Page 339 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

312 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

600

500

400
Anhui
Hubei
300
Henan
Jiangxi
200
Hunan
100

0

FIGURE 16.2 Total investment of Anhui Province in the treatment of environmental pollution
(100 million RMB).

Being simultaneously the central region’s largest recipient of beyond-
province investment of high-polluting industries and of provincial invest-
ment in pollution treatment, Hefei would appear to have both the potential for
a severely polluted urban environment and the public finances to solve such
problems. This begs the question of if and to what extent Hefei has done the
latter. The following describes a theoretical basis and an empirical approach
that can be used to answer this question.
Regarding a theoretical basis, the concept of a city as a “growth machine” in
urban studies describes a coalition between city government officials and
parochially interested business elites acting as purveyors for a given urban area’s
economic growth, whose decisions are motivated by profit maximization. Such
a “machine” is commonplace of modern capitalist urban development (Logan
and Molotch, 2007; Molotch, 1976), and can also be found in China. In China,
however, the local government entities have a significantly stronger position
than private sector counterparts because of the state-centric form of governance
(Zhang, 2002). This capitalistic propensity toward infinite growth is a principle
that underpins institution building in China (Feng, 2016), which is why Chinese
city governments normally implement pollution reduction policies by framing
them as economically beneficial, emphasizing incentives such as cost savings,
employment, and renewable energy opportunities (Koehn, 2016). This study
therefore theoretically frames all Chinese cities, Hefei included, as motivated by
and subject to the limitations of growth machine politics. These politics can
create barriers to progress on environmental protection, but do not obviate the
potential for improvements in environmental governance. These conditions do,
however, conceptually require that profit-maximization interests be satisfied