Chongming Island

After reading this Popular Science article, I wanted to investigate Chongming Island, the planned site of a purported "Eco-city" called Dongtan.

The pictures look good:

But the article does a good job of debunking it:

""Is it realistic?" asked a German architect standing near me of his Brazilian friend. "It's total crap-propaganda," the other replied.

The buses next took us to a patch of supposedly sustainable McMansions, and the multinational crowd of architects scoffed at the American-size, single-family homes. Clearly built forthe elite, they had giant living rooms, garages, balconies, and sculpted yards with rock gardens and bamboo-shaded walkways. "This one will be perfect for 30 or 40 migrant workers," whispered a Swiss planner. "There are no stores in the bottom floors, no places to eat," griped a Spaniard. "They'll have to drive everywhere."

We caravanned to an organic farm with no organic farmers and then to the Dongtan wetland, where not a single bird was in sight. With the bridge soon to connect mostly undeveloped Chongming to downtown Shanghai (travel time will be shortened to 40 minutes from the current three hours on boat and bus), construction was everywhere-villas, apartment blocks, bridges, roads-and very little of it seemed particularly green."

Everything I'd read had said that, despite the fact that the first phase of the city is supposed to be done by 2010, construction hasn't even started. Nonetheless, my curiousity was aroused -- I've been interested in urban planning/architecture, especially of "alternative" places, for a while now -- and I had to go take a look for myself.

The bus ride to the ferry revealed lots of canals, forests, and gardens in the interstices of the suburbs of Shanghai. Lots of corn growing along the sides of canals.

The ferry to Chongming Island took an hour. It was already two in the afternoon when we got to Chongming city, and by talking to the restaurant owner where we ate, we found out that Dongtan was an hour away by taxi, and there was nothing there.

Yet, from where we were eating, we could see a brown road sign that said, "Qianwei Ecology Village." We both looked at each other and wondered what the hell an Ecology Village is. We finished lunch and hopped in a taxi to check it out.

We still don't really know what it is. Apparently it's half-way amusement park, half-way demonstration village for the "Eco-Shanghai" greenwashing campaign. The taxi driver told us we "got there too late." It was a Monday. On the weekends moneyed Shangainese come out to take boat rides and eat home-made farmer food. There was a solar power plant called Solarfun.

There was nothing for us to do there so we had the taxi driver take us to another place he mentioned, a Forest Park. Taxiing around Chongming Island was fascinating. Almost all the land is in some kind of agroforestry system, sometimes stacked with multiple species. The plots of land are small and planted to many different species of trees, not one big monoculture. There were only a few open fields of wheat and suchlike.

The Forestry Park, as Joe predicted, was another abandoned half-amusement park, half-artificial natural setting. The Forest was probably an old tree farm. There were bumper cars, a climbing wall, a zipline, a roller coaster, a shooting range. It was, however, massive and labyrinthine, and quite beautiful at points. Bamboo gardens, lakes, bridges, lotuses -- the Chinese are excellent ornamental garden-creators. Nobody else was there but us, construction workers, and people staffing empty cafes and rides in the far reaches of the place. We rented a tandem bike and almost got lost. We had to hurry back to the taxi so we could catch the ferry. I left with the feeling we'd only seen a small corner of the place, that it extended out infinitely in every direction.