Translating Sustainability into Somatic Experience: Renderings of Eco-Cities in Southeast Asia

Abstract Fusing the aesthetics of futurity with the lush beauty of the natural world, planned eco-city developments like Forest City and Penang South Islands, both in Malaysia, promise luxury enclaves against climate change and the environmental stressors of existing cities. This article analyzes CGI architectural renderings used to promote and sell eco-city projects in Southeast Asia. Eco-city renderings, we argue, produce semio-capitalistic value by translating the familiar concepts of “green,” “eco-friendly,” and “sustainable” into something far more inchoate: feelings. They do so through their supersaturation with signs of greenness in a design strategy we label “semiotic overdetermination.” Selling “green” as a feeling, eco-city renderings capitalize on present-day anxieties over urban decay and commodify “the ecological” as a rich resource of pleasurable qualitative experiences. The result, we contend, is to reinforce a neoliberal mode of subjectivity that equates consumption with somatics and reduces climate responsibility to individual consumer decisions.