What do you think?
Rate this book
Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis
The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs involved. Fantasy Islands probes Chinese, European, and American eco-desire and eco-technological dreams, and examines the solutions they offer to environmental degradation in this age of global economic change.Uncovering the stories of sites in China, including the plan for a new eco-city called Dongtan on the island of Chongming, mega-suburbs, and the Shanghai World Expo, Julie Sze explores the flows, fears, and fantasies of Pacific Rim politics that shaped them. She charts how climate change discussions align with US fears of China's ascendancy and the related demise of the American Century, and she considers the motives of financial and political capital for eco-city and ecological development supported by elite power structures in the UK and China. Fantasy Islands shows how ineffectual these efforts are while challenging us to see what a true eco-city would be.
- GenresChinaEnvironment
248 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
2 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 5, 2020
My daughter’s favorite first-year professor at UC Davis is excellent! “America Studies” now includes dramatic diversity of perspectives, and an impressive blend of research methodology.
Addresses the critical question of how can urbanism be ecological, and how can it happen anywhere if not within the drive of Chinese central control and ambition. Overall an ambitious first person account that introduced me to this form of academic writing, and I found the many narratives more meaningful than my usual data/statistics heavy fare, especially when they are humanized with her own family immigrant story.
As appropriate to American studies, I am led to think about how the different classes of people in China relate to America’s strata. How do 400m to 600m rural Chinese people adapt and fit in to an eco-modern world? Not Spitting on the buses is just a small part of it certainly. You share another smaller and more crowded world with 6 to 8B people who have middle-class aspirations, without any hope of providing modern products or services.
Editing could have been tighter, with various transitions and observations needlessly repeated. The footnotes could have probed deeper and all too often lacked page numbers, as well as mostly relying on a dozen or so substantial contemporary books about Chinese economy/society. China moves so fast that statements like “will double twice by 2020” need clear temporal context, and even the footnotes sometimes didn’t offer it.
That her 2009 Chongming is changing is true in the way everything in China seems to be rapidly changing, as the 2010 bridge connected and China pours more cement every year than the rest of the world combined, but google satellite map doesn’t seem to align well with the author’s rural description of the island, published in 2015. The wildlife sanctuary is at most 5% of the land area, and the rest is almost all organized farming plots.
The Conclusion chapter is powerful and tightly written.. alone worth reading the book:
“A properly situated sustainability is one that takes power and people seriously, rather than as an afterthought to the techno-fetishism that Eco-desire in habits, glorifies and draws its breath from.” (p160)
“What is more necessary and more complex [than eco-desire] is what is missing in these cases: a sense of humility, a pause on capitalist growth and development, and the ability to get past a staunch refusal to see how technological and engineering solutions create their own environmental and social burdens.” (p161)
“We need more fiction, imagination, curiosity, humility, and wonder, not less of these forces – and not only of a techno utopian, engineer in variety.” (p162)
“[here I] warn against any simple design or technological fix that creates ecological fantasy Islands (that conveniently make money), while the rest of the world falls apart.“(p163)
I’m surprised at how central and essential western architectural firms seem to be in Shanghai’s construction boom, including Arup and SF based S.O.M.
Page 121 seems unaware of the compromising irony that the German-theme eco-town of An Ting contains not just the joint venture Volkswagen car factory but also a Formula 1 race track!
I’m curious whether the hundreds of thousands of unoccupied homes bought by real estate speculators were ever resolved. In what is possibly officially sanctioned corruption, the government sold unit affordably, only for middlemen to apparently screw the poor/middle class people who’d like to actually live there.
“Climate change activist and sensible policymakers understand the urgency [...and this..] can sometimes lead to a willful blindness to the negative consequences of projects that are proposed to address climate change but end up creating or exacerbating other social injustices.” (p28)
Eco-desires can be chased, especially by rich people trying to get away from pollution, without actually creating anything positive for the environment. “The more concentrated the ecological place, the less ecological responsibility the rest of Shanghai city must take for environmental standards more broadly defined. Some critics argue that Shanghai lost his chance from the perspective of the barn at benefits during a decades long building boom one environmental standards on energy efficiency for example were first, not built into construction codes, and then not enforced.” (p101)
Addresses the critical question of how can urbanism be ecological, and how can it happen anywhere if not within the drive of Chinese central control and ambition. Overall an ambitious first person account that introduced me to this form of academic writing, and I found the many narratives more meaningful than my usual data/statistics heavy fare, especially when they are humanized with her own family immigrant story.
As appropriate to American studies, I am led to think about how the different classes of people in China relate to America’s strata. How do 400m to 600m rural Chinese people adapt and fit in to an eco-modern world? Not Spitting on the buses is just a small part of it certainly. You share another smaller and more crowded world with 6 to 8B people who have middle-class aspirations, without any hope of providing modern products or services.
Editing could have been tighter, with various transitions and observations needlessly repeated. The footnotes could have probed deeper and all too often lacked page numbers, as well as mostly relying on a dozen or so substantial contemporary books about Chinese economy/society. China moves so fast that statements like “will double twice by 2020” need clear temporal context, and even the footnotes sometimes didn’t offer it.
That her 2009 Chongming is changing is true in the way everything in China seems to be rapidly changing, as the 2010 bridge connected and China pours more cement every year than the rest of the world combined, but google satellite map doesn’t seem to align well with the author’s rural description of the island, published in 2015. The wildlife sanctuary is at most 5% of the land area, and the rest is almost all organized farming plots.
