ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by situating Chinese eco-cities in the literature of policy mobility, mobile urbanism and Southern urbanism to explain why a relational, multi-scalar perspective is important to understand the making of eco-urbanism outside of the Global North, as well as how a new research strategy focusing on connections instead of isolated case studies may be formed. It reconstructs the planning history of Dongtan and Tianjin eco-city from a relational perspective. It also reads this planning history against the structural transition of China's environmental governance in order to demonstrate how the relational planning process is also embedded in regulatory changes. The chapter proposes a research framework for reconsidering the role of eco-cities in China as the cores of dynamic global, national, and local processes in which new forms of ecological urban transition is shaped and distributed.
