Eco-cities are widely recognized as a new paradigm for achieving urban sustainability. In this presentation, I critically examine eco-cities in China and theorize them as eco-developmental processes that are embedded in political-economic systems. I outline two fundamental processes. First, eco-city development is a spatial restructuring technique aiming to convert rural societies into modern urban eco-communities. As such, it is a territorial process through which urban governments gain control over rural land. Furthermore, the acquisition of rural land is not only about livelihood restoration of landless farmers but is also about converting them into citizens constituting new urban eco-communities and integrating them into the urban mode of production. Second, eco-city development is a transnational entrepreneurial process of green technology transfer. Transnational eco-entrepreneurialism is not straightforward processes and there are two concrete entry-points to examine the complex relations between transitions and material elements of political economies: (1) the process of partnership building shows how transition dynamics are mediated by power relations and political alliances, which in turn are entrenched in specific ownerships structures, legal frameworks, and norms; and (2) the processes of technological adaptation are shaped by social preferences, economic relations, and techno-industrial assemblages of the location in which a technology is introduced. This means that any eco-entrepreneurial process takes place within (is enabled and restrained by) regimes of accumulation, economic interdependencies, and systems of knowledge.
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Organised by the Academy of Interdisciplinary Studies
Dr. Lo is an Associate Professor in Geography at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). He has a PhD in Geography from the University of Melbourne and BSc in Computer Science and Information Systems from the University of Hong Kong.
Focusing on developing the human geography perspectives on climate change, Dr. Lo works at the intersection of environmental, energy, political, urban, rural, and development geographies. He has won several major competitive grants from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong and has published over 100 articles in leading journals, including Global Environmental Change, Political Geography, Urban Geography, Energy Research & Social Science, Energy for Sustainable Development, Environmental Science & Policy, Cities, Habitat International, and Journal of Rural Studies. He has an h-index of 25 and FWCI of 2.65.
Dr. Lo has held a number of leadership position, including Acting Director of the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, an international hub in social science and humanities research, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Asian Energy Studies, an international peer-reviewed journal dedicated to interdisciplinary research on all aspects of energy studies in Asia.
Eco-cities are widely recognized as a new paradigm for achieving urban sustainability. In this presentation, I critically examine eco-cities in China and theorize them as eco-developmental processes that are embedded in political-economic systems. I outline two fundamental processes.