Abstract
Drawing on the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city (SSTEC) flagship project, the chapter highlights how eco-city building projects in China target the urban environment as a techno-scientific domain for governmental action to resolve the environmental problems associated with rapid urbanization. Yet such techno-scientific logic rests on a narrow territorialist understanding of urban spatial processes that ignores the relational and scalar politics of urban sustainability. Specifically, the chapter argues that this ‘territorial trap’ is very much evident in the SSTEC notwithstanding its transnational appeal. In particular, the chapter examines how the slippages and contradictions between the transnational/global versus territorial/local logics of the SSTEC project hold as much critical lessons for planners in China as well as in Singapore.
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Pow, C.P. (2019). Of Tesla and Eco-city: Urban Sustainability as Territorial Local Trap?. In: Zhang, X. (eds) Remaking Sustainable Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3350-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3350-7_2
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