The Riviera is one of many artificial suburban communities on the outskirts of Beijing in Shunyi district. Reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting dropped into the middle of Beijing's rural suburbs - with a 'Disney Main Street USA' tackiness - by day, it has the stifling cleanliness of a hospice ward. But every night, it is lit up with fairyland splendour, putting to shame even the Rockefeller Centre during Christmas week.
There are now literally hundreds of these kitsch communities surrounding Beijing, and tens of thousands spreading across China. While the taste of Chinese today apes the big and bright, the cost in energy inefficiency of so much brightness may herald an environmental disaster in the coming years.
Beijing's network of highways is constipated by massive traffic jams, and it chokes under a thick film of carbon-concentrated smog. Yet, this is only the tip of the capital's wasteful and polluting biosystem.
Mark Dembitz, vice-president of Carbon Capital Beijing, has pioneered the introduction of non-pollution technology in China as part of a sophisticated international trading of carbon credits. He explained how such a project works. 'We completely create the project for a polluting factory that has no incentive not to pollute. We say, 'let us come in and give you a piece of technology to reduce pollution'. Then we will ask them to use it. We will teach them how to tip waste, install gas connections [and] capture methane out of landfill pumps through a generator which creates electricity.'
This helps on two fronts. Instead of methane escaping from the landfill, it is captured, thereby creating electricity from a clean source to be sold back to the grid or used in creating carbon credits. The landfill process benefits from upgraded technology, and training is provided in how to 'tip' waste in more efficient ways, to maximise land use.
The tipping policy reduces the amount of smell for locals - a common problem when sewage backs up in the cities. Everyone wins.
'Most polluting carbon emissions actually come from inefficient insulation of buildings,' Mr Dembitz said, not cars and air transport. Certainly, Beijing would take an Olympic gold medal for excessive construction of inefficiently insulated buildings.