megaproject

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, From Home Renovations to Space Exploration
by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Published 16 Feb 2023

Bent Flyvbjerg, Atif Ansar, Alexander Budzier, Søren Buhl, Chantal Cantarelli, Massimo Garbuio, Carsten Glenting, Mette Skamris Holm, Dan Lovallo, Daniel Lunn, Eric Molin, Arne Rønnest, Allison Stewart, and Bert van Wee, “Five Things You Should Know About Cost Overrun,” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 118 (December 2018): 174–90, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3248999. Bent Flyvbjerg and J. Rodney Turner, “Do Classics Exist in Megaproject Management?,” International Journal of Project Management 36, no. 2 (2018): 334–41, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3012134. Bent Flyvbjerg, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), https://amzn.to/3OCTZqI. Bent Flyvbjerg, “Introduction: The Iron Law of Megaproject Management,” in The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management, ed. Bent Flyvbjerg (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–18, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

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The results should be considered preliminary in this sense. 26. Bent Flyvbjerg, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Thomas Frey, “Megaprojects Set to Explode to 24% of Global GDP Within a Decade,” Future of Construction, February 10, 2017, https://futureofconstruction.org/blog/megaprojects-set-to-explode-to-24-of-global-gdp-within-a-decade. 27. Kaamil Ahmed, “Ending World Hunger by 2030 Would Cost $330 Billion, Study Finds,” The Guardian, October 13, 2020. Using the conservative numbers from Flyvbjerg, Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management (2017)—that is, $6 trillion to $9 trillion per year—a 5 percent cost cut would equal savings of $300 billion to $450 billion per year.

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abstract_id=2767128. Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, and Daniel Lunn, “Should We Build More Large Dams? The Actual Costs of Hydropower Megaproject Development,” Energy Policy 69 (March 2014): 43–56, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2406852. Bent Flyvbjerg, ed., Megaproject Planning and Management: Essential Readings, vols. 1–2 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014), https://amzn.to/3kg1g1s. Bent Flyvbjerg, “What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why: An Overview,” Project Management Journal 45, no. 2 (April–May 2014): 6–19, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2424835.

The Story of Crossrail
by Christian Wolmar
Published 5 Sep 2018

Not surprisingly, even without ‘optimum bias’ being factored into the equation, the Treasury was deeply suspicious of these big projects – which are now dubbed ‘transport megaprojects’ – and subjected them to rigorous analysis. Its favoured tactic to avoid spending money was to announce further studies which would inevitably lead to delays, in the hope that they would all one day disappear, leaving the Treasury’s coffers unraided. It took a strong politician – or politicians – to push a project through, and good luck with the timing of their efforts as well. The first time Crossrail ran out of luck because another project, the Jubilee Line, was more in tune with the zeitgeist but the second time it was more fortunate. Research into megaprojects, those defined as costing billions rather than millions of pounds, provide some justification for the Treasury’s scepticism by highlighting the widespread tendency of promoters of new projects to understate costs and overstate benefits.

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Flyvbjerg argues that there are structural reasons for this bias, which, since there are ‘many more underperforming projects than can be explained by chance alone… cannot be explained primarily by the innate difficulty of predicting the future’.6 Flyvbjerg blames the over-eagerness of politicians to make a mark in the short time they have in office and pressure from special interest groups and contractors for the over-optimistic view of megaprojects which in turn makes them more likely to be given the go-ahead. Once work on projects is put out to tender, there are considerable incentives to underestimating costs in order to win contracts, because the penalties for overspending are relatively small. Remarkably, the Major Projects Association, the industry’s representative organization, has acknowledged that ‘too many projects proceed that should not have done’.7 However, while some megaprojects have undoubtedly proved to be white elephants, with, in hindsight, little justification for their construction, many do produce considerable wider societal benefits when their overall impact is taken into account.

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Remarkably, the Major Projects Association, the industry’s representative organization, has acknowledged that ‘too many projects proceed that should not have done’.7 However, while some megaprojects have undoubtedly proved to be white elephants, with, in hindsight, little justification for their construction, many do produce considerable wider societal benefits when their overall impact is taken into account. More recent analysis, by the University College London Omega research team into transport megaprojects, is rather more supportive of the concept than Flyvbjerg, suggesting that the benefits of megaprojects need to be looked at in a wider context. While recognizing that overspending is a problem, the researchers found that there is a tendency to view projects such as Crossrail too narrowly as mere transport projects when, in fact, they are ‘agents of change’.

Food and Fuel: Solutions for the Future
by Andrew Heintzman , Evan Solomon and Eric Schlosser
Published 2 Feb 2009

Through some 180-degree turn of history, you are now just as likely to see Inuvialuit, Gwitch’in, or Sahtu running business meetings, cutting deals, and working the drillfloor. Indeed, the First Nations of the Mackenzie are one-third owners of what will become Canada’s first Arctic megaproject, right alongside corporate majors like Imperial, Shell, Conoco, and ExxonMobil, all of whom hold substantial reserves from the Arctic’s first wave of gas exploration. The result will be the continent’s single longest pipeline and the first megaproject of the twenty-first century: a 1,350-kilometre-long string of steel that would carry a twenty-year supply of natural gas to hungry North American markets.2 It’s a long way from the days when Aboriginal leaders accused companies of genocide and colonization.

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Nations and multinationals are delving deeper and deeper into remote territory to locate marketable fossil fuels, a trend that’s reflected in efforts to create “secure supplies” through energy megaprojects — everything from Canada’s oil sands to China’s Three Gorges Dam to a global wave of nuclear reactor construction — as we attempt to forestall the inevitable and final depletion of non-renewable energy. A surge in new megaprojects is accelerated by a series of tectonic economic shifts that are transforming previously cheap commodities like natural gas into one of Earth’s most strategic resources. A fuel like natural gas, valued for its versatility and relatively clean burn, is the energy source that could bridge a global shift to more diversified, sustainable forms of power — energy efficiency, renewables, hydrogen cells, and beyond.

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Paradoxically, self-government in the Mackenzie also underpins the new business spirit of the region. It’s precisely because Aboriginals have control that development is permitted and promoted. What this all means for the first megaproject of the twenty-first century is that the task of forging partnerships is potentially a bigger job than building the pipeline itself. The megaproject is the relationship, and that mantra shapes everything that happens along the Mackenzie. It’s been a long economic struggle to gain land claims and set up local self-government. People like former Premier Stephen Kakfwi, who was a radical opponent of the pipeline in the 1970s, now understand the future to be in compressor stations, high-tech Arctic drill rigs, and Aboriginal entrepreneurs.

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World
by Jonathan Hillman
Published 28 Sep 2020

Derek Scissors, “China Global Investment Tracker,” American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, accessed February 2, 2020, https://www.aei.org/china-global-investment-tracker/. 19. Jonathan Hillman, “Influence and Infrastructure,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 22, 2019, https://www.csis.org/analysis/influence-and-infrastructure-strategic-stakes-foreign-projects. 20. Bent Flyvbjerg, “Introduction: The Iron Law of Megaproject Management,” in The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management, ed. Bent Flyv-bjerg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1–18, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2742088; Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier, and Daniel Lunn, “Does Infrastructure Investment Lead to Economic Growth or Economic Fragility?

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For China, Europe is the prize at the end of the supercontinent, but as Chapters 3–5 explain, treacherous terrain stands in the way. The challenges begin at China’s doorstep. As I learned when crossing Central Asia’s borders on foot and while hitching a ride across the Caspian Sea, the BRI is a middleman’s dream. Its megaprojects offer ample opportunities for bribery, kickbacks, and theft. These challenges are hardly limited to Central Asia. Indeed, the problem is not simply corruption where China aims to go but how it aims to get there: building massive projects with little transparency and accountability. Corruption is a feature, not a bug, of the BRI’s design.

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The script has been flipped, although as with all historical comparisons, there are important differences. New technologies open avenues for influence, while international institutions and norms moderate today’s global connectivity competition. To understand these challenges, there is no better year to begin than 1869, when three megaprojects shrank the world. The U.S. transcontinental railway, the Suez Canal, and the Indo-European Telegraph leveraged new technologies to carry people, goods, and information faster than ever before. In the West, these projects are popularly remembered as symbols of progress. In hindsight, the story looks very different, not only from the perspective of the weaker states, which often sacrificed political autonomy for relatively little economically, but also from the vantage point of the great powers themselves, whose overwhelming drive to build and expand concealed risks lurking beneath the surface.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Instead, there was considerably more grass-roots skepticism about the value of these megaprojects in view of more pressing needs on earth. Meanwhile, some conspiracy theorists still maintained that the original moon landing had been faked and that NASA’s failure to retain some crucial television footage only confirmed that fraud perpetuated upon the entire world. (Whether they would have preferred a “real-life” landing was not clear.) For the fortieth anniversary, however, NASA unveiled the start of an improved version of the footage that might quell some doubts when completed. The same skepticism, of course, applies to other megaprojects such as the so-called “Star Wars” anti-missile defense system and the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, though it should be said that the latter project has been abandoned while the missile defense project lives on despite having cost more than one hundred billion dollars.

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Rogers, for our children, Richard William Rogers Segal and Raechel Maya Rogers Segal, and for our beloved shih-tzu, Toms Table of Contents Preface Introduction 1 2 xi 1 The Nature of Utopias 5 Utopias Defined 5 Utopias Differ from both Millenarian Movements and Science Fiction 8 Utopias’ Spiritual Qualities are Akin to those of Formal Religions 9 Utopias’ Real Goal: Not Prediction of the Future but Improvement of the Present 12 How and When Utopias are Expected to be Established 13 The Variety of Utopias 16 The Global Nature of Utopias: Utopias are Predominantly but not Exclusively Western 16 3 The Several Genres of Utopianism: Prophecies and Oratory, Political Movements, Communities, Writings, World’s Fairs, Cyberspace 24 The European Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics 47 The Pioneering European Visionaries and Their Basic Beliefs: Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia 47 4 5 Forging the Connections Between Science, Technology, and Utopia 50 The Pansophists 53 The Prophets of Progress: Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Comte 55 Dissenters from the Ideology of Unadulterated Scientific and Technological Progress: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris 58 The Expansive Visions of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier 60 The “Scientific” Socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 66 The American Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics 74 America as Utopia: Potential and Fulfillment 74 The Pioneering American Visionaries and their Basic Beliefs in America as Land of Opportunity: John Adolphus Etzler, Thomas Ewbank, and Mary Griffith 78 America as “Second Creation”: Enthusiasm and Disillusionment 81 Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia in the United States and Europe 89 Later American Technological Utopians: John Macnie Through Harold Loeb 89 Utopia Within Sight: The American Technocracy Crusade 96 Utopia Within Reach: “The Best and the Brightest ”—Post-World War II Science and Technology Policy in the United States and Western Europe and the Triumph of the Social Sciences On Misreading Frankenstein: How Scientific and Technological Advances have Changed Traditional Criticisms of Utopianism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries viii Table of Contents 99 123 6 7 8 Utopia Reconsidered 139 The Growing Retreat from Space Exploration and Other Megaprojects 139 Nuclear Power: Its Rise, Fall, and Possible Revival—Maine Yankee as a Case Study 142 The Declining Belief in Inventors, Engineers, and Scientists as Heroes; in Experts as Unbiased; and in Science and Technology as Social Panaceas 157 Contemporary Prophets for Profit: The Rise and Partial Fall of Professional Forecasters 160 Post-colonial Critiques of Western Science and Technology as Measures of “Progress” 169 The Resurgence of Utopianism 186 The Major Contemporary Utopians and Their Basic Beliefs 186 Social Media: Utopia at One’s Fingertips 193 Recent and Contemporary Utopian Communities 194 The Star Trek Empire: Science Fiction Becomes Less Escapist 199 Edutopia: George Lucas and Others 203 The Fate of Books and Newspapers: Utopian and Dystopian Aspirations 217 The Future of Utopias and Utopianism 234 The “Scientific and Technological Plateau” and the Redefinition of Progress 234 Conclusion: Why Utopia Still Matters Today and Tomorrow 241 Further Reading Index 261 269 Table of Contents ix Preface I have long found serious, thoughtful utopias and utopians to be fascinating, important, and deserving of respect and inquiry.

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The fact that these and so many more activities can be carried on at home on personal computers makes them all the more appealing to those growing numbers of Americans who expect and demand insulation and protection from the world about them. Not surprisingly, their varied individual political agendas increasingly do not include taxpayer support for megaprojects such as super colliders and space stations. For that matter, whatever appreciation follows for the scientific, technological, and social scientific advances that allow for these 122 Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia new living and working arrangements does not, as in the past, translate into any celebration of science or technology, much less of social science, as wonders in and of themselves.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

Behavioural government: using behavioural science to improve how governments make decisions. Report, Behavioural Insights Team (www.bi.team/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/BIT-Behavioural-Government-Report-2018.pdf). 10 B. Flyvbjerg. 2017. Introduction: the iron law of megaproject management. In The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management, edited by B. Flyvbjerg, pp. 1–18. Oxford University Press. 11 B. Flyvbjerg. 2014. What you should know about megaprojects and why: an overview. Project Management Journal 45(2), 6–19. 12 B. Flyvbjerg. 2016. The fallacy of beneficial ignorance: a test of Hirschman’s hiding hand. World Development 84, 176–189.

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Cost overruns are universal A comprehensive study spanning ninety years and covering 1,500 transport megaprojects in twenty countries found that nine out of ten of them experienced cost overruns.13 For rail, the average cost escalation was 45%, for tunnels and bridges it was 34%, and for roads 20%.14 Smaller projects are vulnerable too, just a bit less often An analysis of the nearly 1,000 transport projects in Australia that have cost more than £10 million showed that 34% significantly overran their budget.15 In 2017 the Institute for Government showed that when smaller projects in the UK overran, they did so less severely.16 Evidence suggests that megaprojects operate on a scale so large that, even when they try to keep it simple, they end up breaking new ground, transforming landscapes and gaining a political dimension.

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It’s quite philosophical, but we believe that making transport better for humans means respecting the needs of past, present and future people. Those yet to be born arguably have the biggest stake in the decisions made today. Historically, sustainable and active travel has fallen through the cracks because planning tends to concentrate on mega­projects (those costing more than $1 billion) and major projects (those above $100 million), with big speed-and-time metrics, rather than on the many smaller projects (those costing more like $10 million) that have long-term social and health benefits. These things are qualitatively different. The installation of a cycle lane is much less about shortening a journey and much more about the ease, safety and social acceptability of using a bicycle for transport.

The Profiteers
by Sally Denton

In August 2014 the sixty-one-year-old Riley turned over the presidency to his son, Brendan. At the time, Riley had a net worth of $3.2 billion, putting him among the fifty wealthiest people in America and making him the 127th richest person in the world. Specializing in what it calls “multiyear megaprojects,” Bechtel received $24 billion in new contracts during 2013. Its fifty-five thousand “employees”—most of whom are subcontractors—are divided among projects in six “markets”: civil infrastructure; communications; government services; mining and metals; oil, gas, and chemicals; and power. Its website lists dozens of “signature projects” that read like a roundup of nearly every high-profile undertaking throughout the world.

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The project made a lot of money for a lot of men, but it propelled Bechtel into a condition approaching that of a corporate nation-state. How the formation of the famous Six Companies joint venture came about has taken on mythological proportions. Over time Bechtel emerged as the primary builder of the dam, so that today the company website highlights it as its flagship megaproject. What is undisputed about the consortium’s provenance is the fact that on a February morning in 1931, a group of twelve West Coast contractors assembled at the Engineers’ Club in San Francisco. “Two were aging Mormons who had graded the roadbed for the Western Pacific when it went through Utah,” Fortune magazine reported about the meeting.

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In response, Shultz effectively overhauled the company, reorganizing it toward a holding company structure for Bechtel Corporation’s three principal operating divisions, all managed by Shultz: the Bechtel Power Corporation, a construction company that was the nation’s largest builder of nuclear plants; Bechtel Petroleum Inc., which built refineries and other oil and gas industry facilities; and Bechtel Civil and Mineral, a builder of mass transit systems and other major infrastructures. The Bechtel Corporation changed its name to the Bechtel Group, and Shultz assumed a formal role in developing megaprojects in newly industrialized countries. Under his guidance, the company evolved from a direct construction company into project management, engineering, and construction management, which, by 1980, accounted for two-thirds of its revenues. With Shultz’s leadership, Bechtel also diversified into financing and operational services—most notably acquiring an 80 percent interest in the prestigious Dillon, Read & Company investment firm.

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell
Published 14 Oct 2014

I will focus my attention here on five main examples of reactionary environmentalism in the tar sands. 1. Co-opting Environmental Concepts Not long ago, the main marketing strategy for Alberta Synthetic Crude Oil (SCO) was purely and simply to convince potential producers that it was worth the capital investment, whereas in recent years, industry has had to dress up the entire megaproject in green clothing. Years ago, efforts to reduce ecological impacts were seldom trumpeted, mostly because they were seldom practiced. It is important to recall that it was not until 2003 that the US Energy Information Administration even recognized Alberta’s vast bituminous deposits as an economically viable source of oil.5 So while the production of SCO had already been wreaking havoc upon the landscapes and communities of northern Alberta for decades, up to this time serious attention to questions of the environment overwhelmingly took a backseat to SCO’s main selling points—economic growth and energy security—in order to secure further investment and exports.

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Reframing: From Unsustainable to “Sustainable” Development Both Big Oil and its backers in the Albertan and Canadian governments have increasingly attempted to challenge the label of unsustainability with respect to the tar sands, in part by simply reframing the discourse. Although fossil fuels are by their very nature non-renewable and unsustainable, the tar sands are now being sold as a “sustainable” megaproject. The provincial government of Alberta has some experience in this regard, having faced a crisis of legitimacy in the 1990s over its dependency on natural resource extraction. The response then, as now, has been to construct new ecological subjectivities rather than enact substantive regulations.

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We’re also seeing pipeline breaks like this in other parts of North America, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to the Kinder Morgan spill along the West Coast, as well as spills along the first phase of the Keystone XL pipeline in the US. Will it ever end? How many more communities have to be put at risk for this type of development, and who is really benefiting? Not only are we experiencing impacts at ground zero in Alberta and along pipeline corridor routes, but this megaproject affects communities all around the world through the devastation caused by climate change. What are we leaving to future generations? We need to shift away from a fossil fuel-based system and push for renewable energy systems that enable us to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. The tar sands are the largest industrial project on the face of the planet, and this industry will not stop if we cannot reorient economies to transition away from dirty fossil fuels.

The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results
by Andrew McAfee
Published 14 Nov 2023

Prkachin, “Social Modeling Influences on Sensory Decision-Theory and Psychophysiological Indexes of Pain,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 36, no. 8 (1978), 805–15. 53 cultural evolution can be very fast: Joseph Patrick Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 219–20. 54 “It’s our collective brains”: Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 212. 55 “Move Fast and Break Things”: Henry Blodget, “Mark Zuckerberg on Innovation,” BusinessInsider, October 1, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20210209195313/www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-innovation-2009-10?r=US&IR=T. 56 “I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects”: Bent Flyvbjerg, “Make Megaprojects More Modular,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/11/make-megaprojects-more-modular. 57 Copenhagen’s City Circle Line: Flyvbjerg, “Make Megaprojects More Modular.” 58 partially opened in 2017: Nick Paumgarten, “The Second Avenue Subway Is Here!,” The New Yorker, February 6, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/the-second-avenue-subway-is-here. 59 “The tunnel modules”: Flyvbjerg, “Make Megaprojects More Modular.” 60 “The Tesla’s stopping distance”: Patrick Olsen, “Tesla Model 3 Falls Short of a CR Recommendation,” Consumer Reports, May 30, 2018, www.consumerreports.org/hybrids-evs/tesla-model-3-review-falls-short-of-consumer-reports-recommendation/. 61 Musk tweeted: Elon Musk (@elonmusk), replying to @ElectrekCo and @FredericLambert, Twitter May 21, 2018, 9:31 p.m., https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/998738003668357120. 62 “CR now recommends the Model 3”: Olsen, “Tesla Model 3 Falls Short.” 63 “To see something updated that quickly”: Neal E.

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The key is to make the projects modular—to break them up into small chunks that create value, that can be objectively assessed, that are visible to everyone, and that can be pieced together to create the final product. Management researcher Bent Flyvbjerg has studied megaprojects like bullet train networks, undersea tunnels, and the Olympic Games. He’s reached the same conclusion as the business geeks who are currently disrupting industry after industry. As Flyvbjerg puts it, “I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects for more than thirty years, and I’ve found that two factors play a critical role in determining whether an organization will meet with success or failure: replicable modularity in design and speed in iteration.”

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,” InsideEVs, January 10, 2022, https://insideevs.com/news/559836/tesla-ota-updates-revealed-explained/. 16 more substantial changes: Bianca H., “A Timeline of All Software Updates: Tesla Model 3 Fleet,” Movia News, January 21, 2021, https://movia.news/software-updates-model-3/. 17 Failure rates have held steady: Herb Krasner, “New Research: The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US: A 2020 Report,” CISQ, Consortium for Information and Software Quality, accessed February 15, 2023, http://it-cisq.org/pdf/CPSQ-2020-report.pdf. 18 “all but impossible”: Ralph Vartabedian, “Years of Delays, Billions in Overruns: The Dismal History of Big Infrastructure,” New York Times, November 28, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/us/infrastructure-megaprojects.html. 19 “Overly optimistic forecasts”: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 250. 20 talked to more than a dozen former employees: Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen, “Knock, Knock, Nokia’s Heavy Fall,” Dominies Communicate (blog), February 15, 2016, https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/knock-knock-nokias-heavy-fall/amp/. 21 When work began: Kurt Eichenwald, “How Microsoft Lost Its Mojo: Steve Ballmer and Corporate America’s Most Spectacular Decline,” Vanity Fair, July 24, 2012, www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer. 22 “this is the best Microsoft could do”: Don Tynan, “The 15 Biggest Tech Disappointments of 2007,” PCWorld, December 16, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071219030508/www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,140583/printable.html. 23 a few frank paragraphs: Willie Brown, “When Warriors Travel to China, Ed Lee Will Follow,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 2013, www.sfgate.com/bayarea/williesworld/article/When-Warriors-travel-to-China-Ed-Lee-will-follow-4691101.php. 24 initial budget for the Transbay Terminal: Joshua Sabatini, “SF to Bail Out Transbay Project After Costs Nearly Double,” San Francisco Examiner, April 28, 2016, www.sfexaminer.com/news/sf-to-bail-out-transbay-project-after-costs-nearly-double/article_15e626fd-3b00-5cb1-878b-11ccd09b1e8a.html. 25 workers found structural flaws: Phil Matier and Andy Ross, “Transbay Transit Center Closed After Crack Found in Steel Beam,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 2018. 26 so many big projects are completed late: David N.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices
by Robert McNally
Published 17 Jan 2017

Saudi Arabia began taking some older fields, including a 500 kb/d producer named Khursaniyah, out of mothballs and expanding export facilities.14 And in 2006, the kingdom announced a mammoth $10 billion program to develop three new fields—Khurais, Abu Jifan, and Mazalij.15 Collectively named the Khurais Megaproject, it would be the kingdom’s most complex oil development, spanning half the size of Connecticut and requiring enormous infrastructure investments, including a sprawling network of pipes, water injection systems, and deep wells. These new “upstream” investments in crude oil production capacity intended to raise total Saudi production capacity from 11.3 to 12.5 mb/d,16 but would not be available until 2009.

