Chongming Island, Dongtan City Worlds first Eco City, page 1

Is an experiment in building an eco friendly city, mostly to relocate people displaced by the three gorge damn project and to help with the growing population of Shanghai. With China growing population and the need to build more cities to house it’s future population China has taken this step to build this 750 square mile area into the first fully eco friendly city. China will need to build up to 96 cities in the future and if they decide to build them based on an eco friendly mode, well that would be really cool.

SOM was one of the companies awarded the contract to build this Island based on there eco friendly proposal.

With 20 percent of the world population living in China and national population figures set to hit 1.47 billion by 2020, there is always demand for new housing.
But the city that is to be built on Chongming Island at the mouth of the Yangtze River is like no other in the world: Dongtan eco-city is planned to be first truly environmentally and economically sustainable city.
Situated on a plot of land that is around two-thirds the size of Manhattan, Dongtan is surrounded by wetlands and lies beside a bird sanctuary where hundreds of rare migratory birds seek refuge.
It was these unusual natural conditions that sparked the ambitious idea of creating a new urban concept for an entirely sustainable city that would minimally impact the surrounding environment.
Chinese eco-city heralds revolution in urban living

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It will be a agriculture and tourism based economy with no industry, they are going to use trains to connect cities with and no large highways.

Once the most rural area of Shanghai, it is now the subject of a major urban and agricultural master-plan led by Philip Enquist of SOM. With the construction of a trans-Yangtze tunnel, the island is expected to increase in population while incorporating specialized agriculture in a sustainable design. It is also a major relocation centre for migrants from Three Gorges Dam area. Chongming has an area of 1041.38 km² and a population of 694,600 as of 2001. The city of Dongtan is currently being planned in this county.
Chongming Island

Dongtan City:

Dongtan was presented at the United Nations World Urban Forum by China as an example of an eco-city, and is the first of up to four such cities to be designed and built in China by Arup, a global design and engineering company. The cities are planned to be ecologically friendly, with zero-greenhouse-emission transit and complete self-sufficiency in water and energy, together with the use of zero energy building principles. However, the planned ecological footprint for each citizen in Dongtan is currently 2.2 hectares[1], higher than the 1.9 hectares that the World Wildlife Fund claims is theoretically sustainable on a global scale.

Dongtan proposes to have only green transport movements along its coastline. People will arrive at the coast and leave their cars behind, traveling along the shore as pedestrians, cyclists or on sustainable public transport vehicles. The only vehicles allowed in the city will be powered by electricity or hydrogen.
Dongtan City