Clough Marinaro, IsabellaKneller, MargaretLoner, Flavia2025-03-122025-03-122017Loner, Flavia. "Eco-Cities: An Analysis of the Ecological and Social Costs of the UAE’s Masdar City and the Chinese Eco-City Projects". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2017.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/927Thesis (B.A. in International Affairs, Minor in History and Communications)--John Cabot University, Spring 2017.Across the developing countries, the emerging phenomenon of the ‘eco-city’ is attracting the imagination of local and international architect to build new master-planned cities as fast solutions to pressing economic, environmental and political challenges, ranging from energy scarcity and pollution to mere need for new cities to accommodate a wave of new city dwellers. Local governments push for the creation of urban districts that will minimize pollution, maximize energy efficiency, utilize renewable energy and resources as much as possible, and provide extensive landscaping features such as public parks and many green spaces. A series of critics have negatively described these pilot experiments as over-reliant on new technology, showcases for clean-tech products, elitarian districts, and areas where sustainability is an empty label employed by stakeholders to cover unfriendly economic objectives. This thesis tries to analyze if and how the eco-cities have lived up to their original promises and I try to find out if these eco-hypotheses at the city level can be actually applied at large scale in the real world. I chose to analyze the eco-city experiments of two different countries: the United Arab Emirates and China. In particular, I looked more in depth at the UAE’s Masdar City project and the ecoproject China and Singapore collaborate on, the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City. My plan is to analyze the countries’ various projects, what they both have in common, their divergences, and see if these plans might be applicable only to a certain category of countries and why.51 pagesenSustainable urban developmentUrban ecology (Sociology)Urban environmentThesis