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The period following the tumultuous 2008 bust was a happy one for OPEC producers. Most were able to enjoy maximum output, and all enjoyed stable prices around the $100 level. OPEC oil revenues, which were about $326 billion, in real terms in 1982, soared to over $950 billion in 2012.11 Thanks to production cuts—most but not all by Saudi Arabia—and opening of the Khurais Megaproject—which increased Saudi Arabia’s production capacity by 1.2 mb/d—OPEC’s spare production capacity rose back to around 5 percent of the market by 2010, which corresponded to the relatively calm 1990s.12 Saudi Arabia nearly held all this spare production capacity, and could therefore, look forward to exercising leverage over other producers.

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But while IEA, BP, and OPEC forecasters clearly assumed OPEC producers would cut or forego new supply to stabilize prices, none of forecasters identified which OPEC members would be willing to cut. A reasonable guess would be: Saudi Arabia. Only Saudi Arabia has shut in its own flowing wells (as in the early 1980s) or invested in costly new production capacity with the intention of keeping it idle (as in 2006 with the Khurais Megaproject). All other OPEC members produced all-out, and there was little indication that they would suddenly step up to the swing producer role. Iraq hardly has a sterling record of compliance with OPEC quotas, making Baghdad unlikely to hold back any production. Iran’s oil was sanctioned, and would doubtless be chomping at the bit to increase production and recover lost market share once sanctions were lifted.

Cathedrals of Steam: How London’s Great Stations Were Built – and How They Transformed the City
by Christian Wolmar
Published 5 Nov 2020

Most of the money came from sources with a vested interest, such as contractors and solicitors, since by this stage smaller investors were not attracted to railway investments. While ostensibly the companies claimed that their investments would be profitable, they tended to put in massaged figures that underestimated costs – matched by overoptimistic assessments of the likely traffic, a process that is all too familiar to those who analyze today’s megaprojects. And these really were megaprojects. The £4m expended by the South Eastern for its two terminuses and their railway connections represented 0.5 per cent of the whole of the UK’s annual Gross Domestic Product in the 1860s. Not surprisingly, these costs together with continued rivalry pushed several of the companies into near bankruptcy, sparked by the financial crisis of 1866 caused by the collapse of Overend, Gurney.

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Each of these stations, even the smaller ones such as Fenchurch Street, required not only, obviously, a set of tracks leading into them, which caused further disruption to the existing built environment above and beyond their construction, but also quickly spawned other development, such as goods depots, warehouses, depositories and road access. All these stations were, as we would call them today, megaprojects, massive disruptive forces whose impact stretched well beyond their boundaries. London was already on its way to becoming the world’s largest city when the railways first arrived in the 1830s and by the end of the nineteenth century was far larger and more affluent than any other in the world.

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As Simmons observes, ‘it heightens our appreciation of the grandeur of the building… to realize that its serene self-assurance represents an act of unshaken faith, carried through resolutely in conditions of anxiety, and at times of real danger, until it reached its appointed end’.7 Note, too, that its construction was entirely funded and built by the private sector, in contrast to today’s megaprojects, which are invariably funded by the state. This was capitalism at its most raw and daring. Fortunately, the contractors chosen by the Midland directors, Waring Brothers, were reliable, well resourced and able to help the Midland weather the storm. Demolitions continued apace, a financial crisis was averted, and the site was cleared by June 1866.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

A means of radically reducing the costs of launching satellites, such a project – built as a ‘tether’ to winch loads vertically into space – would also, they argue, be a crucial step to much more intensive extra-planetary exploration and colonisation.33 Street People, Air People There were the Street People and there were the Air People. Air people levitated like fakirs … access to the elevator was proof that your life had the buoyancy that was needed to stay afloat in a city where the ground was seen as the realm of failure and menace. – Jonathan Raban, Hunting Mister Heartbreak As such vertical megaprojects are imagined, marketed and constructed – whether as putative responses to sustainability challenges, demographic and urban growth, the changing possibilities of speculation and construction technology, or sheer megalomania – so the uneven social geographies surrounding vertical mobility are likely to become more and more stark.

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A combination of the 2009 financial crisis and in-depth geological excavations meant that an earlier design – intended to reach a full vertical mile to mimic Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1956 design for ‘The Illinois’, a proposed tower for Chicago – was reduced in scale. Construction of the Kingdom Tower, Jeddah, February 2015 Anchoring a major new city, like most Saudi megaprojects, the $1.2 billion tower is being directly driven forward by the Saudi royal family. Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, nephew of the recently deceased King Abdullah, is chairman of the company building the tower. At least in part, Alwaleed is clearly building ‘his’ tower – a gateway to the holy Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina – in a personal bid to out-do Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai (currently the world’s tallest).

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Since 1996, when the Petronas Towers opened in Kuala Lumpur, the tallest towers have been developed in the Middle East and Asia – the first time since the building of Europe’s Norman and Gothic cathedrals that the world’s tallest structures have not been in the West.28 Indeed, geographer Andrew Harris now identifies what he sees as a ‘vertical fix’ in the fast-moving political economies of capitalism.29 By building highly vertical structures carefully orchestrated to emerge as the centre of huge cycles of hype, spectacle, branding and advertising, the new super-tall towers work to transform complex debt, investment and speculation into lucrative real estate assets more powerfully than do other less visible or less vertical structures. The new tower can thus emerge pretty much anywhere such surpluses become grounded within ambitious megaprojects backed by hubristic local elites. The argument, these days, is very much: ‘If we build it, they will come.’ Most arguments that the new skyscraper towers are necessary to improve urban densities, reduce sprawl, increase ‘sustainability’ and so on are almost entirely specious. French urbanist Jean-Marie Huriot sees such discourses as little more than a smokescreen camouflaging the powerful symbolism of extreme vertical architecture.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future
by Laurence C. Smith
Published 22 Sep 2010

This “South-to-North Water Diversion” megaproject will link together four major drainage basins and build three long canals running through the eastern, central, and western parts of the country. Its costs will include at least USD $62 billion—more than three times the cost of China’s Three Gorges Dam—the relocation of three hundred thousand people, and many negative environmental impacts. When finished, the amount of water artificially transferred from south to north each year will total more than half of all water consumption in California.521 Might another megaproject emerge to redirect water from north to south, say from Canada to the United States, or from Russia to the dry steppes of central Asia?

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The last century saw the construction of many major engineering projects in the Soviet Union and North America, including two huge schemes to transfer water from one drainage basin to another: Canada’s James Bay Project for hydropower, and California’s State Water Project, a massive system of canals, reservoirs, and pumping stations to divert water from the northern to southern ends of the state. Most audacious of all were two megaprojects designed in the 1960s but never built. Both proposed the massive use of dams, canals, and pumping stations to replumb the hydrology of the North American continent and shunt its water from north to south. They were the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), proposed by the Ralph M. Parsons engineering company in Pasadena, California (now Parsons Corporation); and the Great Recycling and Northern Development (GRAND) Canal, proposed by a Canadian engineer named Tom Kierans.

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A water-rich country on paper, most of its uncommitted surplus lies in the far north, flowing over thinly populated permafrost to the Arctic Ocean or Hudson Bay. The south-central prairies are prone to drought, with spotty rainfall and heavy reliance on a few long, oversubscribed rivers fed by distant melting snow and glaciers. If any future megaprojects arise to divert water from northern Canada to the United States, a cut will likely go to southern Canada. One place where we could well see the resurrection of a massive twentieth-century water-transfer idea by 2050 is in Russia. Siberia’s mighty rivers, flowing untouched to the Arctic Ocean, have long been contemplated as a potential water source for the dry steppes and deserts of central Asia.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al
Published 11 Apr 2022

With about one mall per square mile, it has the world’s highest concentration of malls.26 With China expected to become the world’s largest consumer economy, the fate of Gruen’s invention will take another turn. Developers in mainland China and other places now learn closely from Hong Kong’s megaprojects. Hong Kong’s megaprojects may qualify as true vertical cities. But many of the malls’ exterior edges have blank walls, with all the charm of a prison, instead of shop fronts that lend excitement to the street. Meanwhile, the “public spaces” of atria and interior corridors feel manufactured. There is none of the messy vibrancy of Paris or London, despite the occasional exhibitions and ice rinks.

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Placards detail the outlawing of demonstrations, musical instruments, and pets. The point being that there is space for the sole purpose of saying it is there. These and other issues raise difficult questions about the mega-corporation behind the megastructure, such as whether or not real urbanism can exist under the rule of property managers. At worst, Hong Kong’s megaprojects represent a dystopian future of a city hit by the “shop apocalypse.” Still, Hong Kong’s mall-skyscraper hybrids make for highly convenient living, thanks to their integration in mass transit. These buildings are examples of a holistic design methodology, a fusion of city planning, public transportation, and skyscraper architecture.

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So, three years after my initial dismay about Union Square, with this more nuanced view, I ended up staying in one of the project’s apartments. Within a few days, I came to begrudgingly appreciate the thing. Ironically, when I returned to the city a few years later to launch a book about Hong Kong’s urban development, Mall City, I was interviewed by a reporter, a Hong Kong native. She wanted to interview me in the mall in one of the megaprojects. The mall was a disorienting maze. We both ended up getting lost. “LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION” goes the well-known broker’s mantra. It refers to the phenomenon in which two buildings may be identical. However, one may be worth a lot more than the other simply because it is in a different location.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
by Justin McGuirk
Published 15 Feb 2014

These newcomers had not had the benefit of the kind of mass housing programmes that were such a major feature of Argentina’s political agenda in the 1970s, when Villa Soldati was built. Viewed from the nearby flyover, Soldati is a rather extraordinary-looking place. It has a dystopian, retro-futuristic air, a blocky termite mound rising up towards angular water towers that poke up like periscopes. Designed for just over 3,000 people, it was merely one of numerous mega-projects built immediately before and during the military dictatorship that took control of the country in 1976. The most infamous of them is Fuerte Apache – or Fort Apache, a nickname apparently taken from the Bronx police station in the 1981 movie of the same name – built to house 4,600 people and now a dangerous slum.

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To get anything done here, residents have to kick up a fuss: they demonstrate and barricade the roads. ‘But they’re workers,’ says Luciano. ‘They don’t have time or energy to do this for every basic need.’ And this is the story of how the great social housing projects went wrong – not on the architectural side, whatever one may think of such complexes, but on the political front. These megaprojects were treated as one-off expenses rather than long-term investments. Of course three decades with no maintenance would lead to degradation. One can’t help but wonder what the future of this place is – or, rather, how long before that future comes to pass. There is a Pruitt-Igoe moment coming, the only question is when.

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Across the city, tens of thousands of slum dwellers are being evicted from their homes to make way for World Cup and Olympic projects. Following London’s example, there is much talk of an Olympic ‘legacy’. Can anyone really take this notion seriously? And why is it that the one and a half million citizens of Rio who live in favelas are always treated to ‘urban acupuncture’, while a two-week global spectacle warrants mega-projects and massive infrastructural investment? Something is wrong here. In June 2013, by sheer chance, I was in Rio during the largest popular protests Brazil had seen in decades. Triggered by a small hike in the bus fares, a million people took to the streets of the city. Both the pundits and the government initially struggled to pinpoint what the demonstrators were calling for – there were so many issues to choose from.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel
by David Metz
Published 21 Jan 2014

Such predicted traffic growth provides a justification for large investment in the road network, growth which, in the event, might either not arise or might only arise because additional road capacity is created—the ‘induced traffic’ phenomenon discussed in Chapter 5. Either way, the economic benefits remain unclear. Bent Flyvjberg, an economic geographer, has studied major infrastructure projects (‘megaprojects’) and why they fail. He finds that costs frequently tend to be higher than forecast and demand lower, which he attributes to a combination of psychological factors, particularly ‘delusional optimism’ of managers, and political explanations whereby promoters intentionally overstate demand and understate costs in order to increase the likelihood that their projects get funded, rather than those of competitors—known as ‘strategic misrepresentation’.

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The Department for Transport website has extensive material on High Speed 2, the most recently published in October 2013. The National Audit Office issued a report on HS2 in May 2013. For sceptical discussions: of the regional benefits, Tomaney and Marques (2013); of value for money, New Economics Foundation, High Speed 2: The best we can do? (June 2013); and of ‘megaprojects’ generally, Flyvjberg (2009). The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee issued a report on HS1 in 2012. A website is available for the Nine Elms development. The Financial Times of 10 December 2012 reported the financial arrangements for the Tube extension. The same newspaper reported the move of company head offices to London on 17 February 2010.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
by Jeff Rubin
Published 19 May 2009

West Texas prices have hovered around $40 per barrel, and Brent prices, the European benchmark, have traded around $45 even though this recession is well over three times as severe. There is a good reason prices won’t fall that far. The skeptics may not want to talk about it, but at $60 to $90 per barrel, many of the world’s largest energy megaprojects, such as the Canadian oil sands, won’t go ahead because those prices will no longer provide a sufficient economic return. Finding pocket change is getting pretty expensive these days and it’s not going to get any cheaper tomorrow. If you believe that high prices bring new supply out of the ground, you are pretty much committed to the fact that every drop in price means that there is less oil to go around.

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Even the oil industry is beginning to acknowledge that if we are not staring at a production peak in world oil, we are at a minimum entering a period of unprecedented scarcity. That may come as a surprise to many in view of the regular stream of announcements of huge supply increases from the various oil megaprojects around the world. The problem is what you don’t hear about. What oil companies and oil-producing countries don’t send out splashy press releases to announce is how much their wells are losing to depletion every year. Each year, less and less flows out of the world’s mature oil fields, particularly the relatively low-cost fields in the Middle East.

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But while the plunge in oil prices will resuscitate demand, it’s going to end up killing the very growth in supply that will be needed to meet that demand rebound. From Canadian oil sands to deepwater wells off the Brazilian coast, scheduled new production is being canceled left and right as oil companies rein in spending in the face of falling oil prices. The plunge has suddenly made some of the world’s largest oil megaprojects uneconomic. There are much easier ways to lose money than spending several billions of dollars developing a new Canadian oil-sand operation when extraction costs are more than double world oil prices. Over 1 million barrels a day of production has already been canceled in Alberta—where only a few months earlier the plan was to quadruple production.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

Importantly, the economy was also driven less and less by big construction projects; as a share of GDP, construction had fallen from more than 30 percent in 2008 to 20 percent. The transport, trade, and tourism industries housed in those new skyscrapers were fueling growth. That’s not to say Sheikh Maktoum had lost his taste for the dramatic, announcing $130 billion in new megaprojects in 2012, including a new $100 billion city to be named after himself, with a forty-acre swimming pool that would be, of course, the world’s largest. The announcements triggered worries that Dubai was again ringing up extravagant debts. For those skeptics, a local developer hung a thirty-story banner on one of his downtown buildings with the message, “Keep Calm, There is No Bubble.”

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China is at the forefront of a campaign to reshape the geographic destinies of remote nations, spending billions on new trade routes through some of the world’s less-tracked regions. For example, Beijing is supporting a $60 billion plan to build the first major east-west highway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America, running twelve hundred miles and crossing the Andes to link Brazil to Peru. This one megaproject would not be enough to make either Brazil or Peru a rich nation, but it will help connect their more remote regions to the world. For China’s part, these projects open up access to supplies of oil and other natural resources and serve to demonstrate its growing global influence. In 2013 Chinese president Xi Jinping issued the first in a series of announcements unveiling his plans for a New Silk Road.

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By 2014, the property market had hit a rough patch, with prices falling in major cities and work coming to a halt on mega-development projects across the nation. China’s sheer size tends to produce larger-than-life tales, and the word ghost town fails to capture the full scale and chutzpah of its vacant megaprojects. One such project was coming up outside Tianjin, a big city about two and half hours southwest of Beijing. Tianjin’s planners dreamed of building a financial district to rival New York. Called Yujiapu, the officials boasted that it would cover an area three times larger than the Wall Street financial district, and the original sketches of the skyline included what one writer called twin towers, “uncannily similar” to those destroyed in the 9/11 terror attack.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

Private Sector Myths (London: Anthem, 2013). 14.For a lengthy analysis of how Apple cynically deployed state-developed technologies to build the iPhone, see ibid., Chapter 5. 15.The fact that so many megaprojects continue to go ahead despite their history of cost overruns and lack of profitability is deemed a paradox by one study: Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius and Werner Rothengatter, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 3–5. 16.André Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work, transl. Malcolm Imrie (Boston, MA: South End, 1985), p. 61. 17.As Marx and Engels write, ‘this development of productive forces … is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it privation, want is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored’.

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To unleash technological advancement, we must move beyond capitalism and liberate creativity from its current strictures.16 This would begin to liberate technologies away from their current purview of control and exploitation, and towards the quantitative and qualitative expansion of synthetic freedom. It would enable the utopian ambitions of megaprojects to be unleashed, invoking the classic dreams of invention and discovery. The dreams of space flight, the decarbonisation of the economy, the automation of mundane labour, the extension of human life, and so on, are all major technological projects that find themselves hampered in various ways by capitalism.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

But I wanted to try and keep Project Trillion manageable. We’ll have enough to think about by limiting the spending to merely protecting the future of humanity and all life on Earth. We’re sitting on top of a pile of money. Floating on an ocean of cash. In each of the following ten chapters I pick a megaproject – or often a collection of projects – and see how a trillion dollars could make them real. This is a personal list, a mixture of solutions to the world’s biggest and most pressing problems, and things I’m excited, moved and exercised by. There are projects that the world’s top scientists are working on and problems that for the sake of the world desperately need solving.

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The more we do now to reduce emissions, the more time we will buy ourselves before the really bad stuff happens.13 There is a limit to how much greenhouse gas we can dump into the atmosphere before we guarantee warming the planet by 1.5 ºC, and a reasonably accepted figure for this is 570 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (taking into account other greenhouse gases). That means, at the current rate of emissions (40 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year), we have about 15 years. Roll up your sleeves. If ever there was a mega-project to get behind, it is this. $ $ $ LET’S START WITH SOME GOOD NEWS. Harnessing and using renewable energy has become cheaper than ever, cheaper than many ever thought possible. Right now, in many cases it is cheaper to get electricity by building new wind or solar facilities than it is to carry on getting it from existing fossil fuel power stations.

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Let’s bring an end to cosmic loneliness. I was startled to find that it is so cheap, certainly within the scope of this book, to send robot craft on detailed exploratory missions all across the solar system, and to probe the deeper galaxy with telescopes. In terms of public outreach value, it may be the mega-project that has the best cost:inspiration ratio. Achieved We don’t know what we haven’t yet discovered, but with an extensive enough search I’m 70 per cent convinced that we’d find simple life forms in our solar system. Even without this, our missions will generate massive amounts of information about our immediate and wider galactic neighbourhood, and deliver huge spin-off benefits in the form of innovation and scientific discovery.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

What new forms can we compose for this computational and geopolitical condition, first to map it, then to interpret it, then to redesign it? More precisely, then, this book is a design brief; it outlines a design problem and invites new interventions. It articulates a project of “geodesign” to be taken up as a collaborative megaproject. Problems inevitably arise that cannot be defined in isolation, but also cannot be engaged other than by specific technical practice, so opportunistic approaches and experiments are necessary. The argument of this design brief is neither simply pro-Stack or anti-Stack. Any infrastructure of this scale inevitably gathers and binds power into itself, and so is either remedy or poison or both.

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In that governance is bound and determined by how its means allow it to see, measure, and organize its domains, the systems that mediate governance bind them to it just as it is bound by them. Nowhere is this truer than in the computational governance of ecologies, particularly for computational megaprojects such as Planetary Skin, but with the adoption of new media of observation and measurement come new complications. Is sovereignty primarily for the measurement or for the measured? The referent or the referred to? Who owns the data that all these nodes will be generating about themselves and their Users?

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It is a sovereign decision drawn from inverse hallucinations: not seeing what is actually right there in front of you. It arranges for both an absolutized surveillance, as well as the right not to see what appears in the lens, and so in this regard, “seeing like a state” or “seeing like a market” also means protecting blind spots as needed. By contrast, computational megaprojects such as Planetary Skin do have an important part to play in building and thinking alternatives for the Earth layer of The Stack, and we shouldn't dismiss their potential based on the naïveté of their initial goals and marketing. As a rule of thumb, I recommend more megastructures, not fewer, and yet Planetary Skin cannot really “manage what it measures” because ultimately it cannot measure what it thinks it can measure.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
by Amitav Ghosh
Published 16 Jan 2018

Lewis, ‘China’, in Climate Change and National Security: A Country Level Analysis, 9–26, 13–14. See also Kenneth Pomeranz, Water, Energy, and Politics: Chinese Industrial Revolutions in Global Environmental Perspective (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming), 5. 121 ‘human race come together’: Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects, and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia’, Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine 62, no. 1 (January–March, 2015): 1, 6–47. I am grateful to the author for letting me have an English-language version of this article, published in shorter form in New Left Review 58 (2009) and elsewhere. 121 disappear by 2050: Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘The Great Himalayan Watershed’, 32. 121 Indus floods of 2010: Varsha Joshi, ‘Climate Change in South Asia: Gender and Health Concerns’, 209–26, 215, and Pradosh Kishan Nath, ‘Impact of Climate Change on Indian Economy: A Critical Review’, 78–105, 88, both in Climate Change: An Asian Perspective, ed.

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See also Joel Whitney, FINKS: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers (London: OR Book, 2016), chap. 2. 160 ‘and the artist’: Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968), 326. 161 passion for dams: Cf. Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects, and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia’, 19 (published in French as ‘Les eaux de l’Himalaya: Barrages géants et risques environnementaux en Asia contemporaine’, in Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine 62, no. 1 [January–March 2015]: 6–47); for Mao’s ‘War against Nature’, see Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 161 ‘world [they] depict’: Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois, 89. 162 ‘the official order’: Arran E.

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 9 Nov 2010

While they are often architects, urban designers don’t design individual buildings. Instead, they plan the public spaces between buildings—avenues, streets, squares, promenades, and parks—and establish general guidelines, such as setbacks, heights, and other rules that govern how buildings relate to one another. Reacting to the failures of the megaprojects of the 1950s—and to Jane Jacobs’s critique—urban designers recognize that building a city is different from constructing a building; in this gradual process, many actors participate over long periods of time.2 Thus, the goal of an urban-design plan is to create a loose framework that will accommodate this process, acknowledging that the future is usually impossible to predict.

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It would be wrong to describe Penn’s Landing merely as a development failure, since a number of new uses are in the area: low-rise housing on two abandoned piers, a hotel, a maritime museum, a skating rink, and a landscaped plaza that is the site of regular concerts, fireworks, and assorted public festivities. Nevertheless, the millions of dollars that were spent over the years on plans, public hearings, infrastructure improvements, and public institutions have not borne fruit. The story of Penn’s Landing shows the difficulties inherent in the wholesale development of large urban sites. Successful megaprojects, such as Rockefeller Center, are few and far between and are generally the result of unique circumstances (in that case, the Depression, which reduced construction costs, and an immensely wealthy client). The challenge for a site as large and isolated as Penn’s Landing was that it needed a critical mass, but because of its size it took so long to implement that it was particularly susceptible to market cycles.

The Caryatids
by Bruce Sterling
Published 24 Feb 2009

Mishin wheeled in his insulated worker boots, waving his uniformed arms at the glowing Martian sunset and the spare, frozen scrub that dotted the rusty soil. “At this moment you are privileged to step within the Mars of Tomorrow! Here, spread all around you, is the living, air-breathing harbinger of Humanity’s Second Home World! The development of Mars is China’s most ambitious megaproject—and this dome, which is merely a model of that future effort, ranks with the Great Wall of China as the most ambitious construction on the surface of planet Earth!” It was a pity that they’d lost valuable time while trapped within that balky airlock. With the setting of the pink sun in its tear-proofed plastic sky, the Martian bubble was getting bitterly cold.

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“It took the Dispensation a long time to map and track down this rogue project,” he said. “John has found fifteen different cloning projects that were all going on at the time you were born. The Balkans, that little island in the Adriatic: That was just the test bed for bigger projects elsewhere. Your project was small. This Chinese clone project was colossal. This one was the megaproject. And we’re trying to buy it now. We’re trying to buy whatever is left of it.” “There were sixteen cloning projects? Sixteen like me?” “Most of those schemes never left the lab. Not one of those projects ever worked out as planned. Yours was a debacle for sure—and this Chinese one was the biggest debacle of them all.

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He was proud to see his fellow aristocrat commiserating with the little people. Now the fuller extent of the strategic situation dawned on Sonja. The event that had happened changed everything. “You say that the Chinese space station is empty? Nothing in it but corpses?” “Corpses,” John agreed. “The Chinese station is one more large, failed, overextended technical megaproject. Although I had nothing to do with stopping this one myself.” Lionel smirked. “I think you’re selling yourself a little short there, John.” Montalban shot his brother a warning glance. “What?” Sonja shouted. “What is it this time, what have you done? What are you doing, John? What, what?” “Not so loudly, please,” said Montalban.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value
by John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen
Published 30 Dec 2014

Performers, though skilled, are more likely to emerge from such an exercise with self-perception that resembles overconfidence—they are so used to excelling in their own area of expertise that they dramatically underestimate the amount of time and/or money it will take to realize a goal that requires multiple contributors with varying skills. This tendency is so ubiquitous in some areas that organizations have developed compensation systems for correcting such excess. The UK government, for example, has invested significant resources to understand and overcome the “mega-project performance paradox,” whereby huge public-private projects—like the defunct luxury airliner Concorde and the eventually successful Sydney Opera House—are both very popular and overbudget (often by as much as 15,000 percent).35 Recruit for Difference In addition to the work you do to challenge the talent you have and question the automatic ways of thinking that operate in your teams and groups, you should look to grow your organizations with Producers capable of challenging you to take the relative view.

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For details on the exchange rate for Hugonot shares, see “Mesa Petroleum Corporation” by the Texas Historical Association, www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/dom04, accessed February 6, 2014. 33. Isaacson, Steve Jobs. 34. Cuban, How to Win at the Sport of Business. 35. See Will Jennings, Olympic Risks (London: Palgrave, 2012), and Edward Merrow, “Understanding the Outcomes of Mega-Projects,” (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1988). Chapter 6: The Producer-Performer Duality 1. Unless otherwise noted, all details and quotes pertaining to John Paul DeJoria are drawn from an in-person interview with the authors conducted on March 27, 2013. The detail about John Paul DeJoria’s early professional experiences working for other companies in the hair industry came from http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/24/smallbusiness/paul_mitchell_dejoria.fortune/index.htm. 2.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

Louis, Regional Economist, Second Quarter 2017, www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2017/growth-in-tech-sector-returns-to-glory-days-of-the-1990s. CHAPTER 7: IOT AND THE FALL AND RISE OF MANUFACTURING big construction projects Nicklas Garemo, Stefan Matzinger, and Robert Palter, “Megaprojects: The Good, the Bad, and the Better,” McKinsey & Company, www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/megaprojects-the-good-the-bad-and-the-better. When the Komatsu team arrives at your job site “Smart Construction,” video, Komatsu America Corporation, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZdtPhMg3dY. even before there is a work site “Tom Bucklar, Caterpillar,” Zuora Subscribed conference, www.youtube.com/watch?

Bulletproof Problem Solving
by Charles Conn and Robert McLean
Published 6 Mar 2019

If fewer make regular use of the gym without subsidy, it makes sense to offer the program (assuming the assumption of use and health benefits holds), but if more are already paying their own way (and getting the company a free benefit from lower health costs), they should spend their benefit budget on something else. As a final heuristic, consider the distribution of outcomes. Companies planning large projects often add contingencies of 10% or more for cost overruns, which can run into millions of dollars. Recently we saw data that for infrastructure megaprojects costing $1 billion or more, some 90% go over budget by 20% in the case of roads, and 45% in the case of rail projects.11 In these cases the expected overspending is not in line with the contingency of 10%, but closer to 30%, almost a full standard deviation higher for cost overruns. These errors are large enough to wipe out the profitability of the projects.

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Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Oxford University Press, 2000). 3  Report prepared for the United Kingdom's Department of International Development by The Nature Conservancy, WWF, and the University of Manchester, “Improving Hydropower Outcomes through System Scale Planning, An Example from Myanmar,” 2016. 4  Warren Buffett, “My Philanthropic Pledge,” Fortune, June 16, 2010. 5  Our friend Barry Nalebuff of Yale points out that the actual rule is 69.3, but is usually rounded up to 72 because it is easier to do the division in your head. 6  CB Insights, May 25, 2015, www.cbinsights.com. 7  Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise (Penguin, 2012). 8  Dan Lovallo, Carmina Clarke, and Colin Camerer, “Robust Analogizing and the Outside View: Two Empirical Tests of Case Based Decision Making,” Strategic Management Journal 33, no. 5 (2012): 496–512. 9  “‘Chainsaw Al’ Axed,” CNN Money, June 15, 1998. 10  This problem was suggested by Barry Nalebuff of Yale University. 11  Nicklas Garemo, Stefan Matzinger, and Robert Palter, “Megaprojects: The Good, the Bad, and the Better,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2015 (quoting Bent Flyvberg, Oxford Saïd Business School). 12  Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony, “Before You Make that Big Decision,” Harvard Business Review, June 2011. 13  Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Oxford University Press, 1999) (drawing on a medical study at the University of California, San Diego Medical Center by Breiman et al., 1993). 14  R.

Collapse
by Jared Diamond
Published 25 Apr 2011

Easter as metaphor • Chapter 3: The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands 120 Pitcairn before the Bounty Three dissimilar islands » Trade The movie's ending * Chapter 4: The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors 136 Desert farmers • Tree rings * Agricultural strategies * Chaco's problems and packrats • Regional integration Chaco's decline and end * Chaco's message X Contents Chapter 5: The Maya Collapses 157 Mysteries of lost cities The Maya environment Maya agriculture Maya history Copan * Complexities of collapses Wars and droughts Collapse in the southern lowlands The Maya message Chapter 6: The Viking Prelude and Fugues 178 Experiments in the Atlantic The Viking explosion Autocatalysis Viking agriculture Iron Viking chiefs Viking religion Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes Iceland's environment Iceland's history Iceland in context Vinland Chapter 7: Norse Greenland's Flowering 211 Europe's outpost Greenland's climate today Climate in the past Native plants and animals « Norse settlement Farming Hunting and fishing An integrated economy Society Trade with Europe * Self-image Chapter 8: Norse Greenland's End 248 Introduction to the end Deforestation » Soil and turf damage The Inuit's predecessors Inuit subsistence Inuit/Norse relations * The end Ultimate causes of the end « Chapter 9: Opposite Paths to Success 277 Bottom up, top down New Guinea highlands Tikopia Tokugawa problems Tokugawa solutions Why Japan succeeded Other successes Part Three: MODERN SOCIETIES 309 Chapter 10: Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide 311 A dilemma Events in Rwanda * More than ethnic hatred Buildup in Kanama Explosion in Kanama Why it happened Chapter 11: One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti 329 Differences * Histories Causes of divergence * Dominican environmental impacts Balaguer The Dominican environment today The future Contents xi Chapter 12: China, Lurching Giant 358 China's significance Background Air, water, soil Habitat, species, megaprojects Consequences Connections The future • Chapter 13: "Mining" Australia 378 Australia's significance * Soils Water Distance Early history E Imported values Trade and immigration Land degradation • Other environmental problems Signs of hope and change Part Four: PRACTICAL LESSONS 417 Chapter 14: Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?

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In the past, the Dominican people have accomplished feats much more difficult than becoming constructively engaged with Haiti. Among the many unknowns hanging over the futures of my Dominican friends, I see that as the biggest one. C H A P T E R 12 China, Lurching Giant China's significance Background Air, water, soil Habitat, species, megaprojects Consequences Connections The future hina is the world's most populous country, with about 1,300,000,000 people, or one-fifth of the world's total. In area it is Cthe third largest country, and in plant species diversity the third richest. Its economy, already huge, is growing at the fastest rate of any major country: nearly 10% per year, which is four times the growth rate of First World economies.

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During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, pollution spread still further, as many factories were relocated to deep valleys and high mountains from coastal areas considered vulnerable in case of war. Since economic reform began in 1978, environmental degradation has continued to increase or accelerate. China's environmental problems can be summarized under six main headings: air, water, soil, habitat destruction, biodiversity losses, and megaprojects. To begin with China's most notorious pollution problem, its air quality is dreadful, symbolized by now-familiar photographs of people having to wear face masks on the streets of many Chinese cities (Plate 25). Air pollution in some cities is the worst in the world, with pollutant levels several times higher than levels considered safe for people's health.

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil
by Alex Cuadros
Published 1 Jun 2016

Here and there tumbledown shacks with thatched roofs flitted by, their wooden walls sometimes painted with the faded slogan of a local politician. At each stop, villagers in the punishing sun approached the train to sell corn on the cob, ice-cold water, or tasteless beige puff rings, the local Cheetos. Part of the Workers Party dream was to lift these people up with megaprojects like Belo Monte. And yet Lula and Dilma were also picking up where the military regime had left off amid the economic crises of the eighties. From Marabá I went deeper inland, taking a twelve-hour bus ride along a highway known as the Transamazônica. This was the backbone of the Amazon’s first major colonization effort, launched by General Emílio Médici after he assumed the presidency in 1969.

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At a conference once, he said cleaner energy sources like wind simply couldn’t keep up with Brazil’s growth the way Amazonian dams could. “Belo Monte is very important for the country,” he said, shrugging with an air of nonchalant faith in his words. It’s true that the economy needs energy to grow. But Brazil’s love of megaprojects reflects the influence of money—and the lure of power—as much as any objective logic of development. According to Professor Bermann, a lot of energy goes to waste in Brazil. The ethanol industry throws out enough sugarcane dregs to generate two or three Belo Montes’ worth of energy, and fifteen percent of the nation’s electricity is lost to crappy old power lines.

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C., 189–90, 308n189 CBMM, 212 CCX Carvão, 186 CDBs, 207 Ceará state, Brazil, 170 Central Bank, 63 Cesare Ragazzi company, 143 Charlie Rose (TV show), 148, 216 Chateaubriand, Assis, 296n82 Chernow, Ron, 197 Chesnut, Andrew, 125 Chevron (CVX), 146 Chile, 20, 42, 153, 166 China economic slowdown, 183, 186 nouveaux riches in, 22 Three Gorges Dam, 73 trade with, 59, 61, 137, 140, 147, 303n140 Chrispiniano, José, 293–94n57 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 39 Cidadão Pró Mundo, 315n256 Clark, Walter, 85, 90 Clinton, Bill, 57 coffee production, 12, 15, 98 Collor de Mello, Fernando, 91, 92, 234, 271, 298n92, 306n167 Colombia, 180 CCX Carvão in, 186 Conselheiro, Antônio (Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel), 127–30 construction industry. See also Camargo Corrêa; OAS; Odebrecht; specific projects BNDES loans to, 54–55, 285TK bribes and, 39, 50, 51, 78, 92, 270, 272, 273, 274–75, 285, 316n270, 316n74 campaign donations and, 54, 238, 239–40, 272–73, 284 Carwash scandal, 270 dam building and megaprojects, 77–78 desenvolvimentismo policy, 44 inflated costs, 34–36, 50 Lula and, 57, 274, 285TK, 293–94n57, 316–17n274 military dictatorship and, 37–40, 42–47, 291–92n44 politics and public contracts, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38–39, 43–44, 46, 47–48, 50, 51, 55, 72, 90, 226, 239, 292n45 “república das empreiteiras,” 56 as route to wealth, 32 soccer stadiums, 56–57, 114, 226–27, 231, 237–38, 240, 258, 260, 269, 313n237 Construtora Rabello, 46, 292n45 Cony, Carlos Heitor, 227 Corona, Alessandro, 143, 163 Correa, Cristiane, 201 Corrêa, Sylvio, 46 Costa, Lucio, 63–64 Costa e Silva, Arthur da, 38, 43–44, 45 Coutinho, Luciano, 172, 216, 242 CQC (TV show), 33–34, 37 Credit Suisse, 198 crime carjacking or arrastão, 19–21 crime and murder rate, 226, 232 doleiro (money launderer), 35, 36, 123 drugs and, 126, 232 kidnapping, 20–21, 41, 152, 160, 198, 288–89n20 laws on corruption, 2013, 235–36 Red Command drug gang, 101–3, 106 Crivella, Marcelo, 119 Cuadros, Alex, xv–xvi, 6–11, 12, 13, 16, 135, 208 Alemão visit, 103–7 as Bloomberg reporter, xv, 3, 8–9, 16, 17, 22, 24, 52–53, 293n53 Diniz interview and, 3–6 Eike, first big story on, 304n152 Eike interview, 251, 264 Eike’s billionairehood lost, 243–44 Eike’s net worth and, 158–59, 251 hidden billionaires search, 29–30, 52 J.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

A month later, in June, the Interior Ministry presented the Nakhon Suvarnabhumi plan to Thaksin’s cabinet, which approved the plan “in principle,” the first step toward parliamentary approval (once a new government had reconvened parliament, of course). Thaksin was pilloried for gerrymandering the provinces opposing him and for rubber-stamping a multibillion-dollar megaproject while a lame duck. “His government went too far,” one of the planners told me. “They tried to pass the law— bang, bang, BANG!—in only a few weeks’ time, which people were very much against.” Why risk it? I asked. Why not wait until the October elections? He shot me a look. “Because of the financial benefits.”

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Festival City was in fact an aerotropolis within an aerotropolis, a microcosm of the emirate itself. Everyone and everything in it—its luxuries, laborers, architects, accents, even its aspirations—was flown in from someplace else. Playing SimCity for Real Festival City is barely a speck on the city’s maps. The snub has more to do with politics than size, as it’s one of the few megaprojects, real or imagined, that weren’t controlled through one holding company or another by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler and “CEO” of Dubai Inc. “Sheikh Mo,” as he’s affectionately known, runs the emirate as a state-owned conglomerate. Imagine if the Department of Defense had been chartered at birth as Halliburton (which moved its headquarters here in 2007).

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National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation–sponsored study “An Analysis of the Economic Benefits From Full Liberalization of Integrated Air Express Services in the Asia-Pacific Region” was conducted by the Campbell-Hill Aviation Group with Kasarda’s assistance. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Al Manakh 1. Vol. 12, no. 2. New York: Columbia University GSAPP, 2007. Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued. Vol. 23, no. 1. Amsterdam: Archis Publishers, 2010. Ali, Syed. Dubai: Gilded Cage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Altshuler, Alan, and David Luberoff. Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion, 2006. Baluch, Issa. Transport Logistics: Past, Present and Predictions. Dubai: Winning Books, 2005.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

Among the best known of these super-SOEs are the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, the China National Petroleum Corporation, the China Petrochemical Corporation (SINOPEC), and China Telecom. There are more than one hundred such giant government-owned corporations in China under centralized state administration. In 2010 the ten most profitable SOEs produced over $50 billion in net profits. The super-SOEs are further organized into sixteen megaprojects intended to advance technology and innovation in China. These megaprojects cover sectors such as broadband wireless, oil and gas exploration, and large aircraft manufacture. Regardless of the path taken by state enterprise, corruption and cronyism permeated the process. Managers of SOEs that were privatized received sweetheart deals, including share allocations ahead of the public listing, and executive appointments in the privatized entity.

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.”: Mitali Das and Papa N’Diaye, “Chronicle of a Decline Foretold: Has China Reached the Lewis Turning Point?” IMF Working Paper no. 13/26, January 2013, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=40281.0. In 2010 the ten most profitable SOEs . . . : James McGregor, No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers (Westport, Conn.: Prospecta Press, 2012), p. 23. These megaprojects cover sectors . . . : Ibid., p. 34. the interlocking interests of the political and economic elites . . . : “Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility,” Bloomberg News, December 26, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-26/immortals-beget-china-capitalism-from-citic-to-godfather-of-golf.html.

Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe
Published 8 Sep 2011

Several businesses have already shut down, and a hundred-year-old residential building had to be evacuated when it began to tilt dangerously. “The MTA is giving the store owners peanuts,” complained Pecora. At least fifty-two tenants had already been relocated to make room for subway entrances. It sounded like a classic case of big government ramming a megaproject down the throats of reluctant locals. But this time nobody involved—not even the organizer of the resistance—appears to be against the subway project itself. “Definitely, I think there’s a need for it,” said Pecora, “but they should compensate the businesses much better.” And he just wished the station wasn’t being built in his front yard.

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Had Pompidou not died in 1974, a webwork of urban highways would have put eight lanes of high-speed traffic within a hundred yards of the Madeleine church, and transformed Haussmann’s boulevards into urban speedways. Pompidou’s technocrats were nonetheless successful in building their most grandiose megaproject: the Périphérique, a 22-mile-long ring road, in some places 150 feet wide, that cinches Paris in a continuous belt of eternally rushing traffic. From its opening in 1973, the Périph’ averaged an accident per kilometer a day, did nothing to reduce congestion, and created a barrier, both psychological and physical, between Paris and its suburbs.

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Meanwhile, Canadian cities are prevented from having the world-class transportation they deserve because of the lack of a national transit strategy or a reliable revenue stream from the federal government. European nations receive money for intercity rail and urban transit from both their national governments and the European Union. In Canada, such funding, when it comes at all, tends to arrive on an ad-hoc basis for such megaprojects as Vancouver’s Canada Line, whose opening before the 2010 Olympics allowed federal politicians to appear for ribbon-cutting photo ops. Under the Conservatives, a gas tax that was supposed to fund transit has instead gone to paying for mostly highway-based infrastructure projects, and Canada remains the only G8 country without a single mile of high-speed rail.

Suburban Nation
by Andres Duany , Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck
Published 14 Sep 2010

In the image of Annapolis pictured earlier, this ratio would place the pair of town houses among twenty larger houses—hardly a threat. Such a distribution provides role models for the poor while mitigating against the close-mindedness of the wealthy. The one-in-ten approach is gaining favor, but it must overcome a long tradition of government sponsored mega-projects. It is a difficult point to argue when the economies of scale suggest that housing can most efficiently be provided in bulk, like canned peas or paper towels. That may be true, but only in a simplistic analysis. Reducing the cost per unit of affordable housing in this way violates the larger goal of the housing program, which is to provide not just housing but viable places to live.

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This technique opens the door for local stakeholders to become small-scale developers, lessening the city’s dependence on the few national-scale real-estate corporations. The town house lot, usually no more than twenty-four feet wide, is an ideal increment of development, as it can hold a home, a business, or both. Many superblocks now lie fallow, thanks to the unsuccessful mega-projects of the eighties, “quick fix” solutions that failed owing to their reliance on unrealistically large increments of investment. In addition to operating at the correct scale, renewal efforts must proceed with realistic expectations about who will move downtown, and market accordingly. According to William Kraus, the market segment that pioneers difficult areas is the “risk-oblivious”: artists and recent college graduates.

Copenhagenize: The Definitive Guide to Global Bicycle Urbanism
by Mikael Colville-Andersen
Published 28 Mar 2018

It’s one of the saddest ironies of urban planning that the only thing we have learned from a hundred years of traffic engineering is this: if you make more space for cars, more cars come. It’s sad if you think about all the kabillions of dollars we’ve thrown at this for the past century. Lulu-Sophia in Copenhagen in 2011. Megaprojects are all the rage. Never finished on time, always obscenely over budget, and yet they make up 8 percent of the global GDP. We’re fascinated, obsessed by megaprojects. We, the people, the consumers, are told to spend more. Buy more stuff. The more we buy, the better it will be for the economy. For growth. Or so we have been told for a very long time. Perhaps we’ve been hacked, but I believe that we still have the original code inside us.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

STOPPING THE CONTAGION For now, the individual ownership model is still the standard in Osceola’s VHR subdivisions and master planned communities. Some owners have multiple units, but so far there has been no major corporate takeover. Even so, the west end of the 192 corridor, with the more upscale vacation homes, is starting to attract mega-projects, marking the entry of big investor money into the VHR market. The largest of these is Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville resort, with a thousand “vacation cottages” and three hundred time-share units for sale. When I posed as an interested buyer, the salesperson told me that if I wanted to be able to rent out my unit, I would have to choose approved furnishings, in order “to maintain a guest experience consistent with the brand.”

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Ken Storey, “Route 192 in Kissimmee Is About to Get a Dubai-Style Resort,” Orlando Weekly, April 4, 2016, https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2016/04/04/route-192-in-kissimmee-is-about-to-get-a-dubai-style-resort. The pandemic recession put paid to the most ambitious version of the site plan; the towers were dropped and retail scaled back to reflect grimmer economic forecasts. But the corridor’s inventory of mega-projects got an upgrade with the announcement of development plans for the three-thousand-unit Grand Medina, North America’s first Muslim-friendly resort and Osceola’s first five-star property. Laura Kinsler, “Canadian Developer Prepping for Construction on Huge W192 Resort District,” GrowthSpotter, December 30, 2020, https://www.growthspotter.com/news/osceola-county-developments/gs-news-everest-update-20201231-qzumtgcptjf3fgetirvzvric6m-story.html. 20.  

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources
by Geoff Hiscock
Published 23 Apr 2012

The $25 billion project, completed in 2007, is based on a 4,000 km (2,500 mile) network of underground pipes, some of which draw water from aquifers close to the Egyptian border. Gaddafi, who was overthrown by rebels and subsequently killed in October 2011, called it the Eighth Wonder of the World. In March 2011, Brazil began work on its own mega-project, the $11 billion Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, in Pará state. When completed, the dam will generate 11,000 megawatts, making it the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world behind the Three Gorges and the Itaipu Dam, which sits on the border of Brazil and Paraguay.

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As well, several existing Russian oil fields in the West Siberian basin are ranked among the biggest producers in the world, including the Samotlor field, owned by the Russia-UK joint venture TNK-BP, and the Priobskoye field run by Rosneft and GazpromNeft. Oil and gas exports account for almost half of Russia’s budget revenues, and that share may rise as more of the mega-projects come on stream over the next decade. Uncertainty for Foreign Investment But uncertainty is likely to continue to plague the foreign investment scene, given that parts of the Russian oil and gas sector still do business in mysterious ways, and the oligarchs who bought the best energy assets for a song from the state in the 1990s have no intention of relinquishing their privileged positions.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
by Janette Sadik-Khan
Published 8 Mar 2016

These are the fundamental materials that govern the entire public realm, and, if applied slightly differently, could have radical new impact. New York desperately needed a new approach. City leaders, urban planners, traffic engineers, and the people who they serve have been hobbled by two opposite, increasingly unproductive tendencies. First, megaproject monomania, still embraced by mayors and pushed by engineers who want to build bridges, new highway flyovers, bypasses, interchanges, and stadiums to leave a mark and “do something” during their tenures. This tendency clashes with the second common practice: city residents who assert neighborhood-based preservation and resist not just neighborhood-destroying projects but also virtually any other change to the urban context.

