singapore is a small city-state with 660 sq km of land, which is about the size of the City of H. Neo

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This paper examines how the modelling of green urbanism is spatially manifested in flagship eco-city projects such as the Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city (SSTE) project. As part of a multi-scalar process that taps into a host of mobile policy networks and 'quick fix' urban policy solutions that circulate around the world, such eco-flagship prestige projects serve as powerful sites for the convergence of the boundaries between the social and technical and are highly symbolic places charged with the formidable task of constructing purportedly new forms of ecological urban imagineering and socio-ecological lifeworlds. But to the extent that these eco-flagship projects are often underwritten by state-business growth coalition and driven by (green) entrepreneurial objectives, these urban ecological spaces are also necessarily implicated in broader normative debates and the challenge of constructing sustainable and socially just urban futures. As David Harvey has pointed out, insofar as all environmental-ecological arguments are arguments about society and, therefore, complex refractions of all sorts of struggles being waged on other realms, eco-cities in China both reflect and embody the multiple contradictory tensions inherent in contemporary Chinese society.