Roget Wood, green building consultant and Associate Director of Arup, London
Wood has been the project manager for the Shanghai Dongtan Eco-City. The interview above on the affect following business as usual on city design, is a part of Green Dragon Media Project.
an 86 sq km (33 sq mi) site located on Chongming island, the candidate to be the first “truly environmentally and economically sustainable city.
Dongtan was planned to open, accommodating 50,000 people, by the time of the Expo 2010 in Shanghai.
Shanghai Dongtan Eco-City would be eco-friendly, adhering to zero-greenhouse-emission transit and complete self-sufficiency in water and energy, as well as zero energy building principles.
However, currently the project is stopped and all references to it was held from the website of Shanghai World Expo in 2010. The critics, such as China Digital Times claim that such projects are “designed by big-name foreign architectural and engineering firms who plunged into the projects with little understanding of Chinese politics, culture, and economics — and with little feel for the needs of local residents whom the utopian communities were designed to serve”.