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And the consequences of these low expectations couldn’t be higher. Transportation is one of the few professions where nearly 33,000 people can lose their lives in one year and no one in a position of responsibility is in danger of losing his or her job. People are rewarded for completing multibillion-dollar megaprojects that do little to nothing to improve congestion, safety, or mobility. Those who do transportation-as-usual by focusing on the smoothness of city roads and futile road expansions tend to have jobs for life, even as traffic problems stagnate or worsen. In this job, those who fight against obsolete transportation ideas and work to create new choices, improve safety, and reduce congestion are the ones whose jobs are on the chopping block.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

“It’s not rocket science; it’s simply straightforward industry,” argues Phil Metzger, a planetary scientist and former NASA engineer. “We have centuries of experience now in developing the machines of industry. So all we have to do is adapt those machines to another environment, and we already know how to do that, too.” When the International Space Station was not yet complete, ideas for megaprojects in space were beyond far-fetched. Undaunted, Bezos began to fly groups of space experts up to his home base, outside Seattle, for private symposiums on the Apollo program, rocket design, and space economics. “We all were working with Jeff in secret, in this ‘Friday afternoon space club,’ as we called it,” Cantrell told me.

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“no potential for consumer harm”: Letter to Space Explorations Technology Corp., “Re: Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Boeing Company and United Launch Alliance, L.L.C., File No. 051-0165,” Federal Trade Commission, May 1, 2007. “extremely difficult”: McCartney et al., National Security Space Launch Report. 4. The Internet Guy “to be inspired”: Elon Musk, IAC keynote 2016, Guadalajara, Mexico, September 27, 2016. more than $150 billion: Bent Flyvbjerg, “What You Should Know About Megaprojects, and Why: An Overview,” Project Management Journal 45, no. 2 (April–May 2014): 6–19. check for $5,000: Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 99. “men have this characteristic”: Alexander MacDonald, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 10.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George Magnus
Published 10 Sep 2018

During this period, the industry is supposed to increase in value from RMB 1 to RMB 10 trillion, or from $150 billion to $1.5 trillion. This plan was followed in quick succession by a report from the National Natural Science Foundation entitled ‘Guidelines on AI Basic Research Urgent Management Projects’, the announcement by the National Development Reform Commission of an AI Innovation and Development Megaproject, and a three-year Action Plan by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Weighing up the tech wheat and chaff Judged by statements, and published plans and reports, then, it looks as though China just has to join up the proverbial dots to fulfil its ambitions. Yet you might be forgiven for asking whether it is really all that simple.

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Xu Huang and Michael Harris Bond, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012 Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State, MIT Press, 2008 INDEX Unattributed entries, for example geography, refer to the book’s metatopic, China. 1st Five-Year Plan (i) 1st Party Congress (Chinese Communist Party) (i) 5G networks (i) 9/11 (i) 11th Central Committee, third plenum (i) 11th Party Congress (i) 13th Five-Year Plan advanced information and digital systems (i) aims of (i) BRI incorporated into (i) manufacturing and technology (i) pension schemes (i) transport (i) 14th Party Congress (i) 15th Party Congress (i) 18th Party Congress (i), (ii) third plenum (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) 19th Party Congress ‘central contradiction’ restated (i) supply-side reforms (i) Xi addresses (i), (ii), (iii) 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road see Belt and Road Initiative 2000 Olympic Games (i) 2008 Olympic Games (i), (ii) Abe, Shinzō (i) Acemoglu, Daron (i) Action Plan (AI) (i) Addis Ababa (i), (ii) Africa Admiral Zheng (i) BRI concept and (i) Chinese interest in (i) colonialist criticism (i) Japan and (i) loans to (i) metal ore from (i) Silk Road (i) Sub-Saharan Africa (i) ageing trap (i) see also population statistics birth rate (i) consequences of ageing (i) demographic dividends (i), (ii) family structures (i) healthcare (i) ‘iron rice bowl’ (i) mortality rates (i) non-communicable disease (i) old-age dependency ratios (i), (ii), (iii) pensions (i) retirement age (i) Agricultural Bank of China (i) Agricultural Development Bank of China (i) agriculture (i), (ii), (iii) Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Ministry of (i) AI (i), (ii), (iii) AI Innovation and Development Megaproject (i) AI Potential Index (i) Air China (i) Airbus (i), (ii) Aixtron SE (i) Alibaba (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Alphabet (i) AlphaGo (i), (ii) Alsace-Lorraine (i) Amoy (i) Anbang Insurance (i), (ii), (iii) Angola (i) Angus Maddison project (i) Ant Financial (i), (ii) anti-corruption campaigns 2014 (i) in financial sector (i) Ming dynasty (i) Xi launches (i), (ii), (iii) Apple (i), (ii), (iii) Arab Spring (i) Arabian Sea (i) Arctic (i) Argentina (i), (ii), (iii) Armenia (i) Article IV report (IMF) (i) see also IMF ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) (i), (ii) Asia China the dominant power (i), (ii) Global Innovation Index (i) Obama tours (i) Paul Krugman’s book (i) ‘Pivot to Asia’ (i) state enterprises and intervention (i) Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (i) Asian Development Bank (i), (ii) Asian Financial Crisis (1997–98) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Asian Tiger economies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (i) Australia Chinese investment in (i) Chinese seapower and (i) free trade agreement with (i) immigration rates and WAP (i) innovation statistics (i) pushing back against China (i), (ii) Renminbi reserves (i) Austria (i), (ii) Austria-Hungary (i) automobiles (i), (ii) Babylonia (i) bad debt see debt bad loans (i), (ii) Baidu (i), (ii) Balkans (i) Baltic (i) Baluchistan (i) Bandung (i), (ii) Bangladesh heavy involvement with (i) Indian sphere of influence (i) low value manufacturing moves to (i), (ii) Padma Bridge project (i) Bank of China (i), (ii) Bank for International Settlements (i) banks (i) see also debt and finance; WMPs (wealth management products) assets growth, effects of (i) bad loans problem (i) bank failures (i) central bank created (i) major banks see individual entries non-performing loans (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) regulators step in (i) repo market (i), (ii) shadow banks (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix) n18 smaller banks at risk (i) Baoneng Group (i) Baosteel (i) BBC (i) Bear Stearns (i) Beijing see also Peking 1993 (i) central and local government (i), (ii), (iii) Mao arrives (i) Olympics (i) pollution (i) price rises (i) US delegation (i) water supply (i) Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal (i) Belarus (i) Belgrade (i) Bell (i) Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (i) debt problems in recipient nations (i) description, size and nature (i) economic drivers (i) financing and funding (i), (ii) first Forum (i) geopolitical drivers and disputes (i) Marshall Plan and (i), (ii) project investment (i), (ii) reordering of Indo-Pacific (i) Silk Road and (i), (ii), (iii) ways of looking at (i), (ii) benevolent dictators (i) Bering Strait (i) big data (i) birth rate (i) see also population statistics Bloomberg (i) Bo Xilai (i) Boeing (i), (ii) bond markets (i) Bosphorus Strait (i) Boxers (i), (ii) Brazil BRICS (i), (ii), (iii) middle income, example of (i), (ii), (iii) US steel imports (i) Bretton Woods (i) Brexit (i), (ii) BRICS (i) ‘Building Better Global BRICs’ (Goldman Sachs) (i) BRICS Bank (i), (ii) Britain (i) Boxer Rebellion (i) Brexit (i), (ii) Hong Kong (i) new claims (i) Renminbi reserves (i) Broadcom (i) Brunei Darussalam (i), (ii), (iii) Brzezinski, Zbigniew (i) Budapest (i) budget constraints (i), (ii) Bulgaria (i) Bund, the (Shanghai) (i) Bundesbank (i) bureaucracy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Bush, George W.

The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey
by Gillian Tindall
Published 14 Sep 2016

In fact, it is based on a few brief lines about such a mishap that Betjeman saw in a local newspaper, and Mr Basil Green himself and his awful experiences are invented. 7. Translated by Norman Denny as Fattypuffs and Thinifers in 1941. 8. Peter Ackroyd, London Under, 2011. Chapter IV: The High Road and the Low Road 1. See Chapter XIII. 2. See Chapter XII. 3. ‘Megaproject as Keyhole Surgery, London’s Crossrail’, in Built Environment, vol. 37, No. 1. 4. St Barnabas House. See Chapter XII. 5. Myths tell of him living in a cell or a cave, lame from a royal hunting incident, succoured by the milk of a tame hind, and resisting the invitation of the penitent King to accept more comfortable lodgings. 6.

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Douglas, The Vanished Coaching Inns of the City of London, 2009 Articles, academic papers; manuscript sources in addition to those mentioned in the Acknowledgements Anon., ‘Domesday Book’, actually ‘Liber Domus Dei’, manuscript register compiled in 1624 of those who contributed to the rebuilding of St Giles-in-the-Fields: for several centuries in the possession of the parish but recently lodged in the London Metropolitan Archives Anthony, Sian, ‘Medieval Settlement to 18th–19th-Century Rookery: Excavations at Central St Giles 2006–8’, MOLA Study Series no. 23, 2011 Bird, Samantha L., Stepney: Profile of a London Borough from the Outbreak of the First World War to the Festival of Britain 1914–1951, Cambridge thesis, 2011 Boreman, Robert, A Mirrour of Christianity, and a miracle of charity . . . etc., pamphlet printed 1669 on the death of Alice, Duchess Dudley, a copy in the possession of Camden Local Archives Carrier, Dan, ‘Lauderdale House and Magna Carta’, Camden New Journal, 9 April 2015 Dennis, Richard, ‘Gower Street to Euston Square: A Local History of the Underground’, annotated version of a UCL lunchtime lecture given 15 January 2013 Dennis, Richard, ‘Letting off Steam: The Perils and Possibilities of Underground Travel in Victorian and Edwardian London’, paper delivered at the Institute of Historical Research, UCL, 17 January 2013 Gage, John, ‘The Rise and Fall of the St Giles Rookery’, article published in Camden History Review, vol. 12, 1984 Gliddon, Marchant Alexander, History of Stepney 1819–1869, manuscript in possession of Tower Hamlets Archive Library Green, David, People of the Rookery: A Pauper Community in Victorian London, occasional paper from the Department of Geography, King’s College London, 1986 Hebbert, Michael, ‘Megaproject as Keyhole Surgery: London Crossrail’, from Built Environment, vol. 37, No. 1, 2012 Hill, G. W. and Frere, W. H., Memorials of Stepney Parish [in fact the transcribed Stepney Vestry minutes from 1579 to 1662], 1891, held in Tower Hamlets Archive Library Richardson, Nick, ‘Heathrow to Canary Wharf’, London Review of Books, 11 October 2012 Robinson, Simon, Liverpool Street Underground, manuscript paper written for PTS Consulting, 2012 Role, Raymond, ‘Sir Robert Dudley Duke of Northumberland’, History Today, vol. 53, March 2003 Sankey, David, Worcester House, Stepney: Medieval Moated Manor House to Stepney City Farm, MOLA publication for Crossrail Archaeology, 2015 Schofield, Nicholas, Holborn, London’s Via Sacra, pamphlet published by the church of St Anselm and St Caecilia with Stephen Osborne, 2012 Index The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 2008

In the past, the Dominican people have accomplished feats much more difficult than becoming constructively engaged with Haiti. Among the many unknowns hanging over the futures of my Dominican friends, I see that as the biggest one. CHAPTER 12 China, Lurching Giant China’s significance ■ Background ■ Air, water, soil ■ Habitat, species, megaprojects ■ Consequences ■ Connections ■ The future ■ China is the world’s most populous country, with about 1,300,000,000 people, or one-fifth of the world’s total. In area it is the third largest country, and in plant species diversity the third richest. Its economy, already huge, is growing at the fastest rate of any major country: nearly 10% per year, which is four times the growth rate of First World economies.

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During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, pollution spread still further, as many factories were relocated to deep valleys and high mountains from coastal areas considered vulnerable in case of war. Since economic reform began in 1978, environmental degradation has continued to increase or accelerate. China’s environmental problems can be summarized under six main headings: air, water, soil, habitat destruction, biodiversity losses, and megaprojects. To begin with China’s most notorious pollution problem, its air quality is dreadful, symbolized by now-familiar photographs of people having to wear face masks on the streets of many Chinese cities (Plate 25). Air pollution in some cities is the worst in the world, with pollutant levels several times higher than levels considered safe for people’s health.

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On the other hand, China’s leaders have also succeeded in creating messes on a scale scarcely possible for European and American leaders: for instance, by the chaotic transition of the Great Leap Forward, by dismantling the national educational system in the Cultural Revolution, and (some would say) by the emerging environmental impacts of the three megaprojects. As for the outcome of China’s current environmental problems, all one can say for sure is that things will get worse before they get better, because of time lags and the momentum of damage already under way. One big factor acting both for the worse and for the better is the anticipated increase in China’s international trade as a result of its joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), thereby lowering or abolishing tariffs and increasing exports and imports of cars, textiles, agricultural products, and many other commodities.

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan
by Lynne B. Sagalyn
Published 8 Sep 2016

As planning efforts developed momentum throughout 2002, four legacies of the World Trade Center complex resounded in the ideas and ideals put forth in the public realm: its role as a catalyst to remediate downtown’s economic stagnation; its iconic architectural contribution to the skyline of Manhattan; its failed superblock plan, a former symbol of modernity and economic efficiency intended to liberate the city from the constraints of the street grid;42 and its institutional pedigree as an economically questionable megaproject of the Port Authority. Development of the complex had come about only through a grand bargain with the state of New Jersey for the Port Authority to take over the bankrupt Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (H&M, renamed as PATH), which carried some 140,000 commuters a day from Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken to Manhattan.

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And at considerable length in Times Square Roulette, I explained the many setbacks Klein encountered and why and how that public-private development project took twists and turns not contemplated by any of the players over its twenty-plus-year saga. The complex rebuilding at Ground Zero would prove to be much, much harder—for everyone involved—and contrary to the narrative of delay that prevailed throughout, largely completed in a time frame that was acceptably short relative to similar urban megaprojects. Regardless, the first order of business would be to figure out who was in control of decision-making at Ground Zero. A Dysfunctional Document In signing ninety-nine-year leases with a developer who operated on the traditional model of family business that values holding real estate for generational benefit, the Port Authority had aligned its long-term economic interest with an investor group keyed to the same long-term investment horizon.

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Unattached to a permanent in-place foundation, the cornerstone was ready to move into place whenever a fully designed building went into construction. The real question lurking behind the ceremony was the same one that prevailed in the earliest days of the master-plan process: What would really be built? Reporting on the ceremony, Dunlap succinctly captured the spirit of the event: “Guessing the future of long-term megaprojects is a fool’s game. Their momentum depends on an alignment of political will, popular support, market demand and economic conditions that shift constantly, beyond the ability of anyone to control or predict.”53 Putting those big-picture issues aside, the major principals at Ground Zero settled into the detailed process of creating a workable plan and, finally, focusing on the process for selecting a memorial design.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Soviet discourse of what James Carey called the “electric sublime” begins with Lenin’s famous 1920 statement that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” perhaps the highpoint of the Soviet reputation in the West as well as a memorable declaration of the Soviet Union’s commitment to achieve social progress through technological modernization.130 Soviet cybernetic discourse built actively on that tradition—particularly that of the Soviet digital economic network projects, which, like Lenin’s electrification (or GOERLO) project, promised to rework the technological infrastructure of the whole country—the factories, the grids that united them, and the giant hydroelectric and computer stations that powered them. The cybernetwork projects integrated and updated a longer tradition of the industrialist, Taylorist megaprojects that marked the Soviet electrical age. The cybernetic lexicon also resonates richly with native Soviet discourse. Before Wiener cemented that hardy word as central to cybernetic systems, feedback occupied a prominent position in the Soviet political imagination of itself as a “socialist democracy,” a kind of complex social entity sustained by Pavlovian mechanisms of stimulus and response and control and cooperation between rulers and masses.131 With little work, the term noise reduction came to stand for a technical synonym for continuing political censorship in the Soviet Union.

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They affected an “iron cage” of bureaucratic petrification when convenient and waged war with other local deities. The problem does not belong to all modern bureaucracy. Some bureaucracies do not result in this kind of incessant, internecine Hellenistic competition among the gods. Some administrations, including Soviet military ones, have successfully managed to fund, develop, and launch megaprojects, and most large-scale modern institutions are administered by functional bureaucracies.24 Where lay the difference? Glushkov believed that a successful bureaucratic system could be reformed and improved with information technological upgrades, but only with commensurate social and economic reforms.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power
by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Published 14 Sep 2020

Payment could come much later or never at all; the bin Ladens wouldn’t make a peep. But here was a young prince with a bigger ask: He wanted to have a say in core business decisions. Politely, Bakr rebuffed Mohammed, saying the market conditions were not yet ideal. Mohammed was annoyed, suggesting this decision was unwise, considering that the review of all megaprojects could lead to cancellations and a slowing down of work. Bakr called his brothers to discuss his fears. After the crane collapse, Binladin Group was under attack. King Salman issued a royal decree pausing all contracts with the company, pending an investigation. The business was thrust into the cold, cut off from all further government contracts with payments on existing projects stopped.

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To achieve his grandest economic dreams, he needed much more money—hundreds of billions of dollars, not the mere $25.6 billion he earned from the Aramco IPO. Standing in his office in a plain thobe speaking to advisors and ministers, he was frustrated with the pace of the 2030 transformation. Oil prices were hovering in the $60 range, well below the level he needed to build all the megaprojects at once while affording an expensive, never-ending conflict in Yemen and a populace still used to handouts. This problem had been gnawing at the kingdom since Salman took the throne, with a flood of oil from the US fracking boom depressing global prices. And the problem was only getting worse.

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth
by Fred Pearce
Published 28 May 2012

The Bin Laden Group—an eighty-year-old Saudi family industrial conglomerate with an infamous black-sheep son—led a consortium to grow rice on more than a million acres in the Indonesian province of Papua. At one swoop, it gave the Saudis a third of the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate, a $5 billion megaproject being developed by the Indonesian government. But, while Indonesia is a Muslim nation, Papua is unruly, and much of it is not Muslim. In mid-2010, the Merauke project was put on hold by its director after opposition from local tribal animists and Christians reluctant to give up their land to Muslims from either Jakarta or Jeddah.

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Its local boss, Australian Peter Schuurs, told the Financial Times he anticipated returns of 40–50 percent: “The name of the game is to get there first and to do it first.” The scheme forms part of an Egyptian strategy to secure food supplies by accessing well-irrigated land in neighboring countries. But Egypt also wants South Sudan’s help in delivering more water down the Nile to Egypt itself. The idea is to revive an engineering megaproject to dig a giant canal that would allow the Nile to bypass the giant Sudd swamp in South Sudan. The waters of the Nile spend almost a year meandering through this wetland. During that time, roughly half the water evaporates. The Egyptians reckon that, by bypassing the swamp, the river could deliver an extra 4 million acre-feet of water down to Egypt.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

Thus, the policy papers put up to the political heads of government departments and the heads of regulatory agencies, who normally get their jobs because of their commitment to the cause, reinforce rather than challenge their misconception that renewable energy policies do anything other than make rent seekers rich. In a 2009 paper “Survival of the Unfittest,” Bent Flyvbjerg, professor of major infrastructure projects at Oxford University, asked why the worst infrastructure gets built. Flyvbjerg, the world’s most cited scholar on megaproject planning, wrote that a characteristic of major infrastructure projects is that there is “lock in” or “capture” at an early stage, leaving analysis of alternatives weak or absent.20 In reviewing possible explanations as to the benefit shortfalls and cost overruns of big infrastructure projects, Flyvbjerg found that political-economic explanations—project planners and promoters “deliberately and strategically overestimating benefits and under-estimating costs”—better fit the data than other possible explanations.21 Project managers and planners “lie with numbers.”

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Typically the projects he examined are one to three orders of magnitude smaller (billions and tens of billions of dollars, pounds, or euros) than nation-scale renewable deployment (hundreds of billions up to trillions). Such colossal costs impose strains even on rich economies like Germany’s. What can be done? In the case of megaprojects, large forecasting inaccuracies have led to discussions about “firing the forecaster.” Flyvbjerg goes further. “Some forecasts are so grossly misrepresented that we need to consider not only firing the forecasters but suing them, too—perhaps even having a few serve time.”24 Malpractice in project management, argues Flyvbjerg, should be taken as seriously as in other professions such as medicine and the law.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

Koen Olthuis has partnered with hotel and restaurant entrepreneur Paul van de Camp. Their company, Dutch Docklands, is currently selling space on the emerging floating nation. A joint venture between the Maldivian government and Koen’s team has led to an ambitious master plan to build several floating megaprojects, including a floating golf course complete with undersea transparent tunnels between eighteen holes offering aquarium views of wild tropical fish and manta rays, and Greenstar, a floating grass-terraced hotel in the shape of a starfish, where each arm of the starfish is removable and replaceable, like a cruise ship.

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In 1997, as this company began construction of the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, one of the largest underwater tunnels in the world—which would feature an artificial island called Umihotaru (meaning “ocean firefly”)—its plans for an ocean civilization in the twenty-first century seem, yet again, unfathomable. Mega-Lily “We can make a city like a single plant,” claims Shimizu. It plans to take OTEC to the next logical step, with a megaproject it calls Green Float, a plan to have self-sufficient, carbon-negative botanical skyscrapers floating in Tokyo Bay by 2025. Imagine looking out the window of your Tokyo high-rise to view a thousand-meter-high flower floating in Tokyo Bay. The flower is a skyscraper made of magnesium alloy floating on a giant lily pad platform.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

Useful starting-points are Lewis, M.M., 2010, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, London, Allen Lane, and Mian, A., and Sufi, A., 2014, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press. 7. See Megginson, W.L., and Netter, J.M., 2001, ‘From State to Market: A Survey of Empirical Studies on Privatization’, Journal of Economic Literature, 39 (2), June, pp. 321–89, for a survey of the literature on this. 8. See Flyvberg, B., 2003, Megaprojects and Risk, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, for an account of the recurrent problems in both public and private sectors. 9. King, A., and Crewe, I., 2013, The Blunders of Our Governments, London, Oneworld, pp. 201–21. 10. Goldman Sachs Annual Report 2013. 11. Lewis, M.M., 2004, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, New York and London, W.W.

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Final Report: Oral and Written Evidence, 2011, HC 680 2011–12, Ev 62, 23 November. House of Commons Treasury Committee, Independent Commission on Banking. Financial Times, 2009, ‘Government’s Response Like That of a Rowdy Drinker in a Bar Brawl’, 5 July. Fitzgerald, F.S., 1925, The Great Gatsby, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons. Flyvberg, B., 2003, Megaprojects and Risk, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Fox, J., 2009, The Myth of the Rational Market, New York, Harper Business. Francis, J., 1850, ‘Chronicles and Characters of the Stock Exchange’, The Church of England Quarterly Review, 27 (6), pp. 128–55. Friedman, M., and Friedman, R.D., 1980, Free to Choose, San Diego, CA, Harcourt.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

The accumulated deficit during the whole 1820–1860 period was about $175 million, or a little over $4 million a year, but it still had to be financed.5 PREBELLUM FINANCE The United States was not a capital-rich country, and its annual trade deficits had to be covered by shipping gold, by increasing exports, or from inflows of foreign investment. Mega-projects, like canals or railroads, were normally financed by state bond issues, which were sold through American and English banking houses. (The last of the federal debt was discharged in 1835, so there was no Treasury bond market.) A sample of American state bond yields in London and New York from the first half of the 1830s shows spread differentials only in the few hundredths of a percent, suggesting tight integration of the two countries’ capital markets.