The Conclusion chapter is powerful and tightly written.. alone worth reading the book:
“A properly situated sustainability is one that takes power and people seriously, rather than as an afterthought to the techno-fetishism that Eco-desire in habits, glorifies and draws its breath from.” (p160)
“What is more necessary and more complex [than eco-desire] is what is missing in these cases: a sense of humility, a pause on capitalist growth and development, and the ability to get past a staunch refusal to see how technological and engineering solutions create their own environmental and social burdens.” (p161)
“We need more fiction, imagination, curiosity, humility, and wonder, not less of these forces – and not only of a techno utopian, engineer in variety.” (p162)
“[here I] warn against any simple design or technological fix that creates ecological fantasy Islands (that conveniently make money), while the rest of the world falls apart.“(p163)
I’m surprised at how central and essential western architectural firms seem to be in Shanghai’s construction boom, including Arup and SF based S.O.M.
Page 121 seems unaware of the compromising irony that the German-theme eco-town of An Ting contains not just the joint venture Volkswagen car factory but also a Formula 1 race track!
I’m curious whether the hundreds of thousands of unoccupied homes bought by real estate speculators were ever resolved. In what is possibly officially sanctioned corruption, the government sold unit affordably, only for middlemen to apparently screw the poor/middle class people who’d like to actually live there.
“Climate change activist and sensible policymakers understand the urgency [...and this..] can sometimes lead to a willful blindness to the negative consequences of projects that are proposed to address climate change but end up creating or exacerbating other social injustices.” (p28)
Eco-desires can be chased, especially by rich people trying to get away from pollution, without actually creating anything positive for the environment. “The more concentrated the ecological place, the less ecological responsibility the rest of Shanghai city must take for environmental standards more broadly defined. Some critics argue that Shanghai lost his chance from the perspective of the barn at benefits during a decades long building boom one environmental standards on energy efficiency for example were first, not built into construction codes, and then not enforced.” (p101)
July 4, 2024
Compelling analysis of western environmentalists looking up to China as a wish for totalitarianistic environmental policy. However, I seem to keep picking books that have one or two interesting things to say and try to stretch that to 200 pages.
December 26, 2016
On the grounds that there is really only one island discussed, I think this book may be mis-titled. That island is Chongming, an alluvial island in the North of Shanghai province, recently (2009ish) connected to the mainland by a giant bridge-and-tunnel route, and earmarked as the site of Dongtan, a planned and theorised "eco-city" for which construction appears to have been indefinitely delayed. It is a fascinating case study, the more for Sze's personal connection to the region -- her father grew up there, before the family moved to the USA, and many of the most engaging passages of this book take advantage of the doubled perspective she is able to achieve, contrasting bottom-up experiences of life on Chongming with the top-down plans for Dongtan.
Beyond that, however, Fantasy Islands is really about the Shanghai urban region, and other eco-developments that have taken place in recent years -- including the weird and wonderful One City, Nine Towns euro-homages, and the 2010 World Expo. These are islands in a more metaphorical sense: it seems to me that Sze's central argument is about the insufficiency of locating environmental goodness at a specific site, as though any one "ecological place" can provide a solution to the challenges of the anthropocene; so the schemes she describes are fantasy islands within a larger urban sprawl. But the metaphor is a little thin, and the chapters about these other schemes are often more interesting for their general overview than for their environmental specifics.
Sze is careful to not create a good/bad duality between China and "the West" (noting that, for example, Western environmentalists often view China's ability to implement environmental improvements by authoritarian fiat with some envy), but the inescapable impression at the end of the book is that while China's commitment to sustainable urban development is sincere, it may also be cynical -- if only because China sees itself as the location of the future, and a "good environment" is seen as a hallmark of the future -- and that it has thus far often prioritised creating the perception of a good urban environment over creating an actually good urban environment.
Beyond that, however, Fantasy Islands is really about the Shanghai urban region, and other eco-developments that have taken place in recent years -- including the weird and wonderful One City, Nine Towns euro-homages, and the 2010 World Expo. These are islands in a more metaphorical sense: it seems to me that Sze's central argument is about the insufficiency of locating environmental goodness at a specific site, as though any one "ecological place" can provide a solution to the challenges of the anthropocene; so the schemes she describes are fantasy islands within a larger urban sprawl. But the metaphor is a little thin, and the chapters about these other schemes are often more interesting for their general overview than for their environmental specifics.
Sze is careful to not create a good/bad duality between China and "the West" (noting that, for example, Western environmentalists often view China's ability to implement environmental improvements by authoritarian fiat with some envy), but the inescapable impression at the end of the book is that while China's commitment to sustainable urban development is sincere, it may also be cynical -- if only because China sees itself as the location of the future, and a "good environment" is seen as a hallmark of the future -- and that it has thus far often prioritised creating the perception of a good urban environment over creating an actually good urban environment.
January 16, 2018
Julie Sze sets the bar high in attempting a "multimethodological analysis that takes different spatial and temporal scales into account in understanding what happened on Chongming Island, at Dongtan, in the suburbs, and at the world expo in Shanghai...." All in 163 pages. The book is lacking in data on Shanghai or Chongming and also lacking comparative materials on other developments and cities, in China and elsewhere, successful or not. She does bring in observations on eco-cities elsewhere, but again with not a lot of depth. Her conclusions, while interesting, are ideologically rather than data driven. Her personal anecdotes of family in Shanghai are interesting. The non-development of Dongtan is an interesting topic and this is the book.
January 16, 2015
This book is like the academic equivalent of Cowboys and Aliens, a few catchwords strung together in the title to get the contract, the actual content just an afterthought. Poorly written, poor edited: a shame for such a crucial topic! :(
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews