Moving the mountain and greening the sea: the micropolitics of speculative green urbanism at Forest City, Iskandar Malaysia

Abstract

While green urbanism has been discussed extensively in the urban studies literature, less attention has been paid to the micropolitics of its cross-border transplantation. Using the case of Forest City, a mainland Chinese developer-led mega-project in the Iskandar Malaysia, we analyze the different ways green urbanism has been deployed in speculative city-making. The state seeks to position Iskandar Malaysia as greener than its global competitors, while the developer consolidates its brand image and marketing aesthetics with selective "green and smart" techniques, yet at the cost of local residents' habitat. In moving mountains to green the sea, the logic of speculative urbanization prevails and presides over sustainable and equitable green urbanism. Further attention to the complex local power nexus and the micropolitics of speculative green urbanism contextualizes different stakeholders' rationales and practices, and contributes to critical reflections on the entanglement of green urbanism and speculative urbanization.

Urban speculation for survival: Adaptations and negotiations in Forest City, Malaysia

“…In contrast to Forest City’s earlier disregard for environmental protection and subsequent backtracking during Phase 1, its more recent environmental focus represents a significant pivot in strategy and rhetoric regarding the meaning of environmental sustainability. Whereas the previous two phases focused on attracting or representing particular demographics of residents, Phase 3 reinforces a broader search for an identity that can justify Forest City’s existence beyond its purpose as a speculative real estate and investment vehicle, and demonstrates the ‘instrumental nature of green urbanism discourses for advancing economic interests’ (Koh et al, 2021: 7). Although Forest City has always branded itself as a ‘green’ city, CGPV’s recent announcements regarding environmental education and awareness appear to represent a renewed and somewhat reinterpreted commitment to ideas of environmental and urban sustainability, reflecting attempts to go beyond simply including physical green plants and features (Moser and Avery, 2021).…”

“…Scholarship on speculative urbanism primarily examines the motivations for this high-risk, entrepreneurial mode of development, including rent-seeking (Phelps and Miao, 2020), ‘world city’ aspirations (Goldman, 2011), and inter-urban competition and referencing (Zhang, 2017). For example, Koh et al (2021) link speculative urbanism to Forest City’s green identity, arguing that the project leverages its green brand for economic purposes. Urban mega - developments are highly speculative due to their supply-driven nature (Koelemaij and Derudder, 2021), uncertainty of success, and dependence on market conditions as their developers seek to extract value from real estate sales (Shin, 2016) and skyrocketing land prices (Goldman, 2020).…”

“…The developer’s early neglect for local regulations and nearby villagers is reflected not only in the exclusive marketing of the private, gated city to Chinese nationals, but in its disregard for environmental protection: land reclamation at Forest City contributed to increased sediment, shifting water currents, and worsening pollution, negatively impacting local Malay and Indigenous Orang Asli villagers who rely on fishing and mussel farming to make a living (Rahman, 2017). Within the new city, Country Garden replicated its aesthetic of ‘green everywhere’ – its signature style in its real estate developments within China (Koh et al, 2021: 14) – making little attempt to use local plants or provide spaces such as kitchen gardens or fruit trees that are valued by Malay populations and villagers in the area (Moser and Avery, 2021).…”

The urbanising dynamics of global China: speculation, articulation, and translation in global capitalism

“…As they note, for a large-scale housing project built on reclaimed land, residents took hold of the keys to their new flats only three years after land reclamation commenced, the speed of which residents in neighbouring Singapore, where land reclamation has been a mode of urbanisation, would not usually be accustomed to. The high-speed construction of Forest City by the Chinese developer also results in the "speedy destruction of the natural habitats upon which the new city stands" (Koh et al, 2022(Koh et al, , p. 1489, defying the green urbanism the new city was to transplant from the developer's homeland.…”

A political ecology of speculative urbanism: The role of financial and environmental speculation in Jakarta’s water crisis

“…More broadly, it contributes an empirical case study to a growing literature that examines the socio-ecological dimensions of speculative urban development. This scholarship has provided important insights into the political economies of urban disaster risk and environmental crisis (Rumbach 2017;Shatkin, 2019) and highlighted the contradictions between disaster mitigation, resilience planning, and green urbanism on the one hand, and mainstream urban planning trajectories on the other (Octavianti and Charles, 2018;Colven 2020a;Weinstein et al 2019;Koh et al, 2021). However, studies to date have focused more specifically on speculative urbanism as a financial process and have not yet engaged closely with speculative imaginaries associated with environmental speculation.…”