Plans for eco city abandoned?

Plans for the world's first 'eco city' appear to be dead in the water according to Fred Pearce's excellent Greenwash column in the Guardian. Dongtan was supposed to be a car free (except for hydrogen and electric vehicles) city of 500,000 people on the outskirts of Shanghai that met all of its energy and water needs from within the city boundaries, with all buildings constructed to an exacting low carbon standard. But now, according to Pearce :

This week, Peter Head, the man behind the project at the London-based consulting engineers Arup, who drew up the master plan, told me his clients at the city's Shanghai Industrial Investment Company had "gone quiet. We just don't know if anything will happen or when. The project office is shut."

Head outlined the reasons for the project's apparent failure:

"China does everything by the rules handed down from the top. There is a rule for everything. The width of roads, everything. That is how they have developed so fast, by being totally prescriptive. We wanted to change the rules in Dongtan, to do everything different. But when it comes to it, China cannot deliver that."