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Extreme levels of surface-water pollution has forced heavy exploitation of ground water, which is lowering water tables, causing land subsidence with collateral damage in built-up areas, and speeding the country’s desertification. Forced-draft projects to reroute rivers to divert water to agricultural and industrial areas are only making the problems worse, even as they raise tensions around the exploitation of transnational rivers and continue the destruction of the environment. One current mega-project, twice as expensive as the famous Three Gorges Dam, is diverting water from the Yangtze River in the south through three major new channels some eight hundred miles to Beijing. It has been compared to “channeling water from the Mississippi River to meet the drinking needs of Boston, New York and Washington.”

World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen
Published 19 Dec 2016

But just as this new approach got underway, the era of warm city–nation state relations began to cool in 2003, when former Shanghai Mayor Jiang Zemin’s term as Prime Minister ended. The city lost a strong supporter in central government and the policy relationship became less positive as the State reined in the city government from its reliance on megaprojects and the property market, with limits to bank lending and land use. National leaders investigating corruption and mismanagement also targeted a group of officials with links to the Shanghai government. This cooling of relations did not lead to significant or lasting divergence about the vision for Shanghai’s economic future.

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Planning Commission: Steering Committee on Urban Development and Management (2011). Report of the Working Group on Financing Urban Infrastructure. Available at http:// planningcommission.gov.in/aboutus/committee/wrkgrp12/hud/wg_Financing_rep.pdf. Accessed 2016 Feb 9. Rao, N. (2015). Reshaping City Governance. London: Routledge. Ren, X. and Weinstein, L. (2013). Urban Mega‐Projects and Scalar Transformations in China and India. In Samara, T., Shenjing, H. and Chen, G. (eds) Locating Right to the City in the Global South. London: Routledge, pp. 107–126. Reuters (2016). India’s Modi Launches $1.5 Billion Fund for Startups. Fortune. Available at http://fortune.com/2016/01/16/modi‐india‐startup‐fund/.

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
by Casey Michel
Published 23 Nov 2021

James Rufus Koren, “How Disney Used Shell Companies to Start Its Magic Kingdom,” Los Angeles Times, 9 April 2016, https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-disney-shell-companies-20160408-story.html. 15. Findley, Nielson, and Sharman, Global Shell Games. 16. Tom Burgis, “The Secret Scheme to Skim Millions off Central Asia’s Pipeline Megaproject,” Financial Times, 3 December 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/80f25f82-5f21-4a56-b2bb-7a48e61dd9c6. 17. Luke Harding, “Revealed: The $2bn Offshore Trail That Leads to Vladimir Putin,” Guardian, 3 April 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore. 18. 

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Frank Cerabino, “Cerabino: A New Twist in the Old Saga of That Palm Beach Mansion Trump Made a Killing off Of,” Palm Beach Post, 11 September 2020, https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/columns/2020/09/11/michael-cohens-take-trumps-sale-palm-beach-estate-russian/3468953001/. 29. Kevin G. Hall and Ben Wieder, “Trump Dreamed of His Name on Towers Across Former Soviet Union,” Miami Herald, 30 June 2017, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article158519159.html. 30. Burgis, “The Secret Scheme to Skim Millions off Central Asia’s Pipeline Megaproject.” 31. Aubrey Belford, Sander Rietveld, and Gabrielle Paluch, “The Winding Money Trail from Kazakhstan to Trump SoHo,” McClatchy, 26 June 2018, https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/article213846794.html. 32. Richard C. Paddock and Eric Lipton, “Trump’s Indonesia Projects, Still Moving Ahead, Create Potential Conflicts,” New York Times, 31 December 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/world/asia/indonesia-donald-trump-resort.html?

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011

The project, initially scoped out in the early 1990s, took a decade before it produced “first oil” and a decade and a half before it reached full production—all this at a cost approaching $7 billion.15 Shell’s Sakhalin-2 also began in the early 1990s with the same environmental challenges. It would prove to be the largest combined oil and gas project in the world, not just a megaproject, but equivalent to five world-class megaprojects in scale and complexity. Shell faced the additional challenges of building two five-hundred-mile pipelines—one oil and one gas—that had to cross more than a thousand rivers and streams, through terrain frozen in the winter and soggy in the summer. To get the oil and gas to export facilities ended up costing more than $20 billion.

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Finally, Conoco had to tell Moscow that it was going to pull out altogether if the “extra-contractual” demands did not cease.14 Both Exxon and Shell went to Sakhalin, the six-hundred-mile-long island off the coast of Russia’s far east, north of Japan, where there was some minor onshore production. While the technical challenges were immense there, so was the apparent potential, especially offshore. Though the region was almost totally devoid of the infrastructure that the planned megaprojects would need, it had other important advantages. Sakhalin was as far from Moscow as one could get and still be in Russia. It was also on the open sea, so that output could be exported directly to world markets. Exxon became the operator for a project that also included the Russian state company Rosneft, Japanese companies, and India’s national oil company.

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No less important was the quest for scale—the ability to take on larger and more complex projects (Lou Noto’s “six projects in the frying pan”)—and the ability to mobilize the money, people, and technology to execute those projects. Also, the bigger and more diversified the company, the less vulnerable it was to political upheavals in any country. Such a company could take on more and bigger projects. It was already clear that projects themselves were getting larger. A megaproject in the 1990s might cost $500 million. In the decade that was coming, they would be $5 billion or $10 billion or even more. The BP-Amoco deal sailed through the FTC in a matter of months with only minor requirements for divestiture. But Exxon-Mobil was of entirely different scale—much larger. And just to mention together the names of the two largest legatees of the original Standard Oil Trust seemed enough to evoke the ghost of John D.

The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982-1985
by Jordan Mechner
Published 26 Dec 2012

Film society, classes, movies, Joseph Campbell – everything else is getting pushed aside. The sooner I get this game finished, the better, even though I am enjoying it. At $13K a year tuition, Yale deserves more than my peripheral attention. My next project should be something that requires less than total immersion. No more mega-projects during the school year. It’s too much of a sacrifice. October 20, 1983 Went to Compu-Teach to drop off the changes I’d made to Alphabet last night. It took half an hour to get it working on the IIe. Jim Galambos wanted me to change the “Sunset” music from Taps to something happier. I resisted.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

Ex-economist John Perkins describes the basic strategy in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: first bribes to rulers, then threats, then a coup, then, if all else fails, an invasion. The goal is to get the country to accept and make payments on loans—to go into debt and stay there. Whether for individuals or nations, the debt often starts out with a megaproject—an airport or road system or skyscraper, a home renovation or college education—that promises great future rewards but actually enriches outside powers and springs the debt trap. In the old days, military power and forced tribute were the instruments of empire; today it is debt. Debt forces nations and individuals to devote their productivity toward money.

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The legitimacy of the status quo is wearing thin, and when just a few debtors repudiate their debt, the rest will follow suit. There is even a sound legal basis for repudiation: the principle of odious debt, which says that fraudulently incurred debts are invalid. Nations can dispute debts incurred by dictators who colluded with lenders to enrich themselves and their cronies and built useless megaprojects that didn’t serve the nation. Individuals can dispute consumer and mortgage loans sold them through deceptive lending practices. Perhaps a time is soon coming when we will shake off our burdens. INFLATION A final way to redistribute wealth is through inflation. On the face of it, inflation is a covert, partial form of debt annulment because it allows debts to be repaid in currency that is less valuable than it was at the time of the original loan.

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

Whereas Norway and Canada are the primary diplomatic brokers for the North American and European portions of the Arctic, Russia is the gatekeeper for Asia’s Arctic access. That is why the Export-Import Bank of China and China Development Bank have provided half the capital for Russia’s Yamal Peninsula gas extraction, the world’s largest LNG megaproject. In preparing to drink up Russia’s Arctic gas output, Japan, China, and South Korea have sped their production of LNG tankers to haul gas from the Barents Sea through the Bering Strait to East Asia. Along this northern sea route, China is also investing in port and rail facilities from Murmansk to Arkhangelsk to facilitate the flow of Russia’s inland commodities to world markets.

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After China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, its share of GDP derived from exports jumped from 25 percent to 66 percent by 2006. To many outsiders, China has overinvested in industrial output and infrastructure to a fault, generating wasteful overcapacity and littering the country with unnecessary megaprojects. Additionally, China’s postfinancial crisis stimulus generated enormous debt, especially in the state-owned financial and industrial sectors, pushing total corporate debt to 170 percent of GDP.14 But industry and services are not an either-or choice. In fact, hot sectors such as e-commerce depend on the high-quality transportation infrastructure China continues to build.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs
by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson
Published 23 Mar 2011

While the idea of “living above the store” remains controversial to some suburbanites, marketing surveys and demographic change indicate that significant demand exists, especially in the regions least hit by the housing bust. There is ample evidence, as well, that long-held biases against the decision to rent, regardless of income, melt away when faced with hard questions about tying wealth up in one asset, price-to-rent ratios, and underwater mortgages. Meanwhile, on Long Island, suburban megaprojects like the Long Island Lighthouse proposed for the Nassau Hub edge city (Chapter 9) are bogged down with NIMBY opposition, fueled by intensified fears of property value losses. However, other regions are moving ahead with ambitious, large-scale plans triggered by transit. In Northern California, the eco-retrofit of a 175-acre light industrial business park into Sonoma Mountain Village has been endorsed as the first North American development in Bioregional’s uber-high-standard One Planet Communities.

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A case in point is the town of Hempstead, where the Nassau Hub is located. With 760,000 residents spread over 142 square miles, it is the largest “town” in the United States. Perhaps in response to the lack of planning capacity, hopes for the Hub plan seem to have been reduced to a single $2 billion megaproject called The Lighthouse. The owner of the Islanders hockey team and a major real estate player, Charles Wang, proposes to build a new stadium and surround it with 5.5 million square feet of mixed-use development on a large 150-acre parcel formed by combining his land with 77 acres to be leased from Nassau County.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

In 1967, the city demolished fourteen blocks of tenements here, evicting more than two thousand working-class and poor residents, Latino, white, black, and Chinese, to make room for market-rate housing and a section of Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway. Neither came to pass. Over the years, tied up in lawsuits, protests, and politics, SPURA sat mostly undeveloped. Until now. On the flattened ruins will rise a glittering mega-project. Essex Crossing will cost $1.1 billion and cover 1.65 million square feet over nine parcels, mostly parking lots, forming a Tetris-like shape on and around Delancey and Essex. Architectural renderings show a phalanx of hulking glass towers so big, so sparkling, they dwarf and outshine the high-rises of the 2000s.

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The Pintchik family, local landlords with a large parcel of properties, contributed to the upscale place-making. Tess Pintchik told WNYC: “We’re going for Park Slope meets Meatpacking, a well-cultivated and curated group of tenants, and we really want to help change the neighborhood.” Already, many people don’t remember what came before. As Bloomberg once said of the mega-project, “Nobody’s gonna remember how long it took, they’re only gonna look and see that it was done.” He was right. Today, few people talk about the land grab and evictions. They talk about basketball games and rock concerts. “The forgetting began before the arena opened,” wrote Norman Oder on his blog, Atlantic Yards Report, but “[t]he controversy, the deception, and the obfuscation continue.”

Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life
by David Sim
Published 19 Aug 2019

These limits also assure neighbors that they will be protected from piecemeal or haphazard development outside of the defined zones, therefore eliminating the need to oppose or fight planning applications. Thanks to the simple and straightforward single page of rules, the developer can very clearly understand what is possible. The fast-tracking of projects through the planning system that fulfills these requirements means they can get started faster. Unlike megaprojects with only new buildings, which require precise timing and create huge disruption, Linear Barcelona happens piece by piece, over years, and the community around continues to function more or less normally all the time, adapting and accommodating the changes, the new population, and activities as they come.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt
by Russell Napier
Published 19 Jul 2021

This makes Malaysia about as land short and claustrophobic as Ireland, where there are 51 people per sq. km. Should Ireland require a similar development, this would involve building an island one-third the size of the Isle of Man. The announcement of the new island comes a day after the announcement of another new mega-project – the construction of a bridge between Malaysia and Sumatra. Our best estimate of the current schedule of mega-projects is as follows: the world’s two tallest buildings (the Petronas towers), the world’s longest building (Giga-city), Asia’s biggest hydro-electric dam (Bakun), a new administrative capital (Putrajaya), a new airport, new sports arenas (Commonwealth Games), a new industrial zone with its own capital (the Multi-Media Super Corridor and CyberJaya), the city on stilts (off Johor), the world’s biggest reclamation project (off the north-west coast) and a 22km bridge (Malaysia to Indonesia).

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

To be built mainly in the Gobi and other desert areas, the first batch of these new bases will have a combined capacity of around 100 GW; a second batch, announced the following year, will have a combined capacity of around 450 GW – broadly equivalent to Europe’s total solar and wind capacity at the time of this writing. Both batches are scheduled to be completed by 2030. The point to be emphasized here is that these new megaprojects are about as far from being market-led developments as is imaginable. This is not a case of the private sector identifying investment opportunities, weighing profitability prospects and deciding – invest or not? – accordingly. This is the state, in its most centralized and authoritative form, taking the proverbial bull by the horns, and mustering whatever resources it needs at its disposal to ensure that it delivers what it has said it will deliver.

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See real-time markets Ballentine, Miranda 240 Bangladesh 305–6, 328–9, 346 Bank of America 311 bankability, of renewable energy projects 66, 177, 181, 232–3, 244–6, 255, 260, 263 banks 181 investment in fossil-fuel-based electricity generation 179–80 risk aversion 175–6, 178, 179 Baringa Partners 255 barriers to entry 202–3, 211 baseload contracts, electricity supply 241 baseload generating capacity 67, 79, 159 baseload power 25–6, 247–8 Bazin, Philip 181 Bear Energy 339–40 Bear Stearns 339–40 Belgium 19 Berman, Beth Popp 107–9 Bhattacharya, Ananya 330 bid stack (electricity spot market) 166, 169, 171–2 Biden, Joe 20, 197, 203, 378 bioenergy 14, 26 biological diversity 86–7 Birol, Fatih 126, 348 Bittle, Jake xxv blackouts (electricity) Indian electricity crisis (2022) 305–6 Texas electricity crisis (2021) 307–12 BlackRock xxvi–xxvii, 231–3 BlackRock Global Renewable Power II 96 Blanc-Brude, Frédéric 221 Bloomberg 368–9 BloombergNEF 26, 31, 125, 127, 239, 293–4, 299, 324 Blueprint for a Green Economy (Pearce et al.) 108, 109, 110 Bollier, Dominik 233 Booth, Philip 350, 351 BP 215–16, 335–6 Brookfield Asset Management 82–3 Brower, Derek 347–8, 371 Bruegel 327–8 Buffett, Warren 197 Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) 375–9 Bullard, Nathaniel 27–8, 333–4 Bureau of Ocean Energy Management 85 bureaucracy 129–30 Butler, Nick 202, 212, 214 CAISO 366–7 California xxiii, 36–9, 215, 222, 339-41, 365, 369 solar generating capacity 35–6 Cameron, David 164 cannibalization effect, in electricity price formation 226–8, 285 capacity agreements 223 capacity factor, wind power 71 capacity markets 66–7 capital availability of xiii, xxix, 177, 220–1 cost of 94, 115–17, 219–20, 260, 347–8 capitalism xxii–xxvi, 99–100 actually existing xxv environmental impact xxiii–xxv failure to turn away from fossil fuels xxvi green xxv–xxvi path dependence xxiv profit imperative xxii–xxiv and renewable power xxii–xxiii Carbon Brief 271 carbon capture 26 carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions xvii, 3, 4–5, 8–9, 326–7, 341–3 Carbon Emission Reduction Facility (CERF) 116–17, 291–2 carbon tax 129 Carbon Tracker 127, 130–1 Carney, Mark xxviii–xxix Carr, Housley xxv Carroll, Bobby 376, 378 causes, of European energy crisis (2021–22) 317–20 Cembalest, Michael 141 Central Electricity Generating Board 44–5 certificate schemes 183–4 Chediak, Mark 128 Chernobyl disaster (1986) 19 Chevron xxv, xxvii China xvi, 53, 120, 189, 190, 203 benchmark tariff 287 Carbon Emission Reduction Facility (CERF) 116–17, 291–2 central bank support to renewables 116–17, 291–2 climate change 28 coal production capacity 314 coal use in electricity generation 6, 345 coal-fired power plants 27, 314–16 corporate PPAs 251–2 de-monopolization of generation 52 dominance of clean-energy manufacturing 121–2 electricity consumption 7, 314 energy crisis (2021–22) 313–17 energy security 27–8 feed-in tariff (FiT) 287, 289, 292 geography of renewable power facilities 155 government support framework 121–2, 286–94 investment waves 287–8, 289–90, 291 marketization 64–5, 316 megaprojects 293–4 oversupply 206–7 periods of renewables curtailment 208–9, 288–9 policymaking 122 private sector renewables developers 294–5 solar and wind capacity growth 267, 268, 286–7, 378 solar subsidies 289–90 spot markets, electricity 168–9 subsidies terminated 290–1 Three Gorges Dam 17 unbundling of electricity sector 47 zero-subsidy renewables plants 293 zero-support renewables 266 Chow, Valery 329 Christie, Mark 37 City of London Corporation 234 Clark, Brett xxii classical economics 136–7 Clearway Energy 35–6, 36–7, 39 climate change 3–4, 8–9, 18, 28, 34, 109, 180, 342–3, 351 Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (IPCC) 8–9 Climate Change Conference (COP 26) 341–2 climate change mitigation electricity sector major role 2, 11–13 ongoing failure xv–xvii scenarios 2 climate denialism 84–5 Climate Response Financing Operation 116 coal 314 dependency on 306 relative cheapness 103, 106, 109 use in electricity generation 6, 26, 345 coal-fired power plants 27, 314–16, 318, 326–7 Cohen, Steve 126 Cole, Jonathan 181 colonial legacy 347 commercial and public services, electricity consumption 4 commercial contexts 36–41 commercial landscape, renewable power 81–3 commoditization 362–4 compensation, for curtailment of power supply 288–9 competition 40, 68, 123, 146, 156 coercive law of 144, 145 in electricity generation xxi, 37, 51–4, 57 in electricity retail 48–51 and negative pricing 224 prices 144–5, 146–7 United States of America 202–3 Condliffe, Jamie 270 Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation (CTEI) 85 construction cost, renewables plants 73–7 Contracts for Difference (CfDs) 184–5, 186–7, 223, 250, 272–3, 274–5 Copley, Michael 182 Cornwall Insight 224–5, 226 corporate finance 95–6 corporate power-purchase agreements 64, 65, 234–7, 234, 295–6, 310, 354–5 additionality 257–8 bankability 260–1 companies’ rationale for signing 241–4 contract duration 249 counterparty risk 258–60 customer types 240 and decarbonization 254 economic returns 262 energy transition and 252–6 growth of 254, 263 importance 236, 251–2 lender preference for 248 market 240, 241–4, 250–1, 256, 256–7, 257–8, 259 market imbalance 260–1 market size 260–2 onsite 235 political concerns 256–7 prices 245–7, 261–2 regulatory context 250–1 role 252–6, 256–63 shift to 236–7, 248–9 sleeved 235 synthetic 235 variance in penetration 239–40 varieties 235 cost price xiii–xiv relative xxi cost reductions xxi costs, and revenues 140 counterparty risk 258–60 COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic 8, 76, 216, 290, 312–13, 344 Credit Suisse 232–3, 245–6 credit-rating agencies 248 curtailment, of renewable power supply 208–10, 288 dams 17–18 Davidson, Michael 38–9, 313, 314, 378 debt burdens 347 debt financing 91–4, 175 debt-to-equity ratio 92–3, 94 decarbonization, of electricity generation xxxii, 30, 335, 347, 358, 370–1 and corporate power-purchase agreements 254 economic (and technical) challenges met 131 electricity sector 11, 31–4 indirect 10 investment challenge 32–4 obstacles to transformation 2–3 ongoing failure xv primary obstacle to 131 road transport 9–11 state-led 371–5, 375–9 strategy xviii US failure xi–xii DekaBank 96 demand response 24 demand stimulus 114, 116–17 demand-side economics 135–6 de-monopolization, of electricity sector 39–40, 46, 49, 50, 53–4 Denmark 89, 120, 154, 238–9, 359 de-risking, of renewables investment 187, 350–2 Detroit Edison 97 Deutsche Bank 266 developers, in electricity sector pure-play 82 risk orientation 175 types of 82, 83 development finance institutions (DFIs) 116, 296, 300–1 dispatchable technologies 23 distributed electricity generation 22, 71 distribution network 42 DLA Piper 252, 254–5, 257–8 Domanski, Dietrich xxix Dong, Lara 316–17 Donoso, José 354 droughts 18 dynamic-price contracts, for electricity consumption 222 Eckhouse, Brian 128 ecological modernists 104 Ecological Modernization 110 ‘economic style of reasoning’ (Berman) 107–9 economics, as obstacle xx–xxi economies of scale 74 Economist (magazine) xviii, 25, 167, 284, 319, 323, 342–3, 344, 353, 355, 357, 358, 358–9, 360–1, 361, 366 effective demand 135 Egan, Matt xii Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) 308–10 electricity consumption 4, 7, 12–13, 28–9, 189 global growth 7, 28–31, 29, 346–7 projection 307–8 electricity generation 41–2 commercial contexts 36–41, 67–8 competition in xxi, 37, 57, 68 costs of 134, 144–7, 172, 224, 356 decarbonization 13, 31–4 emissions 342–3 from fossil fuels 342–8, 344, 346 geography of 79–80 investment in fossil-fuel-based electricity generation 178–83 location 79–80 marketization 60 non-fossil-fuel sources 14–21, 15, 343 overinvestment 205–10 privatization 56–8, 68 quantity 79 renewables development 352–3 sources 25, 31–2, 32, 124, 124 time 78–9 unbundling 46–8 electricity generation capacity, IEA road map xvi electricity grid 42–3, 52–3, 79–80, 129 connection and connection costs 88–91, 150–1, 269–72, 277 interconnection 208–9, 312 privatization 56 system costs 89 electricity prices and pricing xii–xiii, 99–100, 231, 244, 256, 308, 355–6, 358 decoupling 356 dominant narrative 100–6, 134–8 environmental resources 108 fixed 181, 245–7 importance 110–12 locational 356, 357 marginal cost 366 market manipulation 364–70 negative 222–8 renewable power ix–xi state intervention 61 and technology adoption ix–xii temporal variation 157–9, 158 electricity sector aggregation and consolidation 44 decarbonization 11, 31–4 expansion 13 fragmentation 43–4 major role 2 obstacles to transformation 2–3 restructuring of 353–64 structure of 38–9 unbundling 39–40, 46–8, 49, 146, 348 United Kingdom 165 vertical integration 38–9, 43, 44–5, 54, 146 electricity supply chain 42–4 electricity systems, institutional arrangements xiv, 41–8 electricity use 4 electrification xviii–xix, 16, 345–6 institutionalized 11–12 road transport 10–11, 13 Ellsmoor, James 126, 128 Emery, Teal 298–9, 300, 301, 347 emissions gap, the 341–2 Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit 167 Energy Charter Treaty 206 energy companies 82 energy consumption 12–13 energy crisis (2021–22) 20, 25, 61, 337–8, 352, 355 China 313–17 COVID-19 312–13 European Union 313, 317–37 India 305–6, 328–30 Texas 307–12 energy crisis (2022–23) 255–6 energy efficiency 31 Energy Infrastructure Partners 232–3 Energy Policy Act, 1992 52 energy preparedness forecasting 307–8 energy protectionism 25 Energy Regulatory Commission 37 energy security 25, 27–8, 331–2 Energy Systems Catapult 151–2 energy transition 34, 106, 177–8 corporate power-purchase agreements and 252–6 cost price xiii–xiv drivers xxx, 109 economics of xii–xiv financing 347–8 force retarding 129–31 interregnum 303 investment challenge 33–4 market-led 252–6 political economy xxx, xxxi–xxxiii state-led 371–5, 375–9 trade-offs 143 energy transitions, historical 107–13, 137–8, 139 Enron 368 environmental, social and governance investing (ESG) xxviii–xxix, 220 environmental campaigners 126 environmental economics 135 environmental policy 107–9, 122 environmental resources 108 Equinor 215–16 equity financing 91, 92, 93, 94, 134 Eskom 53–4 Euronext N.V. 63 European Commission 256, 359, 369 European Court of Justice 184 European energy crisis (2021–22) 313, 317–37 carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 326–7 causes of 317–20 extent debate 325–30 gas procurement 328–30 gas shortages 317–20 government support 327–8 impact assessments 325–30 policymaker responses 320–5 price-motivated behavioural adaptation 327–8 profiteering 322 and renewable power 331–7 spot markets 322–3 European Union 61, 129, 206 Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators 359, 364 coal-fired power plants 318, 326–7 energy crisis, 2021–22 306, 313, 317–37 nuclear alliance 20 Evans, Henry 188 expected profitability xxi, xxii, 160–2, 194–5, 214 export, of electricity 63, 165 ‘extra-market’ forces 195–8 ExxonMobil xxv, xxvii, xxviii, 193–4, 216–17 Facebook 243, 244 Farm, the 1 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission 340–1, 365–6, 367, 368 Federation of German Industries 325 feed-in premium 120 feed-in tariff (FiT) 119, 184–5, 186–8, 198–201, 245, 246–7, 250, 266, 287, 288, 289, 292, 354, 371 ‘fictitious commodities’ (Polanyi), electricity as an example of 362–4, 368, 369, 373 finance, cost of.

