The socioenvironmental state and urban transitions: Eco-urbanism in China and the UK

Abstract

Eco-urbanism encapsulates a range of approaches to the management of urbanisation processes and environmental imperatives in contexts of rapid industrial and economic change. The paper focuses on two eco-urban initiatives in China and the UK over a temporal lens stretching from the mid-2000s to the early 2020s, in order to critically engage with the question of how eco-urban projects develop and often undergo radical changes over time, as well as being changed through significant ruptures, periods of stasis and fluidity in the actor-networks involved in project visions, financing and development. Our comparative approach identifies cross-cutting processes operative across two projects at different scales and in different techno-political contexts. The paper argues that longitudinal analysis is key to enabling a view of transitional trajectories as unfolding, and as a way of moving past oft-repeated assessments of specific projects according to a ‘failure/success’ binary. In order to do so, the paper considers eco-urban projects through a theoretical lens that views projects as unstable assemblages exhibiting change over time on the one hand, but that also recognises the dynamic resilience of geographical imaginations around eco-urban projects, that means that these projects endure (albeit often in different guises) over time.

The Smartmentality of Urban Data Politics: Evidence from Two Chinese Cities

“…In addition, Hangzhou is one of China's leading digital cities, as seen in its roll-out of the City Brain urban governance system (Caprotti and Liu, 2020b;Zhao and Zou, 2021), and indeed in its roll-out of a municipal SCS programme in 2018. Tianjin, on the other hand, was a prominent developer of eco-urbanism through its flagship Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City project, which was initiated in the late 2000s (Xu et al, 2022). Its SCS programme has taken on key facets of the characteristics of eco-urbanism.…”