Is this the beginning of a new movement in China?

China is urbanising at a rate that’s much higher than any other society in human history: by 2050, some 600 million people will have moved from a rural to an urban environment, and there are still around 200–300 million to go through this transition. President Hu Jintao and the Chinese government have said that they clearly understand that the current model for development in China is unsustainable, and that a new direction must be found. I think they would like to take all new urban development and move it towards the eco-city model, but I doubt if they’re all going to be eco-cities.

At the moment, I know of about six or seven planned eco-cities and our client [the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation] is working on five or six, with Dongtan – the first – to be built on Chongming Island, east of Shanghai. The size of each one varies, but most are going to built to house between 300,000 and 500,000 people.

Has anything like this been achieved before?

There are no existing eco-cities, but there are communities throughout the world that have been designed around similar principles. There are two in Sweden: one in Stockholm called Hammarby Sjöstad [Sweden’s largest low-carbon development, containing 9,500 apartments] and one in Malmö [in the residential district of Augustenborg], which isn’t quite as ambitious. There is also a small community in Vauban [a district south of Frieburg in Germany that contains 5,000 homes] that has built up around some of these principles, but comparatively, these are really quite small. Having said that, we visited them all to research the good and bad things about them.

Will Dongtan be 100 per cent carbon neutral?

It depends on what that actually means. All of the energy will come from renewable resources, but if you extend this to include carbon associated with goods purchased, construction and so on, then clearly it isn’t. But certainly, in terms of energy, it will effectively be ‘zero carbon’. The largest proportion will come from a biomass-powered combined heater and power plant, which is principally fuelled by rice husks. The next largest source will be from large-scale wind generation, and smaller volumes will be generated from waste, photovoltaic panels and smaller-scale wind turbines.

Dongtan is going to house 500,000 people out of a total population of 1.3 billion, so how much of an impact will this actually have?

Clearly, it can only have an impact if it helps people to understand a new way of doing things, so there are several things that we plan to do. First, there’s going to be an institute for sustainability in Dongtan, which will act as a training and research centre for sustainable cities across China. It will run leadership-training programmes for business and government leaders to help them understand the environmental and economic advantages of eco-cities. Undergraduates and postgraduates will also be trained there, conducting research and further developing knowledge of the subject. In doing that in Dongtan, we hope that this will help to build capacity across China. Second, when people visit the city, they will hopefully be inspired by the advantages and genesis that it shows. But it’s a good point – as a stand-alone project it can’t have that much impact, but hopefully it will act as an inspiration and demonstration of what can be achieved.

How will you ensure the cities have a mixed demographic?

The establishment of universities and educational institutions is going to help. The commercial logic behind the first phase is to use the university as a way of kicking off a mixed settlement. It will attract a whole range of different types of people and hopefully create spin-off businesses and other work opportunities associated with this sort of paradigm shift in China. We hope that it will have the same kind of impact that universities such as Harvard and MIT have had in other parts of the world, where whole communities, businesses and livelihoods have built up around them.

Do you think similar developments on this scale would be possible in India?

It certainly is possible and there has been a lot of interest shown in India. There are more difficulties there in terms of the way in which India is governed, in that the lack of investment in infrastructure is an increasing problem. Any development such as this needs to be infrastructure-led – not in traditional industrial-age infrastructure, but ecological-age infrastructure needs to be invested in upfront. India hasn’t been awfully good at doing that so far.

What can London learn from eco-cities such as Dongtan?

Quite a lot actually. In fact, Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Authority have been over to visit Shanghai to see at first hand the sort of lessons that can be learnt from Dongtan. And certainly a lot of the ideas in the London Climate Change Action Plan have been reinforced by understanding the Dongtan model. In fact, many people have said publicly that it has been an inspiration for the ambitious development of the action plan. It isn’t the only influence – there are so many – but they have said that it has been helpful to them; mostly, I think, because you can see where cities could end up, in terms of the way they perform and the way they can function in an ecological age.