Abstract
Governments and developers around the globe are exploiting the benefits of island spatiality to sell urban sustainability. Many new-build smart cities, eco-cities, and sustainable cities (‘smart eco-cities’) are constructed on small islands or otherwise bounded from surrounding urban space. Island spatiality presents benefits for selling smart eco-cities as role models of sustainable innovation: ease of creating value, ease of measuring sustainability, and ease of communicating success. These benefits, however, are all largely illusory, contributing primarily to the appearance of sustainability for the sake of economic profit. The great innovation of island smart-cities is frequently an innovation in the selling of sustainability. By monetising the environment through ecosystem services, incentivising largely symbolic ‘green’ projects and architecture, drawing attention away from unsustainable practices elsewhere, and exacerbating social inequality, island smart eco-cities may be making the world less sustainable. They may also be unreproducible by design and lead to a global devaluing of genuinely sustainable but non-iconic urban development. Island smart eco-cities increasingly serve as secessionary enclaves for a global elite, privileging corporate over public interests and spearheading an invidious argument of sustainable development by deregulation.
Highlights
Islands have long been produced as scenes for mainland dreams and nightmares (Gillis, 2007), used to set continental problems, tensions, and paradisiacal visions in relief
This paper explores another aspect of the green branding of islands: the development of new or pre-existing islands into ‘smart eco-cities’ with an eco-ethos and eco-branding
Before moving on to a consideration of smart eco-cities on small islands, we briefly introduce why small island spatiality is amenable to experimental projects such as smart eco-cities
Summary
Islands have long been produced as scenes for mainland dreams and nightmares (Gillis, 2007), used to set continental problems, tensions, and paradisiacal visions in relief. This paper proposes that by monetising the environment, incentivising largely symbolic ‘green’ projects and architecture, drawing attention away from unsustainable practices elsewhere, and exacerbating social inequality, islanded smart eco-cities may be making the world less sustainable These issues have been explored for many other large-scale environmental policy and practice initiatives showing how, for instance, payment for ecosystem services (Reid, 2013), carbon offsetting (Richards & Andersson, 2001), and the Clean Development Mechanism (Lokey, 2009) might have done more harm than good for sustainability. The section explores how island spatiality allows smart eco-cities to assume ambiguous relationships with their hinterlands, facilitating the creation and localisation of environmental goods as well as the externalisation of negative environmental conditions This is followed by discussions of smart eco-cities as icons of (largely symbolic) sustainability and as secessionary enclaves. Conclusions provide recommendations for rescaling smart eco-city ambitions
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