Dolphin City -- Yiyang 2121

The Ecotopia 2121 project looks at the urban futures of 100 cities around the world. This month we forecast the future of Yiyang, China.

Yiyang is a city of five million people on the shores of the great lake of Dongting. Postcards of the city are resplendent with lovely, romantic scenes of this famous lake and its feeder rivers.

The lake is home to the very rare Dongting dolphin. At the moment, the survival of this charming, smiling dolphin is precarious at best. Some hundred individuals are all that remain in the lake, which once teemed with tens of thousands. In 2050s they are pronounced locally in the lake extinct by biologists; a warning about the future to the humans in the area.

But the citizens of Yiyang are determined re-introduce the dolphins from nearby rivers and to clean up the lake so they can grow in numbers. By 2121, they are jumping through surface waters once more...

DOLPHIN CITY -- YIYANG 2121

Somehow—probably from one of Lake Dongting’s feeder rivers—a small population is able to survive the disasters of the mid-twenty-first century and then migrate back to the lake fifty years later. For Yiyang, this is a symbol of their success in creating a 22nd century 'Green Utopia'.