What does a good city look like?

The answer depends, but at least in the environmental protection aspect, it can look like a garden, said Ling Jia, a civil servant at the Taixing High-tech Development Zone located in Taichung zone, East China's Jiangsu province.

For the past 10 years, Ling has witnessed how the zone, following the Ecology-Oriented Development (EOD) mode, realized both economic prosperity and ecological harmony.

A modern development mode, EOD features running industries that fit local conditions and comprehensively developing a region on the basis of protecting ecological environment, as introduced by Tang Wenkui, vice head of Taizhou municipal environmental protection society. In Taixing zone specifically, they have achieveddone it by exploiting local tourist resources to increase local revenue and in turn support the environmental protection there.

Near the Fengqi Lake within the zone, a tourism town with local characteristics was built, together with an exhibition center and industrial tourism scenic sites; Thethe local high-tech industrial garden has also incubated high-tech enterprises that do research on energy-saving and environmental protection technologies that can be applied on this, thus forming a benign circle.

"EOD lays huge emphasis on people's sense of happiness and fulfillment," said Li Daiqing, a researcher at the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences(CRAES).

The 15 EOD sub-programs in the zone involve a total investment of 4.3 billion yuan($679.8 million), for which the local government has raised funds via enterprise investment, bank loans, debts, rents and Public-Private Partnership(PPP), all of which will help toto lessen the financial burden on taxpayers and to rally more money for the programs.

On Monday, an expert consultancy meeting was held for the mode. Chaired by Liu Hongzhi, a senior researcher and vice secretary general at CRAES, six experts have expressed their ideas about the mode in Taixing.

Wang Zhiping, an associate professor on environmental studies at Shanghai Jiaotong University, called for introducing more high technologies on reducing carbon emission into the zone, so as to make it more characteristic; hHe also looked forward to huge potentials of the zone in cultural tourism because the water quality there is high enough to support good ecology.

Yao Huanqing, an associate professor on business law at Renmin University of China, said that a key issue to the EOD mode is how to raise money andto make it sustainable. "One cannot always rely on bank loans to protect the ecological environment," he said, "high-quality environmental protection is based on a benign cycle that balances economy and environment." Taixing has done the job well, he said, adding that similar standards are needed to evaluate the performance of EOD programs everywhere.