China's Eco-Cities: Substantive and Skimpy at the Same Time

The route to China's most promising eco-city, 140 kilometers southeast of Beijing, is down an eight-lane highway, past factories and clusters of ubiquitous 60-story housing towers. Once over the elegant Rainbow Bridge, the first signs of a greener approach to development appear: a field of wind turbines, rows of abundant plantings, meadows of stormwater swales, and a parking garage festooned with solar panels.

At the visitor center, a team of guides in prim skirts reads display panels in Mandarin while another woman translates: the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, a joint venture with the Singapore government, occupies 30 square kilometers at the coastline, and will be home to 350,000 residents. The key performance indicators include energy-efficient buildings for drastically reduced carbon emissions, recycled waste and water, and 90 percent "green trips" via walking, biking, electric vehicles and streetcars powered by renewable energy.