The "Eco" and "Low-carbon" promise: a critical review of China's experience

The scale and speed of China’s urbanization translate into major challenges for sustainability. Could the ‘eco-city’ and ‘low-carbon’ agendas, and the promotion of related pilot cities drive Chinese urban practice towards more environmentally sustainable solutions? We explore this question through a critical review of experience in China, identifying problems relating to the development of space, the treatment of scale and the pursuit of efficiency (the ‘space-scale-efficiency nexus’). China seeks sustainable solutions through eco and low-carbon agendas, but our review finds that current efforts fall short of expectations, and problematic patterns are repeated. We propose that a geo-administrative notion of functional regions could provide a strategic framework to address the range of design, physical and administrative planning problems, ensuring that eco-city and low-carbon city pilots result in comprehensive solutions that can be effectively replicated.

The future imagined: Exploring fiction as a means of reflecting on today’s Grand Societal Challenges and tomorrow’s options

European science policy (so-called Horizon 2020) is guided by Grand Societal Challenges (GSCs) with the explicit aim of shaping the future. In this paper we propose an innovative approach to the analysis and critique of Europe’s GSCs. The aim is to explore how speculative and creative fiction offer ways of embodying, telling, imagining, and symbolising ‘futures’, that can provide alternative frames and understandings to enrich the grand challenges of the 21st century, and the related rationale and agendas for ERA and H2020. We identify six ways in which filmic and literary representations can be considered creative foresight methods (i.e. through: creative input, detail, warning, reflection, critique, involvement) and can provide alternative perspectives on these central challenges, and warning signals for the science policy they inform. The inquiry involved the selection of 64 novels and movies engaging with notions of the future, produced over the last 150 years. Content analysis based on a standardised matrix of major themes and sub-domains, allows to build a hierarchy of themes and to identify major patterns of long-lasting concerns about humanity’s future. The study highlights how fiction sees oppression, inequality and a range of ethical issues linked to human and nature’s dignity as central to, and inseparable from innovation, technology and science. It concludes identifying warning signals in four major domains, arguing that these signals are compelling, and ought to be heard, not least because elements of such future have already escaped the imaginary world to make part of today’s experience. It identifies areas poorly defined or absent from Europe's science agenda, and argues for the need to increase research into human, social, political and cultural processes involved in techno-science endeavours.