Two hundred and eighty-five. That’s the number of new purpose-built eco-cities that China claims to be developing. This is not a joke or an ironic jest at a country that has garnered a global reputation for rendering itself an ecological wasteland. This is a very real development that is taking place in a China that is attempting to rapidly transition and stabilize on many fronts.

What started out as a few experimental developments to test new green urban design and technological systems has turned into an all out movement. Eco-cities are now being built across China, from the eastern seaboard to the fringes of Central Asia, from Inner Mongolia to the jungly hinterlands of the south. 80% of all prefectural-level cities are now said to have at least one eco-city project in the works, and it has been estimated that in the near future over 50% of China’s new urban developments will be stamped with labels such as as “eco,” “green,” “low carbon,” or “smart.” In a country that has roughly 650 established cities, the impact of this eco-city building bonanza could be drastic — even if only a modest portion of them are ever actually completed and populated.

We read these stories of China’s forays into the futuristic fringes of urban development, and it seems impressive, but trying to access any information that goes deeper than headlines and bare facts is often a fruitless dive into the black box of the Chinese development sector, which generally goes light in the public outreach department. To really find out what is happening in China’s eco-cities you need to go there — you need to go out and look at these new developments first hand, talk to the people building them, and the investors and prospective residents who are betting on their future success.

Wade Shepard

The new city of Nanhui, a Chinese eco-city, rising up on reclaimed land. Notice the heavily polluted sky.

Fortunately for those who are not particularly drawn to the dystopian liminal zones of a rapidly urbanizing China, the Jiaotong-Liverpool University professor and writer of all things urban, Austin Williams has already done this for us, documenting his findings in a new book called China’s Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-Cities. Over the course of three years, Williams traveled to dozens of eco-cities around China, documenting their progress and figuring out what this movement is really all about.

But what, exactly, is an eco-city?

While the words ‘eco’ and ‘city’ being combined together in any fashion seems like an abject oxymoron, and there is a troubling fact about the term that goes beyond this apparent contradiction:

“There is no definition of an eco-city, which makes them incredibly easy to invent,” Williams very accurately quipped.