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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.

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CHOICE Review

Turning from her American studies base (Noxious New York, 2007) to China, where she has family connections, Sze (Univ. of California, Davis) again explores the interplay of culture, politics, and materiality in environmentalism. Twenty-first-century China's well-publicized drive to create green islands of imagination and practice makes it a significant player in future environmental change, as well as a comparative venue to analyze "eco-desire," technofixes, branding, and policy outcomes. Sze scrutinizes relatively representative but often ineffectual eco-projects around Shanghai, including development of Chongming Island as a "special ecological place," the Arup engineering firm's eco-city of Dongtan, themed suburbs, and the motifs and some pavilions of the Shanghai World Expo. The author combines short visits with close readings of planning documents, websites, and periodicals. She offers analyses that feel lively and journalistic rather than probing broader urban political economic questions across China that so closely intertwine opinion and ecology, such as resettlement, environmentally oriented production (the solar panel industry), the complexities of current and future urbanization and planning, or the multilayered global relations of China and world markets. Nonetheless, the book accessibly introduces paradoxes of greening China's future--and that of the world. Summing Up: Recommended. Most levels/libraries. --Gary Wray McDonogh, Bryn Mawr College

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Julie Sze is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis and founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for the John Muir Institute for the Environment at UC Davis. Her first book, Noxious New York (MIT Press), won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Award for the best book published in American Studies.