Dongtan is a community on Chongming island near Shanghai that is being developed as a model carbon-free community that even London is watching.
Typically, the environmental news that comes out of China is bad: polluted air, polluted water, denuded hillsides, melting glaciers. But every now and then, there's good news to report and this little bit of light goes by the name of Dongtan.
Dongtan is a community on Chongming island near Shanghai. It is a planned community that the Independent in the UK described thus:
Three-quarters of the size of Manhattan and located on China's third largest island, Dongtan will be developed on 630 hectares of land to attract a range of commercial and leisure investments, mostly the kind of companies that can benefit from an ecologically positive environment, such as bio-tech companies. All the buildings in Dongtan will be self-sufficient in their energy use, with power coming from a combination of wind power, solar power and other renewable sources. All the apartments and houses will be within seven minutes' walk of public transport. Most of the citizens of Dongtan will work within the city and all buildings, made of local materials, will use a combination of traditional and new construction technologies.
Farmers on the island will be encouraged to use organic methods to grow the crops that will make the city self-sufficient in food. Battery and fuel cell-powered cars will whirr silently through its precincts.
The Dongtan project could be the solution to the demands of city-living - combining the need to be environmentally sustainable with being extremely cool. The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is reportedly interested in Dongtan as a possible blueprint for development in London.
This is really exciting news and we hope that it does, in fact, serve as a model for urban development, not just in China or the UK, but around the planet.