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy
by Richard Duncan
Published 2 Apr 2012

Rather than spending trillions of dollars each year in a manner that only boosts consumption, the government must begin to invest in large-scale projects that can generate a return. The government can now borrow at 2 percent interest. If it borrows at 2 percent, invests and earns 3 percent, our national emergency will lessen. If it borrows at 2 percent and invests in transformative mega-projects, such as the development of solar energy, this crisis will be overcome and prosperity for the next generation will be assured. The economic system that has grown out of the adoption of fiat money is new. It is different from what came before. It is not capitalism. We have not yet learned how it works.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Published 18 Jun 2018

These episodes are so appalling – cock-ups that hit the tabloids – that they cut through to the popular consciousness. Few voters will know or care about the intricacies of why a technology failure almost brought down a flagship policy, but they’ll remember that it did. Few people vote for visibly incompetent governments. Megaprojects and their eye-popping budget overruns are often a good source of crisis material. Nine out of every ten government projects with an initial budget of at least £1 billion end up spending more than originally planned.28 As a comparative study by the Institute for Government on large and small projects notes, big projects tend to be inflexible, expensive to finance, encounter lots of opposition, hard to predict and often fail to deliver the transformation they promise.29 Digital transformation has no magic wand to wave away public complaints or uncertain futures.

Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup
by Andrew Zimbalist
Published 13 Jan 2015

See “2004 Universal Forum of Cultures” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Universal_Forum_of_Cultures), p. 3. 14. Parks, Promenades & Planning: Brand Management with the 21st Century Urban Waterfront, “Barcelona: Event as Catalyst” (urbanwaterfront.blogspot.com), p. 6. 15. M. Müller, “State Dirigisme in Megaprojects: Governing the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi,” Environment and Planning A 43, no. 9 (2011): 2091–108. 16. RT.com, February 4, 2013. 17. Jules Boykoff, “Celebration Capitalism and the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics,” Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 22 (2013): 54. A number of news reports put the price tag at $51 billion already in February 2013.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Funders, scientists, and royals end up with better excuses to stay at one of Jeffrey Epstein’s properties; Israeli and U.S. intelligence services get surveillance assets and backdoor technologies; and the Davos elite get to explore “solutions” for their own death (transhumanism) or for global inequality (eugenics). Do just a little reading on any of these initiatives and you see names like felons Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Michael Milken alongside those of royals like Princes Charles and Andrew, tech founders like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton, and mega-project science advisors like Boris Nikolic and Melanie Walker. Each name serves as a trailhead to an entitled culture of would-be philosopher kings for whom conventional notions of morality and equity are mere obstacles to perpetuating their own dominance. They are entrenched legacies resisting any form of fundamental change.

Lonely Planet Sri Lanka
by Lonely Planet

Colombo Lotus Tower ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; DR Wijewardana Mawatha, Col 2) Casting a shadow over Slave Island, the 350m Lotus Tower is set to open by sometime in 2018. With a bulbous top meant to resemble the namesake blossom, this soaring erection (24m taller than the Eiffel Tower) will have telecommunications equipment and an array of tourist attractions, including an observation deck at the top and a restaurant at the base. Like most other recent megaprojects in Sri Lanka, it is being financed by China. Altair ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.altair.lk; 121A Sir James Peiris Mawatha, Col 2) Another of Colombo's new instant landmarks, the 240m-tall Altair is a stunning edifice that takes its name from its soaring A-shape. Balconies texturise the otherwise smooth exterior.

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Most of the clientele is from the region and the casinos – despite adopting names familiar to Vegas high rollers – are very modest affairs with no connection to their famous namesakes, although some big-ticket operators have been vying to change this. 7Shopping Colombo’s markets, with their vast selection of everyday goods, are much more compelling as places to visit than venues for finding gifts and goods to take home. Otherwise, Colombo has many stores making that extra bag essential, and glossy new malls are expected to open in the next few years as megaprojects progress. High-quality tea is sold everywhere. oBarefootCRAFTS, BOOKS ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %011-258 9305; www.barefootceylon.com; 704 Galle Rd, Col 3; h10am-7pm Mon-Sat, 11am-5pm Sun) Designer Barbara Sansoni’s beautifully laid out shop, located in an old villa, is justly popular for its bright hand-loomed textiles, which are fashioned into bedspreads, cushions, serviettes and other household items (or sold by the metre).

Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
Published 22 Jan 2013

Waite, a researcher for the state’s parks department, concluded, “Only three projects in Manhattan’s history have been able to slow down, much less to stop or reverse, this remorseless process of expansion and decay”: Central Park, Rockefeller Center, and Grand Central Terminal. Pointedly, they did not include Pennsylvania Station, which, for all its glory, spawned a few nearby hotels but never became a catalyst for further development (only now are the Hudson Yards west of the station fulfilling their potential). Those three megaprojects shared a number of epochal characteristics, not the least of which was they each defied the inviolable street grid that city commissioners had presciently mapped in 1811 from Houston Street all the way uptown to 155th Street. “They are significant,” Fitch and Waite wrote, “for having served to polarize the forces of growth, thus acting to stabilize the whole center of the island rather like the electro-gyroscopes employed on large ocean liners.

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.
Published 24 Sep 2019

This is commonly called a “scrape off” and the net effect is to dislocate the existing population. All of this can be seen in hyperreality in a city like Detroit, which I’ve described as being an early adopter of the Suburban Experiment and, thus, a demonstration of one likely path American cities will take. The urban core of Detroit has seen tremendous revitalization, with mega-project public investments in stadiums and infrastructure complimented by private investments in office towers, hotels, and condominium units. These neighborhoods are becoming increasingly exclusive with poorer residents being priced out to more suburban areas. There are also pockets of affluence out on the far edges of the community, where newer suburban investments – including malls, big box stores, and single-family residential subdivisions – are still in the first-generation, Illusion of Wealth phase of development.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott
Published 8 Feb 1999

The great majority of his gargantuan schemes were never built; they typically required a political resolve and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could muster. Some monuments to his expansive genius do exist, the most notable of which are perhaps Chandigarh, the austere capital of India's Punjab, and :Unite d'Habitation, a large apartment complex in Marseilles, but his legacy is most apparent in the logic of his unbuilt megaprojects. At one time or another he proposed city-planning schemes for Paris, Algiers, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Geneva, and Barcelona.2 His early politics was a bizarre combination of Sorel's revolutionary syndicalism and Saint-Simon's utopian modernism, and he designed both in Soviet Russia (1928-36)3 and in Vichy for Marshal Philippe Petain.

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Terence Kilmartin (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957), is a key document in this context. 30. The larger, the more capital-intensive, and the more centralized the schemes, the greater their appeal in terms of power and patronage. For a critique of flood-control projects and World Bank projects in this context, see James K. Boyce, "Birth of a Megaproject: Political Economy of Flood Control in Bangladesh," Environmental Management 14, no. 4 (1990): 419-28. 31. Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity, p. 12. 32. See Charles Tilly's important theoretial contribution in Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990-1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 33.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

Yet at the time nearly a third of Chinese families owned one or more vacant properties.55 Such was the nation’s devotion to property that the divorce rate spiked after Beijing imposed restrictions on families owning more than a single property.56 UNCOORDINATED INVESTMENT Beijing’s stimulus plan launched thousands of ‘shovel-ready’ projects for new airports, bridges, highways, subways, and so forth. The most ambitious scheme involved the rapid expansion of the high-speed rail network, reportedly the world’s most expensive public works project since the US interstate highways were built in the 1950s.57 The person in charge of this mega-project was Railway Minister Liu Zhijun, whose Maoist exhortation that ‘To achieve a great leap, an entire generation must be sacrificed’ earned him the sobriquet ‘Great Leap Liu’. Spending on the project amounted to 2 per cent of China’s GDP. By 2010, the Railway Ministry owed more than 1 trillion yuan on railway bonds alone.

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Investment wasn’t merely directed towards infrastructure projects. As part of the stimulus, Beijing endorsed a ‘strategic emerging industries’ plan, promoting investment in new technologies, including biotech and electric vehicles.61 A number of sectors, ranging from aerospace to telecoms, were earmarked for ‘indigenous innovation’.62 Several ‘engineering mega-projects’ were fast-tracked, including a plan to develop a large-scale civilian jet-liner. Less glamorous industries were also supported with stimulus funds, including machinery, textiles, shipbuilding, car-making, steel, nonferrous metals and logistics. The trouble was that most of these industries already produced more than they could sell.63 The glut in China’s steel production was notorious.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work
by Richard Florida
Published 22 Apr 2010

The third piece of the happiness puzzle is the level of diversity, open-mindedness, and acceptance: Is there some equality of opportunity for all? Can anyone—everyone—contribute to and take pleasure from the community?26 My own work with cities across the United States and Canada and around the world convinces me that none of these things can be accomplished by government-sponsored megaprojects. Instead, they are organic in nature and require real leadership and the active engagement of the community. Chapter Thirteen Northern Light I’ve come to know several cities intimately in my lifetime: Newark, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh, Detroit. Now I have a new adopted hometown: Toronto, where I’ve lived since 2007.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
by Larry Bossidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

First, it turned out that while Walt was full of ideas, he didn’t rigorously follow through on them; he left the execution to others. Second, he was so eager to win big orders that he would consistently ignore the capital investment implications that others would point out to him—a serious mistake in a company that was capital-intensive, with high debt and low profit margins. Finally, he loved to go after megaprojects, but he avoided smaller ones that would be more profitable and less capital intensive. These were very specific behaviors, observed by line leaders who worked closely with the man—not “round words” or abstract checklist items. In less than twenty minutes, the executives—including the CEO—reached the conclusion that Walt needed further development and wasn’t right either for the operating job or as a CEO candidate.

The Narcissist You Know
by Joseph Burgo

“He could not acknowledge his refusal to heed their warnings or accept responsibility for the problems that had resulted from his own actions.”18 One by one, he fired them or pushed them out. He refused to pay their bills. Exploiting media access, he heaped scorn upon his enemies—that is, those people who disagreed with him or didn’t do what he wanted. Early in his career, when Mayor Ed Koch declined to give him enormous tax concessions to build a megaproject called Television City, Trump “blasted the mayor as a ‘moron,’ called for his impeachment, and demanded an investigation of Koch’s involvement in his appointees’ misdeeds.”19 At a public hearing for approval of another development, when a local resident argued that Trump was playing the taxpayers of New York “for small-town suckers,” he erupted in rage.

A Burglar's Guide to the City
by Geoff Manaugh
Published 17 Mar 2015

That a new type of building required a new type of police force, with its own techniques of surveillance and its own tactical understanding of the built environment, underscores that an architectural design can present previously unheard-of possibilities for criminal behavior. The irony here, Codella explains, is that the types of megaprojects most often funded and built by the state inadvertently created pockets of immunity to further state intervention and police control. Public housing became an arena in which the city simply “tried out some new architectural experiment on the mostly immigrant poor,” Codella suggests, confining those residents inside meandering architectural labyrinths where the state could no longer reach them.

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists
by Linda McQuaig
Published 30 Aug 2019

Denison, who had also written radio plays for the CNR decades earlier, credited Hydro with being a pioneer of “large-scale hydro-electric development, standardization of equipment and appliances, utility management and rural electrification.”16 Among Hydro’s more notable technological achievements was the Queenston-Chippawa generating station, which involved diverting water from above Niagara Falls through more than twenty kilometres of open canals and tunnels, dug through solid rock, until the water plunged from a height almost twice as high as the falls — and generated roughly twice the power. With the construction supervised by Beck every step of the way, the Queenston-Chippawa station finally opened in 1925, amid controversy over its costs. Still operational today, it’s been designated a national historic site as the world’s first hydroelectric megaproject. For all his accomplishments, Beck failed in achieving another key dream: creating a system of publicly owned, electrically operated trains throughout southern Ontario, with Toronto as the hub. Beck had worked tirelessly developing and pushing the scheme, which took his goals of public ownership and affordable electricity and applied them to the realm of public transportation.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
by Peter Pomerantsev
Published 11 Nov 2014

There is also a “hyper-bridge,” which swings above the Pacific, connecting Vladivostok and South Sakhalin. There is nothing on South Sakhalin, the real economic benefits are almost zero, but the opportunities for graft are great. The new planned “hyper-project” is a tunnel between Russia and Japan. The USSR built mega-projects that made no macroeconomic sense but fitted the hallucinations of the planned economy; the new hyper-projects make no macroeconomic sense but are vehicles for the enrichment of those whose loyalty the Kremlin needs to reward, quickly. But it was power, rather than money, that was always Berezovsky’s interest.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

Reports of considerable labour unrest abounded (see below) and the Chinese government was faced with the problem of absorbing vast labour surpluses if it was to survive.16 It could not solely rely on an ever-expanding inflow of foreign direct investment to solve the problem, important though this might be. Since 1998, the Chinese have sought in part to confront this problem through debt-financed investments in huge mega-projects to transform physical infrastructures. They are proposing a far more ambitious project (costing at least $60 billion) than the already huge Three Gorges Dam to divert water from the Yangtze to the Yellow River. Astonishing rates of urbanization (no fewer than forty-two cities have expanded beyond the 1 million population mark since 1992) required huge investments of fixed capital.

The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

And, unlike the grand plans laid out at climate change summits, recessions don’t take three or four decades to do the job; they do it nearly overnight. According to the IEA, in 2009 global carbon dioxide emissions fell for the first time since 1990. The ripple effects from an economic slowdown elicit all sorts of environmentally friendly results. Consider, for example, the number of resource megaprojects that were canceled after commodity prices plunged during the last recession. In Alberta’s tar sands alone, the oil industry canceled or delayed $50 billion of planned capital spending. The US environmental movement—backed by celebrity activists such as Robert Redford and Daryl Hannah—is deeply opposed to tar sands development.

The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
by Alan Ehrenhalt
Published 23 Apr 2012

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Ackroyd, Peter. London: A Biography. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2000. Alexiou, Alice Sparberg. Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Allman, T. D. Miami: City of the Future. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. Altshuler, Alan, and David Luberoff. Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. Ballon, Hilary, and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds. Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York: Queens Museum of Art/W. W. Norton, 2007. Bennett, Larry. The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism.

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 10 Sep 2018

Engineered systems can be more or less responsive to the emerging climate, but history shows that they are never infallible. Breakdowns often occur for unanticipated reasons. Social infrastructure is always critical during and after disasters, but it’s in these moments that it can truly mean the difference between life and death. Social infrastructure can be built into traditional megaprojects, so that expensive climate security systems like seawalls and water basins function as parks or public plazas where people congregate on a regular basis and develop the informal support networks that we need during crises. It can also come from community organizations and religious groups, whose physical facilities and programs are staging grounds for all variety of collective life, regardless of the weather.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 9 Sep 2019

The chairpersons of city and county government peer assemblies should meet periodically with the governor’s office and the state legislature to report on progress in their roadmap deliberations and receive feedback and assistance. After the ten-month process, each municipality and county peer assembly will publish an extensive roadmap detailing its customized Green New Deal plan and next steps for initiating financing and local deployment of green infrastructure megaprojects. They will also share their views on the codes, regulations, standards, incentives, and penalties that need to be forthcoming from the state legislature and governor’s office to expedite a statewide transition into the Green New Deal Third Industrial Revolution paradigm. The roadmap mission is not just to create a grab bag of favorite green projects but rather to develop a comprehensive and systemic Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure plan that can be deployed across the state over a period of two decades.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

Place itself had become the central organizing unit of the new knowledge-based economy—the basic platform for attracting talent, for matching people to jobs, and for spurring innovation and economic growth. I traveled across the country and the world, taking this message to mayors, economic developers, and city leaders who still believed that the surest way to grow their cities was to lure big companies with tax subsidies and other incentives, or to dazzle people with downtown mega-projects like stadiums and outdoor malls. Instead, I told them, enduring success in the new people-driven, place-based economy turned on doing the smaller things that made cities great places to live and work—things like making sure there were walkable, pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, parks, exciting art and music scenes, and vibrant areas where people could gather in cafés and restaurants.

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 7 Sep 2015

Standardization proved inhuman and disorienting, the open spaces were inhospitable, the bureaucratically imposed plan, socially destructive. In the United States, the Radiant City took the form of vast urban renewal schemes and regimented public housing projects that damaged the urban fabric beyond repair. Today, these megaprojects are being dismantled, superblocks replaced by rows of houses fronting streets and sidewalks. Downtowns have discovered that combining—not separating—different activities is the key to success. So is the presence of lively residential neighborhoods, old as well as new. Cities have learned that preserving history makes a lot more sense than starting from zero.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

UCL plans to build second campus. Financial Times. Nov 22. Available at www.ft.com/cms/s/0/caa72280-1205-11e1-9d4d-00144feabdc0.html. Accessed 2013 Mar 4. Covent Garden Area Trust (2013). History. Available at www.coventgardentrust .org.uk/aboutus/history. Accessed 2014 Jun 19. Crabtree J (2013). UK to help India build ‘mega-project’. Financial Times. Feb 18. Available at www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f16ce936-79b5-11e2-9015-00144feabdc0 .html#axzz2LHOqKGFE. Accessed 2013 Feb 23. Crawford R, Joyce R, Phillips D (2012). Local Government Expenditure in Wales: Recent Trends and Future Pressures. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Crosland A (1972).

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability
by David Owen
Published 16 Sep 2009

The total run is just 1,200 feet, and the ambience is less Aspen than Discovery Zone, especially in the dank changing area, where customers are fitted for skis and identical red-and-blue insulated coveralls. Ski Dubai is a lot like the rest of Dubai: you’re amazed that anyone had the money and the moxie to pull it off, but after you’ve gotten past the novelty you can’t help wondering whether people haven’t simply lost their minds. One of the many mega-projects that were under way during my visit was an amusement park and residential development called Dubailand, which has been under construction since 2003 and still has a few more years to go. When it’s completed, it will be bigger than Disneyland and Disney World combined. I passed the site on my way to a condominium-and-golf-course development at what was then the far edge of the city, and saw mainly roads and parking lots and glare and blowing sand.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends
by Richard Dobbs and James Manyika
Published 12 May 2015

It can be done by defining explicit strategies for capital allocation, focusing on timely and efficient project delivery, reengineering products and processes, and adapting procurement, sourcing, and working capital terms. Nowhere will the pressure to improve productivity be felt more than in capital-intensive industries such as mining, oil and gas, and real estate. Our analysis of more than 40 recent megaprojects (exceeding $1 billion in original capital expenditure investments) shows that over 80 percent wound up costing more than anticipated. On average, the capital ultimately invested was more than 40 percent higher than the original plan contemplated.45 In recent examples, Gorgon, the huge Australian liquefied natural gas plant, and the mammoth Kashagan oilfield in Kazakhstan have proven to be huge headaches for their developers, with cost estimates for the latter rising to five times the originally budgeted amount.46 If interest rates stay constant, cost overruns can quickly gobble up potential returns.

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad
by Christian Wolmar
Published 4 Aug 2014

This paranoid thought process led the Soviets to look at the construction of a new line well north of the existing Trans-Siberian, where it would be not only less vulnerable to attack (always a consideration in Stalin’s mind), but would also open further vast swathes of Siberia and its natural resources that were previously too far from the railway to be exploited.1 That was the strategy behind the start of construction of the 2,300-mile-long2 Baikal Amur Railway, known always by its acronym BAM (Baikal Amur Magistral or Baikal Amur Mainline), a project that dwarfed any of the sections of the existing Trans-Siberian in both difficulty and cost. It was in the long line of Soviet megaprojects, such as the industrial combines mentioned in the previous chapter, and other schemes like the successful space programme, the Virgin Lands Campaign to boost the use of land (another failure), and the madcap idea (fortunately abandoned) to reverse the flow of several Siberian rivers. The BAM, though a mere railway line using tried-and-tested technology, was actually more ambitious in scale than any of these other projects because of the difficulties and inaccessibility of the terrain, which proved to be a far greater obstacle than for the earlier sections of the Trans-Siberian.

The Rough Guide to Seoul
by Rough Guides
Published 26 Sep 2018

At a local level, much has changed in Seoul during Park Won-soon’s stint as city mayor, which started in 2011. While his predecessor, Oh Se-hoon, prioritised the attraction of international tourists as his main (some would say sole) aim, Park refocused the city’s finances towards civic welfare. While the megaprojects continue, with the gargantuan Lotte World Tower being the most notable recent addition to the city’s skyline, a greater number of projects are making use of buildings or areas which already exist, with the Makercity Sewoon developments a particularly pleasing example – especially so since the whole area was, at one point, slated for demolition

Lonely Planet Brazil
by Lonely Planet

The plantation owners prospered, and by the early 19th century São Luís was one of the wealthiest cities in Brazil, built on the back of the labor of African slaves. Today the city has the third-highest Afro-Brazilian population in the country (after Rio and Salvador). When demand for São Luís’ crops slackened later in the 19th century, the city went into a long decline, but the economy has been stimulated by several megaprojects in recent decades. In the 1980s a big port complex was constructed at Itaqui, just west of São Luís, to export the mineral riches of the Carajás in neighboring Pará state, and Alcoa built an enormous aluminum-processing plant on the highway south of the city; both constructions remain key to the city’s economy today.

…

Year after year in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the economy grew by over 10% as Brazil’s rulers borrowed heavily from international banks. But in the absence of rural land reform, millions moved to the cities, where favelas filled up the open spaces. During this time, Brazil’s obsession with ‘megaprojects’ was born. Under the quick-spending regime, construction began on numerous colossal (and mostly ill-fated) plans, including the Transamazônica highway, the Rio-Niterói Bridge and the Ilha do Fundão, which was to house Rio’s Federal University. THE ORIGINS OF THE FAVELA In the 1870s and ‘80s, terrible droughts coupled with the decline of the sugar industry brought economic devastation.

