I was driving home the other day and switched on the radio halfway through a short discussion on Radio 4 about building ‘eco-friendly cities’ - just the sort of subject that gets my antennae twitching. As it unfolded it became apparent that the debate was not about whether building a city was ‘eco-friendly’ or not, but about how to make a city ‘green’ for its inhabitants.

The principal expert that much of the discussion revolved around was a Chinese architect (I didn’t catch his name I’m afraid) who was proudly explaining how a new city being built near Shanghai was going to be a 21st Century answer to the problems of urban living, how its air would be clean through clever traffic-flow regulation, and its design would be a model for planners everywhere. He painted a bright picture of how the people who will come to live there - most of whom he implied would be émigrés from ‘the countryside’ - would be able to lead ‘eco friendly’ lives. He proudly told the presenter how the design even incorporated a freshwater wetland so that the inhabitants would be able to “eat fresh fish” every day…

With city-dwellers soon expected to outnumber the percentage of the world’s population that live in the countryside - for the first time in human history - this model seemed, the panel agreed, like an excellent alternative to the dirty, grid-locked cities that the planet has currently evolved. Pats on the back all round, and onto the next subject…

The conversation left me infuriated (what doesn’t these days, you might ask) for two reasons: I know for a fact that this ‘eco-friendly city’ is being built on a massive reclamation site on Chongming Island, which is in the mouth of the Yangtse River - thus the region will be losing, amongst other things, yet another huge shorebird staging area and nursery area for both fish and shellfish; and secondly because I’m getting increasingly irritated by the way that “eco-friendly” and “green” is being hijacked to only include environmental impacts on human beings.

No matter what design the architects come up with, and no matter how that design is interpreted and presented by graphic artists on glossy hoardings and billboards, it is simply not possible - by any measure - to construct a new city of perhaps a million people that can claim to be ‘eco-friendly’. Cities require land - in this case land that needs to be converted from a highly productive tidal flat full of life into a concrete base for the city to stand on. There will be almost immeasurable increases in noise and disturbance. There will be huge disruption to the environment caused by the construction itself of course: unless they’re planning to air-lift in inflatable buildings there will be new roads built, vast amounts of construction materials brought in, and a huge workforce needed on site. The future inhabitants of this ‘eco-friendly’ city will want plumbing and sewerage, electrical supplies, transport links, shops and hospitals, recreation facilities, schools and office buildings - all of which will be decidedly ‘unfriendly’ to the existing environment. Food will have to be brought in - and the irony of providing a few “new” fish to replace the enormous numbers lost by destruction of part of the Yellow Sea would be laughable if it was funny rather than just sad.

Given that we are in a period of undisputed global warming, the city planners will also undoubtedly be having to think about the effects of rising sea-levels: without being fortified and protected behind either sea-walls or a system of enormous dykes the new city will be flooded almost as soon as it’s finished. How these preventive measures might affect tidal flow across the Yellow Sea wasn’t discussed - but if the estimate of a 5 meter rise in sea-levels in some parts of the Yellow Sea because of the restriction to the incoming tide caused by the 33km Saemangeum sea-wall is true, then they could be very severe indeed. How ‘eco-friendly’ is that going to be?

It’s also worth asking why this city is being built. The obvious response is going to be “because we need it”, but that’s hardly an answer. The architect I referred to above, who said that many people would want to come to live here from the countryside, was probably right - because the truth is that the Chinese ‘countryside’ is in one Hell of an awful state. Home to two-thirds of China’s population, it is increasingly becoming a dumping ground where local officials, desperate to generate jobs and tax revenues, protect factories that have polluted for years. Water is now so polluted that some rivers are actually too dangerous to TOUCH, or so scarce (either because of diversion away from major river systems towards the hugely expanding demands of the new Chinese middle-classes who - like the rest of us - want showers every day and nice gardens) that the economic viability of the countryside is collapsing. China also has an enormous problem with increasing desertification - blamed on water diversion again, over-grazing, and global warming. The vast grasslands that were historically the ‘bread basket’ of China are drying out and becoming desert. People simply can’t live in the countryside any longer - and not unsurprisingly are looking with envy at the seemingly unquantifiable luxury that the new capitalist economy is bringing to city-dwellers. Providing the rural poor with ‘eco-friendly’ cities seems almost an act of kindness…

To my jaundiced eyes all it seems that China is really doing is attempting to shift the problem of disastrous environmental policies from one area to another under a re-assuring cloak of ‘eco-friendliness’ - and, though I have no figures to back this up, I’m willing to bet my binoculars that property prices in a technologically advanced, expensively reclaimed area of prime real-estate that promises inhabitants a ‘green’ and ‘eco-friendly’ way of life will be way beyond the reach of a peasant farmer driven off environmentally degraded land thousands of miles away. Surely what is being built here is an enclave for the super-rich, a ghetto for those lucky enough to be able to afford to enter it?

I’m not in any way singling China out for criticism here by the way: Arab states like Dubai are busy building huge developments off shore in the Arabian Gulf, and if the UK had the wealth no doubt speculators and planners would love to expand London onto the tidal flats and marshes of the Thames Estuary - there will be enormous fortunes to be made for the developers who make it happen. Humans everywhere are desperate to escape the noise, pollution, and soul-destroying realities of today’s city life, and it will undoubtedly be true that this ‘green city’ will be built to be energy-efficient, to recycle its waste as effectively as possible, to give its inhabitants a lifestyle that - in human terms - will be ‘eco-friendly’, but let’s not kid ourselves that reclamation of a complex eco-system, construction of a city, mass human population movement, and an irreversible change made to an already rich and harmonious environment is in any way ‘eco-friendly’. It’s not - it’s destructive, it’s “progress” with the usual total lack of concern for non-human forms of life, and it diverts huge resources away from solving problems that we’ve already caused and are simply walking away from.

Tidying up the mess we already live in, re-designing our existing run-down inner cities to be ‘eco-friendly’, and making the ‘countryside’ inhabitable is surely where our efforts should be going.

If this city is ‘the future’ and a ‘model for planners everywhere’ - as the architect proudly proclaimed on the radio - then mass-extinctions, irretrievable loss of eco-systems, and our ploughing on towards the eventual complete breakdown of our environment is inevitable. And if that’s not worth getting infuriated about - then what is?