Page 347 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

320 Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

for most years observed and a modest growth rate. Given Changsha’s primacy
in the above-mentioned indices, this may suggest that it is only when a city
reaches and/or surpasses a certain high threshold of per capita income level
and growth rate that income has a significant impact on urban sustainability.
Furthermore, Hunan Province has the lowest levels of both in-migrating high-
polluting investment (Fig. 16.1) and investment in pollution treatment
(Fig. 16.2), suggesting that in the absence of high levels of in-migrating high-
polluting industries, high per capita income may provide the sufficient con-
ditions for an effective sustainable urban transition.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Through the 2000s, central provinces attempted to catch up economically with
the coast by using the same export-oriented, high-polluting model used in the
past decades by the coast (Ang, 2017). Just as coastal cities reached a point at
which they transitioned away from high-polluting industries, so too did Hefei, as
its mayor in 2009 announced explicitly the need to shift away from the old high-
polluting coastal model and toward a more sustainable one (Si, 2009). Hefei’s
transition to a more sustainable, less polluted and more energy efficient
development model was enabled only in part by financial resources afforded by
the vast quantities of available government financing for the treatment of
environmental pollution. The other key element explaining this transition is
urban growth machine politics, where profit maximization and economic growth
demands guide government decision making (Feng, 2016; Logan and Molotch,
2007; Molotch, 1976; Zhang, 2002). It is due to the persistent presence of such
growth-related demand that Chinese city governments normally implement
pollution reduction policies by emphasizing their economic advantages (Koehn,
2016), as Hefei did by framing its transition as being toward an “energy effi-
cient, low-emissions, and high profits” development model (Zhu, 2011). How-
ever, although this framing helps make sustainable reform in Chinese cities
more politically palatable, it does so only in a superficial way.
Rather, for an urban sustainable transition to be theoretically possible in
these conditions, it is required that the growth and profit maximization de-
mands of the urban growth machine be substantively satisfied. It is argued here
that such conditions were indeed present in Hefei, such that the accumulated
growth benefits from years of massive inflows of beyond-province investment
satisfied Hefei’s economic development and growth needs to the degree that it
could afford to incur the economic costs associated with a green transition.
Having thus satisfied the urban growth machine demands, and having also the
available mass quantities of public investment in pollution treatment, Hefei
leaders were both politically and financially capable of exerting stringent
policy efforts to reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency. Noteworthy
also is that Changsha maintained the highest performance in emissions
reduction and energy efficiency among the central capital cities, which appears