The Environmental Restructuring of Beijing’s Office Stock in the Light of China’s Economic Opening

Abstract. The spatial constitution of major cities is undergoing a rapid transformation in the era of globalisation. From place to place, the urban tissue is seeing a process of verticalisation and densification with the rise of ‘transnational urban spaces’. This is in turn entailing a number of pressures on the local environment and infrastructure, which are emerging as hidden costs of development and besetting major cities in a burgeoning way – e.g. the decline of green areas, heat island effect, vehicular atmospheric pollution, sanitation and energy inefficiency, and so on. Nowhere in the world are these pressures so accentuated as in Chinese cities, where the country’s economic reform has prompted an urban ‘modernisation rush ’ without precedents in history, contributing to turn the once cleanest cities of the planet into the most polluted ones. The aim of this paper is to explore the links between globalisation and the transformation of the urban environment, but to also go one step further. By looking at the case of Beijing’s office stock – and focusing on its water management – our objective is to investigate not only how globalisation is triggering urban environmental pressures, but also how it may introduce urban environmental management solutions. The case of the China World Trade Center building is described to illustrate how the conceptualisation of environmental innovations in Beijing may be linked to the same processes of economic opening that are contributing to introduce them