A refashioned Huangbaiyu longs for residents to woo.

With the “eco-village” of Huangbaiyu in northern China scheduled to be built, and with a handful of other Chinese cities awaiting his Cradle-to-Cradle design imprimatur for new development, William McDonough told this magazine exactly one year ago: “China is our most ambitious project yet.”

Yet by spring 2006, McDonough’s partnership work on Huangbaiyu with the Portland-based China U.S. Center for Sustainable Development (CUCSD) is at what a McDonough spokesperson calls “a less than opportune moment for additional coverage.”

CUCSD senior program manager Rory Schmick also declined to talk to SIJ about the current status of work at Huangbaiyu, saying that it was not the right time. And University of California at Berkeley PhD candidate Shannon May, who’s been living in the village since May 2005 and has written the draft of her dissertation on the development effort there, says McDonough’s reading of her work has led to “a complete circling of the wagons” by the partners. Instead of being a demonstration model for sustainable growth ready to be replicated throughout the country, Huangbaiyu appears to be a village in limbo.

In the old village districts of Huangbaiyu, many farmers subsidize their yearly harvest earnings with small flocks of sheep, backyard gardens and trout aquaculture. Meanwhile, the new village’s neat rows of 42 eco-dwellings — outfitted with rooftop solar panels, radiant heat floors and pipes for methane heating and cooking fuel from a nearby biomass gasification plant — currently sit empty. No villagers have yet agreed to cash in their old homesteads in order to purchase the comfort of a McDonough-designed bungalow.

The village was cherry-picked by CUCSD and McDonough as an ideal site for demonstrating to the world how China, in its mad rush into industrialized wealth, could build with sustainability in mind. Resettling 400 Huangbaiyu families to McDonough’s hay-bale bungalows was meant to raise living standards, reduce coal-burning emissions, as well as consolidate housing in a compact region so more of the village’s land could be turned into arable hectares — a major goal of the Chinese government.

McDonough designed the houses to cost around $3,000 (U.S.), but the move-in price is now estimated by local developer Dai Xialong and the CUCSD to top $5,000.

Technical expertise for the flagship Huangbaiyu project was donated by companies such as BP, a multinational producer of rooftop solar panels.

Village residents are considered to be among China’s “have-nots.” Rigorous efforts were made to design the new village with local resources and local residents in mind. But potential income villagers could lose if they lived suddenly only meters apart with no provision for sheep pens and vegetable gardens did not appear to be part of the planners’ initial calculations.

A key issue in rural China is how to provide steady incomes that can pay for housing improvements, CUCSD’s Schmick said in a previous interview with SIJ. Schmick added that he had anticipated some “structural challenges” in projects such as Huangbaiyu.

May says CUCSD and its advisors have known for some time that some type of micro-enterprise assistance might be needed in the village to bolster household incomes. Rumors have circulated in the village that no one could move in unless a factory of some sort was planned along with the housing, she adds.

May says she thinks there’s a chance the villagers might not even choose to move if they suddenly had a surge in income. “While most householders recognized that the new houses are an improvement, there are other improvements that take priority, including health care, care for the elderly, and education for children,” she says.

CUCSD, formed in 1999 by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and the State of Oregon, has a mission of promoting sustainable development. Technical expertise for the flagship Huangbaiyu project was also donated by board member multinationals such as Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), BP (NYSE: BP) and Vermeer Manufacturing Co.

William McDonough glad-hands developer Dai Xiaolong.

McDonough’s book with Michael Braungart, “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things,” offers a blueprint for how to redesign products with either biological nutrients to be tossed into the compost or technical nutrients that can be endlessly recycled. McDonough frequently asserts that good design is integral to creating a waste-not, want-not, non-toxic world. In addition to the CUCSD, Chinese officials seemingly embraced the concept, translating Cradle-to-Cradle thinking as a “circular economy” in the local edition of the book. Chinese President Hu Jintao has advocated the circular economy for urban planning.

The stakes at Huangbaiyu are high. China has a pressing need to house an estimated 400 million citizens over the next decade. Pursuing development in a business-as-usual fashion is perceived by Chinese officials and other nations as a serious threat to the world’s ecology.

McDonough has said, for example, that if China did its building with brick, it would lose all its top soil and burn all of its coal. Huangbaiyu’s eco-village design emerged from collaborative work between McDonough, CUCSD, the local Benxi Urban Planning Design association and Tongji University. Centralizing village residences was considered important to approximating a walkable, more urban existence and freeing up hundreds of hectares of farmable land.

In her dissertation, May hypothesizes that the design flaw — inadequate attention to how villagers could increase their income to pay for better quality of life — is based on a blind spot in China’s domestic policy and its plan to beef up arable land.

The idea that more arable land equals more money for farmers may not be accurate, May says, and domestic planners might need to more closely consider income sources along with development changes. May says she hopes the partnership’s “circling of the wagons” might have a beneficial effect on future plans at Huangbaiyu.

“Everything had been full speed ahead for so long, without regard to what was happening on the ground,” she says. “Now they are taking some time to consider things. I can only hope sounder decisions will be made. I think it is a positive step, and demonstrates some care for the project that has been lacking.”