Jingmen

Jingmen is building an energy-storage city on top of a recycling city. The central Hubei city sits 94 metres above sea level, and recent city estimates remain close to the GeoNames figure of 632,954 residents. Officially it is a prefecture-level city better known for transport links and nearby ancient sites.

The Wikipedia-gap story is metabolism. Jingmen High-Tech Zone says it aims to become a demonstration area for the recycling economy and the most attractive resource-recycling industrial park in central-west China, a policy direction that made the city ready for the battery boom before the boom arrived. By the end of 2024, EVE Energy had put the first phase of a RMB 10.8 billion, 60 GWh super factory into operation in Jingmen, with 17 GWh of annual capacity and the city's total power and storage battery capacity rising to 212 GWh. In 2024, EVE and GEM also launched a 60.2MW/120.4MWh energy-storage project in Jingmen's circular-economy park, described as Hubei's largest industrial and commercial storage project. These are not isolated plants. They sit inside a city that deliberately organised recycling, materials, energy storage, and manufacturing as one loop.

Autophagy is the first mechanism: Jingmen keeps trying to turn waste streams and exhausted materials into fresh industrial input. Niche-construction is the second, because the high-tech zone was built as a recycling habitat years before energy storage became fashionable. Positive-feedback-loops are the third: each new battery, recycling, or storage project makes the city more useful to the next investor.

The biological parallel is the earthworm. Earthworms do quiet work that turns residue into fertile ground for more growth. Jingmen plays the urban equivalent. Its underappreciated edge is not one headline factory. It is a civic habit of keeping materials in circulation until new industries can feed on them.