Why Ecoblock failed in China?

On September 19, I presented at a presentation in KTH made by 2 renowned professors from US, Harrison Fraker (UC Berkeley)and Doug Kelabugh (Ann Arbor UMICH). Harrison Fraker showed his project which is called EcoBlock to us, he developed a whole self sufficient system to replace the popular super block which is widely built up by capitalist developers.

“China has been able to succeed in this incredible development process by developing what we call ‘superblocks’. These are roughly 1km2 residential developments where the city provides the arterial streets and then the developer buys the rights to build everything inside the blocks. Superblocks can have anything from 2,000 to 10,000 units of housing in them, and because the Chinese are so efficient, they’re building something like 10-15 of these per day. For 3 years my students and I at UC Berkeley have been trying to develop an alternative to the superblock which is completely off the grid, generates its own electricity, processes its own water and own its waste. Mass replication of a model such as ours is the key to China really becoming sustainable – I’m talking about ecoblocks as far as the eye can see – not superblocks.”
Harrison Fraker
You can find a video of EcoBlock here: http://www.greendragonfilm.com/qingdao_ecoblock_project.html

The technology is reasonable, and affordable. But he said up to now there is no developer want to make this experiment to build a EcoBlock in China. Why? It seems a huge business if someone can build this prototype successfully and spread it national.

I think Mr Fraker made a little mistake in his design, at this moment this kind of open up community don’t fit the social context in China. Superblock is gated community, which seems boring and not good for society integration, and not traffic efficient because all the cars have to access through a few gates.

But why it’s so popular?
Because it’s easy to secured, and people want to live in a block where their neighbors are of same social status.
Like many other countries, the development in China is unbalanced between urban and rural area and people in the same city vary from billionaire to beggar. And some poor people feel the rich people gained their fortune in unfair way, so they are stressed and angry, some even want to revenge. To protect their fortune, inhabitants don’t want strangers to enter their living area. If the inner streets are opened up to city, it will be very hard to keep surveillance and control safety. And also in one superblock the buildings have similar value so the inhabitants who choose to buy apartment there belong to same social status, they don’t feel comfortable to live with richer because they feel embarrassed, they don’t want to live with poorer because they don’t want to be envied.