Remaking Sustainable Urbanism

Book excerpt: This book analyses the implications of eco-urbanism re-making for policy and practice under the transformational trends of economic decentralization and market reform in China. While the guiding themes are space, scale, and governance of cities, the book focuses on three interrelated prevailing processes of local green space reproduction, cross-scale mediation of eco-city planning ideology and mobilized social-economic-political intricacies among different countries. This book addresses the ongoing global diffusion and diversification of sustainable urbanism discourses, debates and practices to portray, evaluate, remake and implement a sustainable form of urban development, using China as a national example. As eco-city practice becomes a city-branding instrument worldwide, this new urban development vision is also well embraced by Chinese local governments. In these contexts, the Chinese government has initiated and endorsed a number of massive projects to promote green urbanism, steering urbanization onto a more sustainable trajectory. The construction of these “ecotopias” involves a multitude of processes ranging from policy transfer/mobility to institutional design, from innovation in green technologies to the promotion of green buildings, and from policy implementation to public participation.