China's Eco-City Plans: too good to be true?

I find cities and their role in modern global life entirely fascinating and extremely important, as I've written about many times. This is a really exciting story, reported in Business Insider: China is beginning a project, a giant eco-city that 80,000 people can live in, with greatly reduced water and electricity usage, less waste produced, two-minute walks to green parks from every single residence, and public transportation that makes cars obsolete. It almost sounds like a utopia, the kind of thing impossible to produce, that if you happen to actually materialize, it turns out only to be a giant, precarious balancing act veiled in corruption, with suppressed and unhappy people residing there. At least, that's what I've seen in every depiction of utopian societies I've ever read about. They've all been fictitious stories, but it's not too hard to visualize something so perfect as this Chinese theoretical city as being too good to be true.

Then again, with climate change destined to destroy humankind (earth then long outliving us on its own), an unsustainable global dependency on automobiles and fossil fuel, and huge populations needing water, food, and shelter, our times do call for grand, bold innovation. Especially in China, one of the epicenters of where these crises will all play out over the next few generations, it makes sense that Brave-New-World-esque intrepid experimentation will begin. It could be a giant failure, or a massive success. It's worth trying.