When an entrepreneurial government hammers out a plan for sustainable growth: a sustainable urban experiment story in China?

The last century has witnessed the ups and downs of various urbanisms. In the late 1970s, China joined the global turn to neoliberalism and embraced the trend of global urbanism, expanding the urban space at a staggering rate to incorporate more population into the urban systems. China has made great achievements by providing local governments and entrepreneurial actors the chance to compete for global capital, intelligence and resources. However, growth-oriented development disregards environmental and social capacities and causes severe consequences. In response to the rising discourse in international sustainable urbanism, China reached out to establish knowledge, policy and technology transfer mechanisms to boost sustainable urban experiments deemed replicable to the whole country. Local entrepreneurial governments respond proactively to such calls. A comparative case study is selected from Shenzhen to analyze the mechanisms, characteristics, as well as potential risks of these sustainable urban experiments. The low-carbon city is a high-profile model with international attention, making it a well-equipped showcase that is difficult to be implemented and replicated in other places. On the other hand, the Guangming New District in Shenzhen employs a more grounded approach. However, its resemblance to conventional new town development projects makes it easily falls into a ‘sustainability fix’ for image-building. Although their potential risks are analyzed, the impact from China’s sustainable urban experiments remains to be seen in the forthcoming years.