Financing sustainable urban development has become a major issue, especially in Asian countries where the size and scale of construction efforts are vast. Shenzhen International Low Carbon City (ILCC) is a demonstration project of the China-EU Partnership on Sustainable Urbanization (CEUPSU) and an intriguing example for understanding innovative forms of funding with the specific aim to do this in environmentally, socially and economically sustainable ways. This article examines which financial vehicles are utilized in ILCC, in what way these contribute to sustainability and which implications the lessons drawn from it have for other eco and low carbon cities in China and elsewhere. The authors find that Urban Investment and Finance Platforms and Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) in a broader context are the two financial vehicles ILCC uses. A broad approach to PPPs is chosen in which stakeholder involvement is key and social conflicts are avoided by balancing the interests of various stakeholders. In particular, planning the village area as a whole and arranging finance through ‘metro + property’ provide a replicable and operable example for other cities in funding urban renewal and community transformation and dealing with the issue how residents can share the benefits of urban development with developers. The combination of these financial arrangements facilitates ILCC to achieve the triple bottom line in sustainable urbanization. ILCC is environmentally sustainable by promoting low carbon transition, socially sustainable through resident and villager involvement, and financially sustainable through diversification of funding sources. The financing experience gained from ILCC provides practical lessons for other cities and has significant implications in adapting institutional and organizational arrangements to create enabling conditions for innovative financing activities.@en

Currently, more and more people live in cities, and this leads to an enormous increase in global GHG emissions. Cities are blamed for the cause of environmental problems. Therefore, countries over the world aim to approach these problems by launching sustainable city programs. On April 22, 2016, China signed the Paris Agreement at the United Nations Headquarters in New York and formally promised that carbon dioxide emissions in China would reach the peak around 2030, and it would strive for reaching the peak as soon as possible. However, the transition to sustainable cities requires governments to invest a large sum of money. It was projected by IEA in 2010 that the total investment to projects responding to climate change may amount to US $ 220 billion each year between 2010 and 2020 and about US $ 1 trillion each year between 2020 and 2030. Against this backdrop, how to fund the development of sustainable cities becomes a pressing problem the Chinese government faces. Previously, it was a common practice for the Chinese government to resort to off-budget means such as land concessions and Urban Development and Investment Corporations (UDICs) to bridge the money gap. However, these tools are viewed as unsustainable due to the scarcity of land and the imbalance of benefit appropriation among different stakeholders caused by land finance and the lack of transparency financing through UIFPs. Therefore, this research aims to expand the funding sources through exploring the possibilities for the involvement of private sectors in the construction of sustainable cities and their roles playing in achieving climate goals nationally.@en

In the past few decades, urban infrastructures in China have seen an enormous upgrade, and due to large-scale urbanization many more investments are due in the coming years. In order to supplement public funding, Public Private Partnerships (PPP) and municipal bonds have recently grown popular in China. The introduction of this new policy does not occur in a void but should be understood as the path-dependent consequence of a historical evolution of funding arrangements for urban development. How have Chinese governments traditionally arranged financing for these extensive investments and how has the emphasis in funding sources shifted over time? We argue that the evolution of urban development financing has gone through three phases (planned economy, reform and pilot, and socialist market economy), each with different emphasis in financial sources. Our analysis demonstrates how weaknesses in earlier phases present challenges that new solutions in later phases are aimed to address.@en

Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City (SSTEC) is currently the best-known and arguably the most successful large-scale sustainable new town development project in China; as such, experiences gathered there are of significant importance for the development of other eco-cities in China and elsewhere. This article focuses on a thus far relatively understudied aspect of SSTEC, the financial vehicles used to fund SSTEC. The authors find that highly structured and intense collaboration at the national level between China and Singapore plays a catalytic role in attracting many other players to the project by giving them confidence that it is too big to fail. It encourages various preferential policies from lower governmental bodies, broad involvement of the private sector, a market-based operation model and the issuing of bonds in Singapore, which all contribute significantly to Tianjin eco-city's financial viability. The broad involvement of the private sector relieves part of the financial burden from local governments, while the bonds issued in international markets lower the interest rate for master developers. However, the Sino-Singaporean collaboration at the national level is far less likely to be replicated to other eco-cities, since this requires an enormous willingness on the part of other countries to invest manpower, money, and other resources into the construction of eco-cities in China.

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The deployment of electric vehicles has attracted growing attention and is now seen as a possible pathway for a transition towards sustainable transportation. This paper provides insight into the commercialization of electric vehicles in Shenzhen focusing on business innovation and the regulatory context in which it occurs. Using the business model canvas framework, this paper analyzes interactions between enterprises and governments along the value chain of electric vehicles in the bus and taxi fleets. It also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the Shenzhen model both in business innovation and government regulation for promoting electric vehicle use. This paper finds that Shenzhen has succeeded in fostering a distinct government-enterprise cooperation model that not only reduces the financial pressure on the local government to promote electric vehicle use, but also gives enterprises significant leeway to experiment with various innovative business models. The joint result of these efforts is that the commercialization of electric vehicles has become feasible for delivering the public transport service (buses and taxis) in Shenzhen. Still, this paper argues that the current model of Shenzhen can be further enhanced by: 1) encouraging private investment in charging infrastructures by means of public–private-partnerships; and 2) standardizing electric-vehicle technologies and production to break down the local protectionism in the electric vehicle market. The Shenzhen model acts as a source of inspiration by pointing out the significance of integrating business innovations and government regulations to facilitate the deployment of electric vehicles, which provides practical lessons for industrial players and policy makers in other cities. Furthermore, this work offers theoretical references regarding the application of the multi-actor perspective and the business model canvas framework to analyze the actors and interactions along the value chain of innovative technologies.

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