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So begins the era of dictatorship, with generals running the show for the next 20 years. 1968 The government passes the repressive Ato Institutional 5 law, which purges opposition legislators, judges and mayors from public office; most political parties are banned. Protests erupt nationwide. 1968 The Brazilian economy booms, averaging an incredible 10% growth for the next six years. Rapid income growth continues into the 1970s. 1972 The era of mega-projects and skyrocketing deficits begins, with the opening of the 5300km Transamazônica highway. It costs nearly US$1 billion, but never achieves its goal of colonizing the Amazon. 1979–80 The consistent decline of workers’ wages leads to strikes across the country. Unions call for justice and young workers join with intellectuals and activists to form Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT; Workers’ Party). 1984 The Movimento Sem Terra (MST; Landless Workers’ Movement) – an organization calling for land reform – is founded.

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain
by Mark Casson
Published 14 Jul 2009

This created an endemic ‘succession’ problem (Rose 1993), made famous as the ‘Buddenbrooks syndrome’ of ‘rags to rags in three generations’. 2 . 8 . P RO J E C T P RO M OT I O N A N D F I NA N C E Projects played a crucial role in the Victorian economy—from small projects such as new factories to large projects such as railways and mega-projects such as new ports, and holiday resorts, and their associated towns. Projects are much more heterogeneous than ordinary economic activities of the kind described in basic economics textbooks—no two projects are ever alike. They have a minimum efficient scale and substantial set-up costs, and a distinctive life cycle of start-up, consolidation, maturity, and decline.

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Morier (1968) Facts, Failures and Frauds: Revelations Financial, Mercantile, Criminal (reprint), Newton Abbot: David & Charles. Farr, Michael (n.d.) Thomas Edmondson and His Tickets, Andover: The author. Fishlow, Albert (1965) American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Flyvberg, Bent, Nils Bruzalius, and Werner Rothengatter (2003) Megaprojects and Risk: The Anatomy of Ambition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fogel, Robert W. (1964) Railroads and Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Francis, John (1851) A History of the English Railway: Its Social Relations and Revelations, 1820–1845, Reprinted 1968, New York: Augustus M.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

That, in turn, is what triggered the boom in tar sands investment and the rush to the Arctic. And this dynamic could be repeated. A war that takes large state-owned oil reserves offline, or which significantly weakens the power of OPEC, would be a boon for the oil majors. ExxonMobil, loaded with tar sands reserves and with megaprojects pending in the Russian Arctic, would have a huge amount to gain. Perhaps the only person who would have more to gain from this kind of instability is Vladimir Putin, head of a vast petro-state that has been in economic crisis since the price of oil collapsed. Russia is the world’s leading exporter of natural gas, and its second-largest exporter of oil (after Saudi Arabia).

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

The sanitisation of large swathes of cities and towns acts not just to erase local traditions and character in favour of ‘corporate sterility’, but erects a barrier to creativity and expression in the form of what are sometimes called street politics and street art. As the sociologist Saskia Sassen has emphasised, commercial mega-projects kill the urban tissue and de-urbanise city life.20 It is disingenuous for politicians such as Johnson to say that the idea behind all developments in London is to ‘put the village back into the city’. More important would be to put the city back into the city, the town back into the town. Private owners of public space can prohibit or restrict what people can do – eating and drinking, cycling or skate-boarding, busking, snoozing, even taking photographs – and can deny access altogether if they choose.

The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape
by Brian Ladd
Published 1 Jan 1997

The official goal in the 1990s became the "critical reconstruction" of the inner city. This program began in Friedrichstadt, the old commercial center, whose eighteenth-century grid of wide streets and rectangular blocks established the pattern later extended to the nineteenth-century districts. Much of that grid has been obliterated by megaprojects on both sides of the Wall (the southern Friedrichstadt belonged to West Berlin). Berlin's planners in the 1990s have partly restored the grid as a first step toward restoration of Berlin's traditional urban form. The scale they have in mind, though they < previous page page_108 file:///Volumes/My%20Book/arg/ladd-Ghosts_Berlin/files/page_108.html [24/03/2011 13:48:52] next page > page_109 < previous page page_109 next page > Page 109 rarely admit it and sometimes seem not to know it, is that of the late nineteenth century.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

The phrase is Stephen Hawking’s and he used it to describe ‘humanity’s attempt to bridge heaven and earth’.1 Like the great medieval cathedrals of Europe, they are destined to last longer than a human lifetime, to adapt to changing tastes and technologies, to endure long into the future as symbols of faith and human imagination. Cathedral projects are distinct from megaprojects such as dams, bridges, spacecraft and power plants because they have no end date. So the longevity and scale of their ambition makes them intrinsically ambiguous, uncertain and full of risk. Who could write a 1,000-year plan? What new technologies might render any plan too long, too short, too expensive – or irrelevant?

Down the Tube: The Battle for London's Underground
by Christian Wolmar
Published 1 Jan 2002

Ove Arup Partnership Ltd, The Jubilee Line Extension, End of Commission Report by the Secretary of State's Agent, presented to the DTLR July 2000, p.7. 21. Denis Tunnicliffe recalls how the Tory transport minister, Roger Freeman, had sought to make savings through reductions in the size of the stations but was easily rebuffed when the safety card was played. 22. See Megaprojects and Risk by Bent Flyvbjerg, Nils Bruzelius and Werner Rothengatter, to be published by Cambridge University Press in February 2003, for details of` ‘how the promoters of multi-billion projects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built’. 23.

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by Mckenzie Funk
Published 22 Jan 2014

Shields had been inspired to become a civil engineer himself, but unlike his grandfather he was not technically a government employee: He had been remanded to the IID from Parsons, the Los Angeles engineering firm that had been the first to dream up NAWAPA, the North American Water and Power Alliance, which I had heard about when sitting in on Michael Byers’s class at the University of British Columbia. Early in his career, Shields had seen a scale model of it once, had gotten to really study the megaproject that had so scared Canadian water nationalists. “It was just this huge board with all these systems,” he said, “interesting as hell to me.” He thought it could work. “I’m sure it would work,” he told me. “It’s technically feasible. You know, it would solve water needs. It would probably violate lots of environmental needs.

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
by Vaclav Smil
Published 23 Sep 2019

Levers (to lift and move heavy loads, also common as oars, crowbars, scissors, pliers, and wheelbarrows) and inclined planes (ramps to lift loads, to erect heavy stones, also as wedges to exert larger sideways forces, axes, adzes, and screws in presses) were used by many prehistoric societies (otherwise they could not have built their megalithic monuments), while a simple pulley is first documented during the 9th century BCE and ancient Greeks and Romans used compound pulleys (Needham 1965; Burstall 1968; Cotterell and Kamminga 1990; Winter 2007). Many devices and machines combine basic mechanical principles in order to achieve otherwise impossible performances. Construction cranes—machines as indispensable for modern megaprojects as they were for building medieval cathedrals and antique temples—are excellent examples of such combinations as they rely on pulleys and levers to lift as well as to move heavy loads. I will trace the progress of their maximum performances (the process that began nearly three millennia ago and whose main steps are fairly well documented) in order to illustrate slow, but eventually impressive, growth of basic artifact capabilities achieved primarily by ingenious design and only secondarily by deploying more powerful prime movers.

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The Ust’-Balik-Kurgan-Almetievsk line, 2,120 km long and with a diameter of up to 122 cm, was completed in 1973 to carry up to 90 Mt of crude oil annually from the supergiant Western Siberian Samotlor oilfield. By the time of its demise in 1990, the Soviet Union held the records for both the longest and the largest-diameter crude oil pipelines, while the US still had the world’s densest network of crude and refined product lines. The latest wave of pipeline megaprojects is bringing crude oil to China from Kazakhstan and Russia. The Kazakhstan (Atyrau) to China (Xinjiang) line, completed in 2009, spans 2,229 km and brings annually 20 Mt through 81.3 cm pipes. The Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline, built between 2006 and 2012, is a 4,857 km long link from Taishet in Irkutsk region to Kozmino port near Nakhodka on the Pacific coast, and it was built with 122 cm pipes.

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

The historical trend towards large-scale growth and away from smaller-scale, incremental growth has also led, in some places, to an increasingly controlled and monotonous urban fabric – lacking the diversity, character and experiential depth of places that have developed incrementally. Asserting that piecemeal change is diminishing, Dovey (1990: 8) observes how the economic context often favours ‘mega-projects’ bringing massive one-off investments, jobs and political kudos. The flexibility of capital investment by multi-national corporations gives them power to play cities off against each other. Governments are induced to compete for such projects on an ‘all-or-nothing’ basis, and often to overrule, and undermine, regulatory and design processes to secure investment (see Chapter 11).

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An Inquiry by the Royal Fine Arts Commission, RFAC, London Canter, D (1977) The Psychology of Place, Architectural Press, London Carmona, M & Tiesdell, S (2007) (editors) Urban Design Reader, Architectural Press, Oxford Carmona, M; Marshall S; & Stevens, Q (2006) Design codes, their use and potential, Progress in Planning, 65(4), 209–289 Carmona, M & Freeman, J (2005) The groundscraper: Exploring the contemporary reinterpretation, Journal of Urban Design, 10(3), 309–330 Carmona M; de Magalhaes C; Hammond, L; Blum, R & Yang L (2004) Living Places: Caring for Quality, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, London Carmona, M; Carmona, S; & Gallent, N (2001a) Working Together: A Guide for Planners and Housing Providers, Thomas Telford, London Carmona, M; de Magalhaes, C & Edwards, M (2001b) The Value of Urban Design, CABE, London Carmona, M & de Magalhaes, C (2008) Public Space: The Management Dimension, Routledge, London Carmona, M & de Magalhaes, C (2006) Public space management – Present and potential, Journal of Environmental Planning & Management, 49(1), 75–99 Carmona, M; Marshall, S & Stevens, Q (2006) Design codes, their use and potential, Progress in Planning 65, (4) Carmona, M; Punter, J & Chapman, D (2002) From Design Policy to Design Quality, the Treatment of Design in Community Strategies, Local Development Frameworks and Action Plans, Thomas Telford, London Carmona, M & Sieh, L (2004) Measuring Quality in Planning, Managing the Performance Process, Spon Press, London Carmona, M & Sieh, L (2005) Performance measurement innovation in English planning authorities, Planning Theory & Practice, 6(3), 303–333 Carmona, M (2009a) Design coding and the creative, market and regulatory tyrannies of practice Urban Studies, 46(12), 1–25 Carmona, M (2009b) Sustainable urban design: Definitions and delivery, International Journal for Sustainable Development, 12(1), 48–71 Carmona, M (2009c) The Isle of Dogs: Four waves, twelve plans, 30+ years, and a renaissance … of sorts, Progress in Planning, 71(3), 87–151 Carmona, M (2006) Designing mega-projects in Hong Kong: Reflections from an academic accomplice, Journal of Urban Design, 11(1), 105–124 Carmona, M (2001) Housing Design Quality: Through Policy, Guidance and Review, Spon Press, London Carmona, M (1998a) Design control-bridging the professional divide, part 2: A new consensus Journal of Urban Design, 3(3), 331–358 Carmona, M (1998b) Urban design and planning practice Greed, C & Roberts, M Introducing Urban Design: Interventions and Responses, Harlow, Longman Carmona, M (1996) Sustainable urban design: The local plan agenda, Urban Design Quarterly 57, 18–22 Carr, S; Francis, M; Rivlin, L G; & Stone, A M (1992) Public Space, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Carter, S L (1998) Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy, Harper Perennial, London Castells, M (1977) The Urban Question – A Marxist Approach, Edwin Arnold, London Castells, M (1991) The Informational City, Blackwell, Oxford Cavanagh, S (1998) Women and the urban environment in Greed C and Roberts M, (1998) (editors) Introducing Urban Design: Interventions and Responses, Longman, Harlow Centre for Livable Communities (1999) Street Design Guidelines for Healthy Neighbourhoods, Local Government Commission, Sacramento CERTU (2001) NonEnAccidents en Milieu Urbain: Sorties de chaussée et chocs contre obstacles latéraux, Centre d’études sure les réseaux, les transports, l'urbanisme et les constructions publiques, Lyon Chase, JL; Crawford, M & Kaliski, J (2008) Everyday Urbanism (second edition), The Monacelli Press, New York Chaplin, S (2007) Places, in Evans B & McDonald F (Editors) Learning from Place 1, RIBA Publishing, London, 104–121 Chapman, D & Larkham, P (1994) Understanding Urban Design, an Introduction to the Process of Urban Change, University of Central England, Birmingham Chase, JL; Crawford, M & Kaliski, J (1999) Everyday Urbanism, The Monacelli Press, New York Chase, J L (2008) The space formerly known as parking, in Chase, JL; Crawford, M & Kaliski, J (2008) Everyday Urbanism (second edition), The Monacelli Press, New York, 194–199 Chatterton, P & Hollands, R (2002) Theorising urban playscapes: Producing, regulating and consuming youthful nightlife city spaces, Urban Studies, 39(1) 95–116 Chase, J; Crawford, M & Kaliski, J (2008) Everyday Urbanism (second edition), Monacelli Press, New York Chaven, A; Peralta, C & Steins, C (2007) (editors) Planetizen Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning, Island Press, Washington Chermayeff, S & Alexander, C (1963) Community and Privacy, Pelican, Harmondsworth Cheshire, P (2006) Resurgent cities: Urban myths and policy hubris: What we need to know, Urban Studies 43(8), 1231–1246 Chih-Feng Shu, S (2000) Housing layout and crime vulnerability, Urban Design International, 5(2), 177–188 Childs, M C (2009) Civic concinnity Journal of Urban Design, 14(2), 131–145 Childs, M C (2004) Squares: A Public Place Design Guide for Urbanists, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque Clarke, P (2009) Urban planning and design’, in Ritchie A Thomas R (2009) Sustainable Urban Design – An Environmental Approach (second edition) Taylor & Francis, London, 12–20 Clarke, RVG (Editor) (1992) Situational Crime Prevention: Successful Case Studies, Harrow & Heston, New York Clifford, S & King, A (1993) Local Distinctiveness: Place, Particularity and Identity, Common Ground, London Cohen, E (1988) Authenticity and commoditisation in tourism, Annals of Tourism Research, 15(3), 371–386 Coleman, A (1985) Utopia on Trial: Vision and Reality in Planned Housing, Shipman, London Collins, G R & Collins, C C (1965) Translators' Preface’, in Sitte, C (1889) City Planning According to Artistic Principles, (translated by Collins, G R & Collins, C C, 1965) Phaidon Press, London, ix-xiv Colomb, C (2007) Unpacking new labour's ‘Urban Renaissance’ agenda: Towards a socially sustainable reurbanization of British cities?

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
by Chris Dubbs , Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker
Published 1 Jun 2011

In the United States, NASA administrator Dan Goldin came close to meltdown during congressional testimony. "I'm highly frustrated by the fact the Russians signed up to a program that put such incredible empha sis on Mir," Goldin complained to a House subcommittee. "They always seem to have a little extra money around for Mir but not the International Space Station." It was as though the iss mega-project would now have to make room in orbit for the upstart commercial project that threatened to skim off resources from the Russians. That dose of free-market competition did not sit well with NASA. The Russian Space Agency, eager to preserve its good relations with NASA, also wanted to forget about Mir and concentrate on iss.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Published 10 Jun 2013

Although a unified vision is not a prerequisite to realizing innovation districts, cities and metro areas that proceed without one have a higher probability of making the wrong physical bets, siting them in the wrong places, or ultimately creating a physical landscape that fails to add up to “cityness.” It is easy to find such examples around the country, such as isolated megaprojects (a new stadium or convention center) or waterfront revitalization efforts that constructed the wrong projects, having misunderstood the market and the diversifying demographic.74 The quest for integration is also present in financing. Innovation districts require juggling multiple, compartmentalized public, private, and civic financing sources.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 16 Oct 2017

In the same way, if you get the fusion reaction going fast enough, it can sustain a continuous fusion burn. If that happens, all the external heating methods could be shut off, and the reaction would continue. And bonus, it’s happening inside a huge metal donut. ITER is the biggest, most expensive fusion project today. Unfortunately, ITER (like many science megaprojects) has been fraught with delays and cost overruns. You know how it’s hard to get cats with brain damage to agree on something? Well, imagine if instead of brain-damaged cats, it’s political appointees from many different nations. The current cost estimate for ITER is over $15 billion,* which is a bit of an increase over the initially projected $5 billion.

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money
by Frederik Obermaier
Published 17 Jun 2016

In the company records, Roman discovered an interesting document that states that Earliglow is a ‘non-direct shareholder’ of a Russian company called Svyazdorinvest. Around 2010, Svyazdorinvest was awarded a contract by the Russian state-run company Rostec to build a fibre-optic cable between China and Russia. Estimated order volume: $550 million. A mega-project. Rostec’s director, Sergey Chemezov, is an old friend of Putin’s from the KGB, and he too is on EU and US sanctions lists. A graduate of the Russian General Staff Academy, he was once stationed with Putin in Dresden, and later became one of the Russian head of state’s most important middlemen.

Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson
Published 6 Aug 2012

At first blush it might seem as though IDC was guilty of valuing harmony and cooperation over the preservation of shareholder value—a common charge leveled against Japanese corporations by grasping and peevish American investors. Perhaps there was some element of this, but the fact is that IDC did have good reasons for wanting FLAG connected to KDD’s network. KDD’s Ninomiya station is scheduled to be the landing site for TPC–5, a megaproject of the same order of magnitude as FLAG: 25,000 kilometers of third-generation optical fiber cable swinging in a vast loop around the Pacific, connecting Japan with the West Coast of the U.S. With both FLAG and TPC–5 literally coming into the same room at Ninomiya, it would be possible to build a cross-connect between the two, effectively extending FLAG’s reach across the Pacific.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 Apr 2016

Rallying against construction around Taksim Square, protesters decried what has been described as “authoritarian building”41—the demolition of older, more human-scaled neighborhoods in favor of denser high-rise construction, massive malls, and other iconic projects.42 Similar protests over urban development priorities have occurred in São Paulo and other cities across Brazil,43 where the government is accused of putting mega-projects ahead of basic services such as public transport, education, and health care, particularly in the run-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.44 Comparable conflicts have also arisen in high-income countries. Even in New York City, the red-hot center of American ultra-density, eight of Manhattan’s 10 community boards45 opposed former Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to further densify already congested Midtown.46 The Midtown project prompted Yale architect Robert Stern, a devoted advocate for dense cities and no opponent of density, to warn that too much high-rise development creates a dehumanized aesthetic that chases away creative businesses and tourists, while preserving older districts attracts them.47 Retro-urbanist Richard Florida, usually a reliable supporter of density, also expresses concern that high-rise density does not appeal much to the “creative class,” who prefer more human-scaled neighborhoods.48 Similarly, in Los Angeles, neighborhood councils, notably in Hollywood, have rallied against attempts to build denser buildings, which generate more congestion and erode both the area’s livability and its distinct urban identity.49 In London, too, attempts to build what the Independent describes as “the tall, the ostentatious, the showy and ‘iconic’” have been widely criticized for undermining the human-scaled character of London.

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe
by Kapka Kassabova
Published 4 Sep 2017

Lyudmila Zhivkova was then the country’s most powerful woman: Minister of Culture, daughter of the Head of State and General Secretary of the Communist Party Todor Zhivkov, and visible evidence that the first totalitarian dynasty of Eastern Europe was in action. Zhivkova, however, seemed not to be your average dictator’s daughter. She appeared to challenge the philistinism of her father’s cronies by embracing a life of eccentricity. In the late 1970s, she began to construct a cult around the mega-projects she initiated. One of these was the Children of the World Assembly of Peace which brought thousands of children to my home city of Sofia. There, we were to gather at a gigantic concrete complex outside the city that represented each country through its national bell. It was called ‘Bells of Peace’, and we sang the specially composed songs during our school visit there to meet the children of the world.

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
by Alex Hutchinson
Published 6 Feb 2018

The experimental results emerging from the Harvard Fatigue Lab offered a middle ground, acknowledging the physiological reality of fatigue but suggesting it could be avoided if workers stayed in “physicochemical” equilibrium—the equivalent of DeMar’s ability to run without accumulating excessive lactic acid. Dill tested these ideas in various extreme environments, studying oxygen-starved Chilean miners at 20,000 feet above sea level and jungle heat in the Panama Canal Zone. Most famously, he and his colleagues studied laborers working on the Hoover Dam, a Great Depression–era megaproject employing thousands of men in the Mojave Desert. During the first year of construction, in 1931, thirteen workers died of heat exhaustion.33 When Dill and his colleagues arrived the following year, they tested the workers before and after grueling eight-hour shifts in the heat, showing that their levels of sodium and other electrolytes were depleted—a telling departure from physicochemical equilibrium.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement
by Dave Cullen
Published 12 Feb 2019

Weeks after the tragedy, David Hogg explained why he thought they had finally broken through. “The immediate choke hold that we placed on the news cycle, to make sure that people would not be able to look away from this,” he said. Five weeks to the march was always a risk, but they couldn’t take on another megaproject till they pulled off that one. They could use a little juice, though, and lots of other groups were sprouting up as well. Families of the fallen created Change the Ref, Meadow’s Movement, and Orange Ribbons for Jaime. Fellow students started Shine MSD, Parents Promise to Kids, Societal Reform Corporation, and others.

The Future of Fusion Energy
by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball
Published 18 Dec 2018

We define the location of the rings of charge by their centers, but then must adjust for the fact that it experiences the electromagnetic fields along the ring itself (not at its center). 35As mentioned in Chapter 4, computation has also been crucial in optimizing stellarators. Chapter 7 The Present: ITER ITER is a huge tokamak and one of the most ambitious science experiments ever. It is expected to be the first device in human history to confine a plasma that generates more fusion power than the heating power needed to sustain it. ITER, alongside scientific megaprojects like the International Space Station and the Large Hadron Collider, help to define humanity and our capacity for international collaboration. While you may not realize this, chances are high that ITER is being built in your name. This is because it is the biggest scientific collaboration ever, with 35 countries (representing over half the world’s population) contributing time, money, and components.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

For those inclined to distrust China’s government, it’s easy to impute an unrealistic degree of skill in its execution of programmes like a social credit score, especially when viewed through the lens of poorly translated Chinese legal documents. This warped perception is encouraged by the Chinese government itself, which has an interest in overawing both foreign and domestic audiences with megaprojects like the Belt and Road Initiative or its Green Great Wall tree-planting program. It’s this mismatch between rhetoric and reality that demands we look at how social credit scores work in practice before we become too scared—or too complacent. Suzhou, a city of over ten million people in Jiangsu province, is an instructive example.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World
by Tim Marshall
Published 14 Oct 2021

Already investment seems to be drawn towards two of the kingdom’s thirteen administrative regions – those housing Riyadh and Jeddah. If this continues then regions such as the Shia-dominated Eastern Province and the borderland with Yemen will ask: ‘What’s in this vision for us?’ and identify even less with central power. The mega-projects are slipping behind schedule. With great fanfare MBS announced the building of Neom – a $500-billion city by the Red Sea in which all vehicles would be driverless, robots would do most of the mundane work, sustainable energy would power everything and men and women would mingle freely. Sounds great, but there’s very little chance of it being ready on time, a fact that will become increasingly embarrassing as we approach 2030.

Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy
by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
Published 7 Nov 2023

Officials dodged any possible disruptions of the ceremony marking the deal by holding it in the middle of the night without alerting the media.25 Thanks to Lam, it was the first time that mainland police were allowed to legally operate within the city. The next month, Lam was in Xi Jinping’s presence once again for the opening ceremony of the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau bridge, a $20 billion megaproject connecting the two autonomous territories with the mainland. The bridge, the world’s longest sea crossing at thirty-four miles, looked from the sky like a great umbilical cord tethering Hong Kong to its motherland. Xi’s mood was light and cheery. He and Lam stood side by side, chatting like old friends, her cheeks as flushed as her pink Mandarin-collar jacket.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

Nearly all large-scale projects—bridges, dams, tunnels, railroads, airports, power plants, wind farms, transmission lines—come in way over budget and behind schedule, and they don’t pay out as expected. One global study of sixty projects with an average cost of $1 billion “found that almost 40 percent of the projects performed very badly and were either abandoned totally or restructured after experiencing some kind of financial crisis.” In another study of thirty-six such megaprojects, three quarters of them failed to meet financial expectations. The norm is: We make grand plans, we build stuff, we’re mostly glad we did, and the money gets sorted out awkwardly over decades. Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value—the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests.

eBoys
by Randall E. Stross
Published 30 Oct 2008

If this works, we build over five hundred of these in the next few years in the U.S., plus we go global. This is huge.” Unable to elicit a visibly encouraging response, Beirne said, “I’m going to say something, and I want you to not laugh us out of the room: Webvan is every bit as important to Bechtel as the Hoover Dam.” The mention of Bechtel’s glory, the company’s first megaproject, the then-largest civil-engineering project in the United States—and one completed two years ahead of schedule and under budget—was a calculated play to Bechtel’s vanity. It did not produce the desired results, however. Over the next weeks Bechtel moved agonizingly slowly in negotiations. When Webvan balked at signing Bechtel’s standard contract, which in Webvan’s view stipulated an imbalanced relationship that gave Bechtel all the advantages, Beirne used what he called the “take-away,” the same technique he used when his Benchmark partners were being obstinate.

City on the Verge
by Mark Pendergrast
Published 5 May 2017

In 2014, Matt Garbett, the carless community organizer who took me on a tour of the derelict old State Farmers Market in Adair Park,* wrote an irreverent editorial. “We need to stop referring to Atlanta as a ‘world-class’ city,” Garbett admonished. “Atlanta is not in the same league as New York, London, Paris, or others.” The city’s movers and shakers all too often have pursued mega-projects, he noted, such as the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, “further disconnecting entire neighborhoods from the rest of the city, and doing nothing to reduce the sea of parking that prevents the neighborhoods from becoming vibrant.” He approved of the BeltLine but complained that “parking decks wrapped in a thin veneer of apartments spring up like mushrooms along the Eastside Trail.”

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Across the continent, Chinese entrepreneurs have opened shops and businesses, Chinese companies are building hotels, hospitals and roads, and Chinese products are for sale.8 Chinese state media, first under the banner of CCTV International and then the Voice of China, invested heavily in programming for African audiences, spreading Chinese soft power and lauding Beijing’s commitment to the continent and ‘win-win solutions’. Documentaries on African businesspeople succeeding with Chinese assistance and investment, or mega-projects such as the colossal Tan–Zam railway line, which connects Tanzania and Zambia via 300 bridges and more than 10 kilometres of tunnels, sell a vision of China as a different kind of foreign power, one interested in helping lift the continent up, rather than exploit it.9 This presence has visibly changed parts of some countries.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Privacy International, “Case Study: Fintech and the Financial Exploitation of Customer Data,” August 30, 2017, https://www.privacyinternational.org/case-studies/757/case-study-fintech-and-financial-exploitation-customer-data. 47. Ibid. 48. Rachel Botsman, “Big Data Meets Big Brother as China Moves to Rate its Citizens,” Wired, Oct. 21, 2017. For a scholarly analysis of SCS’s, see Yu-Jie Chen, Ching-Fu Lin, and Han-Wei Liu, “ ‘Rule of Trust’: The Power and Perils of China’s Social Credit Megaproject,” Columbia Journal of Asian Law 32 (2018): 1–36. 49. James Rufus Koren, “Some Lenders Are Judging You on Much More Than Your Finances,” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2015, https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-new-credit-score-20151220-story.html. 50. Ryen W. White, P. Murali Doraiswamy, and Eric Horvitz, “Detecting Neurogenerative Disorders from Web Search Signals,” NPJ Digital Medicine 1 (2018): article no. 8, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-018-0016-6.pdf. 51.

American Foundations: An Investigative History
by Mark Dowie
Published 3 Oct 2009

-John Gardner In the early 1990s, convinced that the environmental movement was drifting away from what they conceived of as its mission, Pew, the Rockefeller Family Fund, MacArthur, and a few other foundations began designing new strategies and tactics and offering national organizations money to carry them out. By combining forces and money with other large foundations, Joshua Reichert, Pew's environmental program officer and an anthropologist, has become a major player in the movement. With a sizable staff to design and oversee multimillion-dollar megaprojects, he is, in essence, a kingmaker. "Reichert's ideas have a way of becoming reality," according to Boston Globe writer Scott Allen.' His initiatives have restructured national debates on endangered species, public land forestry, and energy deregulation, invariably by pushing militant environ mentalists toward the center and withholding funds from uncompromising activists.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism
by Harm J. De Blij
Published 15 Nov 2007

And Russia's borders create another problem obvious from the map: for all its bulk, the country is almost entirely confined to high, cold latitudes under Arctic influences much of the year (see Figure 4-4). Grain shortages during the Soviet era drove communist planners to expand farm RUSSIA 237 production through irrigated megaprojects in the republics, but even then Moscow had to depend on costly imports from the west. Now the Soviet Union's breadbasket, Ukraine, is an independent country and Russia's climatic quandary is even more pronounced. As a Russian geographer once said to me, "our borders have never been our friends."

Inviting Disaster
by James R. Chiles
Published 7 Jul 2008

“There is only one driving reason that a potentially dangerous system would be allowed to fly,” wrote chief astronaut John W. Young after the disaster: “launch schedule pressure.” DREAMING GREAT DREAMS The British hydrogen-filled dirigible R.101 and the space shuttle Challenger were both megaprojects born out of great national aspirations. The same high-flying promises it took to get them started forced them to keep going forward, despite specific, written warnings of danger by key technical people. In neither case, as in so many other predisaster intervals, did those well-intentioned, urgent memos make a shred of difference.

The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa's Wealth
by Tom Burgis
Published 24 Mar 2015

The stake was 50 per cent of Block 18, a concession area three times the size of London off the Angolan coast. BP, which held the other 50 per cent and was the operator of the project, in charge of hiring the rigs and drilling the wells, had already discovered half a dozen oilfields containing about 750 million barrels of crude. It was shaping up to be another Angolan megaproject, involving the largest corporations in global commerce: that year Forbes rated Shell and BP as the world’s sixth- and seventh-biggest companies by revenue, respectively. An industry analyst predicted in the trade press that the successful bidder was ‘highly unlikely to be anyone other than the supermajors’, the half-dozen giants of the industry, including Exxon Mobil and Chevron of the United States and Total of France.30 But times were changing.

Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles
by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer
Published 10 Mar 2016

It has tried large-scale clearance and redevelopment of blighted neighbourhoods, initiated housing and infrastructure projects, and promoted economic development and community-services programs. It has experimented with various organizational models for the planning and implementation of slum improvement programs. They have ranged from public-sponsored mega-projects, to public-private consortiums and community-managed development and delivery of services. These tools and lessons continue to be a part of urban planning’s repertoire for slum improvement and overcoming social deprivation. One lesson that came out of the urban renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s is that physical rebuilding alone is not enough for overcoming slum conditions.

Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
by Mark Hertsgaard
Published 15 Jan 2011

This enormous, three-pronged project is designed to divert 45 billion cubic meters of water a year from the Yangtze River basin to the parched north. The idea is based on a basic fact about China's water: the bottom half of the country, from the Yangtze southward, has more than enough water, while the northern half is one of the driest inhabited areas on earth. The notion of reengineering China's hydrology dates back to the faith in mega-projects that Mao shared with his Communist brothers in the Soviet Union: science and technology would bend Nature to man's will. The project's current design envisions an eastern route that will extract water from the lower Yangtze and pump it north through a 1,200-kilometer-long canal; a middle route that will send water from the middle of the Yangtze basin northward; and a western route that will inject water from the upper reaches of the basin to the severely depleted Yellow River.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

In the first, time’s arrow moves steadily forwards; buildings and spaces are added slowly to the environment. Things added to the built environment are often small: a single house made or renovated, a vest-pocket park. In the second, time’s arrow moves forward by big, bold declarations which rupture what existed in the environment before. It is the time of the megaproject, whether that be Bazalgette’s sewers, Haussmann’s streets, Cerdà’s blocks or Olmsted’s park. The first time is adaptive in character, accounting the context of what’s already been made. This is Jane Jacobs’ domain of ‘slow growth’. The second can seem a malign time, violating or erasing context, as did Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, and as do many smart cities which vaunt breaking traditional urban forms.

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
by Richard McGregor
Published 8 Jun 2010

His lenient treatment and prison privileges might have been brushed off as trivial, and never seen the light of day, had not Chen opened a new front in the war with Beijing, on the economy. No development had been too grand or expensive for Shanghai to tackle while Chen, and his predecessors, were in the chair. The city’s obsession with returning to the international limelight saw it splash out on one mega-project after another. A billion-dollar track to attract Formula One motor racing was built in a couple of years, dazzling the globe-trotting crowd that followed the sport. ‘No democracy could afford this,’ gushed Jackie Stewart, the former F-1 champion. A new $300 million tennis centre, constructed to host the end-of-season Tennis Masters Cup, attracted similar gushing compliments.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

Building taller, newer structures would reduce the pressure to tear down other, older monuments. The importance of allowing change becomes particularly clear when America or anyplace else considers building new infrastructure. The same forces that have slowed private development of homes and apartment buildings have also made it far more difficult to construct urban megaprojects that could benefit cities and society as a whole. In France, Germany, and Japan, high-speed rail service has connected major cities for decades. In 1994, Amtrak tried to bring such rail service to the United States with its Acela line. The Acela can reach speeds of 150 miles per hour, which would bring New York-to-Boston train service down to less than ninety minutes, making trains a speedy, ecofriendly alternative to plane service.

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence
by Robert I. Rotberg
Published 15 Nov 2008

Chinese Aid in Comparative Perspective, 1960–1989 Millions of US$ Cumulative amount Recipient region (estimate) East Asia 514 Latin America 314 Middle East and South Asia 4,053 Africa 4,728 Total 9,655 Source: Central Intelligence Agency, Handbook of Economic Statistics (Washington, D.C., 1990). the massive Tanzania-Zambia (Tanzam) Railway (completed in 1976), which employed some 25,000 Chinese over more than half a decade, and in Asia, the mountainous, trans-Himalayan Karakoram Highway linking China and Pakistan (completed in 1986). However, these megaprojects are the exceptions to the rule. Most of China’s aid has come in the form of small and medium-size projects, such as a loan of $8.6 million to construct two administration buildings in Burkina Faso, or the launch of a $3 million irrigation project in Ghana. In scores of countries, the Chinese have implemented the construction of public buildings such as ministry office blocks, cultural centers, stadia, schools, hospitals, and clinics, as well as roads and bridges.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap
by Graham Allison
Published 29 May 2017

And while China’s supercomputers previously relied heavily on American processors, its top computer in 2016 was built entirely with domestic processors.60 Two further 2016 breakthroughs in China provide troubling pointers to the future: the launch of the world’s first quantum communications satellite, designed to provide an unprecedented scope of hack-proof communications, and completion of the largest radio telescope on earth, a device that has an unmatched capacity to search deep space for intelligent life. Each of these achievements demonstrates China’s ability to undertake costly, long-term, pathbreaking projects and see them through to successful completion—a capability that has atrophied in the US, as demonstrated by the failure of multiple recent multibillion-dollar investments in mega-projects, from plutonium reprocessing at Savannah River in South Carolina (facing cancellation, despite $5 billion in taxpayer expenditures, after a recent estimate stated that the project would cost $1 billion annually and last decades), to what MIT called the “flagship” carbon capture and storage project at Kemper County, Mississippi ($4 billion in cost overruns, recently delayed by over two years, and facing an uncertain future).61 BIGGER BARRELS OF BIGGER GUNS While GDP is not the only measure of a country’s rise, it provides the substructure of national power.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

Jacobs so thoroughly skewered Howard’s top-down utopian approach that it is still forbidden territory for city planners today (at least in the West).8 There was much to criticize. The physical master planners who followed in the steps of Howard overreached, destroying vibrant neighborhoods and virgin farmland to make way for lifeless megaprojects. As Tom Campanella puts it, “Postwar urban planners . . . abetted some of the most egregious acts of urban vandalism in American history.”9 The Garden City dream has metamorphosed into the banal reality of suburban sprawl. Another Geddes neologism best describes that unbroken patchwork of built-up areas we now inhabit—“conurbation.”

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better
by Annie Leonard
Published 22 Feb 2011

Many groups have abandoned efforts to reform them, believing that the structures and programs of the World Bank, along with its sibling organization the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are too deeply flawed. Instead, these groups focus their efforts on restricting the reach and influence of these institutions. “The record of the IMF and the World Bank is one of unmitigated failure. Their... failed megaprojects have disqualified them from any future role in development. It is time to shrink these institutions,” explains Njoki Njoroge Njehu, a Kenyan activist who has focused on the World Bank and IMF for more than a decade.144 After witnessing many devastating World Bank projects in Asia and Africa with my own eyes, and getting inadequate responses from World Bank officials each time I marched up to their Washington, D.C., offices with my latest data and concerns, I have to agree that the best approach is restricting these institutions’ reach.

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

French intellectuals and scientists were beginning to write about the significance of the coming information age. Pressure was mounting on the government and industry to do something more than modernize an antiquated telephone system. The DGT obtained a superministerial budget in 1975 to develop a megaproject. In 1978,Simon Nora and Alain Minc submitted a 26-04-2012 21:45 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 8 de 22 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/8.html decisive report, requested by the president of the French Republic, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, on "the computerization of society." The Nora-Minc report, as it is still known, was bold in its forecasts: "A massive social computerization will take place in the future, flowing through society like electricity. . . .

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

Sanderson, “China Aims for More Sway over Copper Prices with Future Launch,” Financial Times, November 18, 2020. 60. S. Sundria, G. Freitas Jr., and R. Graham, “China to Take Oil-Refining Crown Held by U.S. Since 19th Century,” Bloomberg, November 21, 2020. 61. S. Shehadi, “BASF’s $10bn China Plant Followed ‘Market Logic Not Trade War,’ ” FDI Intelligence, January 8, 2019. J. Zhu, “BASF Kicks Off China Megaproject,” FDI Intelligence, December 16, 2019. 62. Silver, Devlin, and Huang, “Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries.” 63. M. Landler, Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power (Random House, 2016). 64. D. Palmer, “Clinton Raved About Trans-Pacific Partnership Before She Rejected It,” Politico, October 8, 2016. 65.

Water: A Biography
by Giulio Boccaletti
Published 13 Sep 2021

Decades after Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto, with their eye firmly on the proletarian classes of the West, it was Russia that would first embrace their revolutionary call. They judged the capitalist transformation of the nineteenth century to have been the “subjection of Nature’s forces to man.” The revolution would in turn subject them to the service of the proletariat. Lenin saw it done. Megaprojects and Utopia In the nineteenth century, Chernyshevsky’s water utopia was far from unique. Revolutionaries like Dr. Sun imagined a future inspired as much by the political philosophy of the long Western tradition as by the aesthetic response to the modern world. It seems that novelists had succeeded at sensing where modernity was headed far more than political economists and philosophers.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

Even on Mars the mighty engineering works seem merely to scratch the skin of the planet, and the final result of Martian activity on the solar system seems likely to be infinitesimal.’ Sherlock shows that at least some of those thinking about engineering as a planetary phenomenon used Lowell’s ideas as a benchmark, and for much of the twentieth century speculations about human redesign of the Earth are much more similar in spirit to Lowell’s megaprojects than to the Enlightenment belief that civilization and climate were providential co-productions. Early-and mid-twentieth-century ideas about humans changing the climate tend to focus on specific projects aimed at specific ends: diverting ocean currents with canals and dams; rearranging river flow; creating inland seas, as in the Sahara; even putting mirrors into space to give the Earth rings like Saturn’s, rings that would shield some places from the sun and reflect more of it to others.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

Food manufacturers needed tin for the booming business in canned goods: By the mid-1920s, Sparrows Point was turning out enough tinplate to produce about two billion cans per year. This new line of business brought hundreds of women into the plant: the so-called tin floppers, who stood at long tables checking sheets of metal for flaws. The Point was also providing the steel for the mega-projects of the decade: cast-iron segments for tubing of the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River, plate and girders for the Benjamin Franklin Bridge linking Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, and, a few years later, plate and other superstructure for the Golden Gate Bridge. The ranks of workers grew so large that a whole new town sprang up to the north, Dundalk, along with the adjacent Black enclave of Turner Station.

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe
Published 3 Oct 2022

And he thought he needed their expertise to turn his big dreams into reality, such as the city of the future. In case there was any question about that, the city’s name, NEOM, is an acronym for “new future,” derived from the Greek word neo and the Arabic word for future, mustaqbal. Such an undertaking was so ambitious that “mega-project” just wouldn’t do. This was a giga-project. Plans call for flying drone taxis, an artificial moon, and robotic Jurassic Park–style dinosaurs for this space-age city on the Red Sea. McKinsey billed millions of dollars to advise on the project, internal company records show. The lobby of the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton was full of McKinsey men.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
by Gabor Mate and Peter A. Levine
Published 5 Jan 2010

The same process is happening around the world as a result of globalization. China is a prime example. That country’s breakneck-speed industrialization has made it an emerging economic superpower, but the accompanying social dislocation is likely to prove disastrous. Entire villages and towns are being depopulated to make room for megaprojects like the Three Gorges Dam. The pressures of urbanization are cutting millions of people adrift from their connections with land, tradition and community. The social and psychological results of massive dislocation are not only predictable; they’re already obvious. China has had to set up a massive needle-exchange program in an attempt to prevent the spread of HIV and other infectious diseases among its rapidly burgeoning addict population.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

Then New York State decided to undertake a canal project that was not only the largest yet undertaken in the United States, but was more than twice as large as any canal yet built in the world, at a projected cost that rivaled the annual budget of the federal government. The Erie Canal would prove to be the first of the long, and continuing, list of megaprojects—the Atlantic cable, the transcontinental railroad, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, the Hoover Dam, the interstate highway system, the Apollo project—that would become so much a part of the American experience. And it was a titanic roll of the economic dice. Failure might have crippled the New York economy for decades.

How Asia Works
by Joe Studwell
Published 1 Jul 2013

This is the so-called Golden Triangle, enclosed by the thoroughfares Sudirman, Rasuna Said and Gatot Subroto. The high-rise district’s constant growth in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s appeared to signal the discovery of a new developmental model. It was, however, a false dawn. Today – just as we saw at the north end of Jalan Sultan Ismail in Kuala Lumpur – the Golden Triangle contains unfinished mega-projects from before the Asian crisis. The most striking are the giant stubs of two I. M. Pei-designed towers for Sjamsul Nursalim’s Bank Dagang Nasional Indonesia (BDNI), on the west side of Jalan Sudirman by the Le Meridien hotel. The site has been at a standstill for fifteen years.92 Suharto tamed inflation and restored macro-economic stability to Indonesia.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

“The Effects of Personality Traits on Adult Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Siblings.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 89(May): 122–135. Flynn, James. 2007. What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect. Cambridge University Press. August 27. Flyvbjerg, Bent. 2015. “What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why: An Overview.” Project Management Journal 45(2). “Forbes Ranking of Billionaires: The World’s Richest Jews.” 2013. Forbes Israel, April 17. http://www.forbes.co.il/news/new.aspx?pn6Vq=J&0r9VQ=IEII. Foster, Lucia, John Haltiwanger, and C. J. Krizan. 2006. “Market Selection, Reallocation, and Restructuring in the U.S.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge
by Faisal Islam
Published 28 Aug 2013

It might have started with ‘Guggenheim envy’, the urge by other cities to imitate Bilbao’s iconic regeneration, epitomised by the opening of the striking new Guggenheim Museum in 1997 in the city’s derelict dock area. It may even stretch back to 1992, when Barcelona played host to the summer Olympics and found itself in the world’s spotlight. Such developments prompted copycat schemes in regions across Spain that needed debt-funding. Another pattern involved banks granting loans for megaprojects such as airports or theme parks – but the loans only covered the construction and not the long-term viability of the projects. The result? A series of white elephants. Again, only the construction companies seemed to benefit. One caja appointed a ballet dancer to its board. Political dominance of the banking system was nothing new.

Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet and Carolyn McCarthy
Published 30 Jun 2013

Originally planned for inauguration at the canal’s 100-year anniversary, it now seems that the expansion will not open until 2015. EXPANDING THE CANAL Betting on growing international shipping needs, the Panama Canal is expanding. One of the biggest transportation projects in the world, this US$5.25 billion mega-project is slated to finish by 2015. New locks will be 60% wider and 40% longer. Container traffic is expected to triple. But will it be able to meet increased world shipping needs? As container ships get bigger and bigger, the need to accommodate them is plain. Proponents of the expansion expect the increased traffic and volume through the canal to inject a huge boost into the Panamanian economy.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 7 Feb 2017

The wiring diagram of the nematode worm, C. elegans, with its 302 neurons of 118 varieties, is now just about complete, and its operation is becoming understood at the level of individual neuron-to-neuron actions. The Human Connectome Project aspires to make an equally detailed map of the tens of billions of neurons in our brains, and the Human Brain Project in Europe aspires to “simulate the complete human brain on supercomputers,” but these mega-projects are in their early days. The brain is certainly not a digital computer running binary code, but it is still a kind of computer, and I will have more on this in later chapters. Fortunately, a lot of progress has been made on understanding the computational architecture of our brains at a less microscopic level, but it depends on postponing answers to almost all the questions about the incredibly convoluted details of individual neuron connectivity and activity (which probably differs dramatically from person to person, in any case, unlike the strict uniformity found in C. elegans).

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

In 2010 consultancies played a big role in encouraging the government to launch a wholesale reworking of Britain’s system for paying income support and other benefits to low-income people, even though civil servants thought it was a disastrous idea. ‘Sometimes the consultancies want a big, disruptive project to happen, so they often say, “We can do these things much better and more efficiently, let’s do this transformational mega-project, rather than making small tweaks to make things work 20 per cent better.”’ In the case of Universal Credit the civil servants have been proved right: it is years behind schedule and has cost billions more than expected.23 Those costs mean it has been highly profitable for the private-sector firms involved.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
by Gaia Vince
Published 19 Oct 2014

Chile’s second biggest bank, BBVA, announced it would not be assisting HidroAysén with loans for the project, citing environmental and social concerns. And then, in December 2012, Colbun, the big Chilean energy company, announced it was selling its 49% stake in HidroAysén. In December 2013, Chile elected the left-wing president Michelle Bachelet, who has spoken out against the dams. For the first time, the $10 billion megaproject looked on shaky ground. The battle is far from over, though. Electricity rates on the central grid have risen by 75% in six years, straining pockets and the economy, especially in energy-intensive mining operations north of the desert. With Chile relying on copper for as much as one-third of the national income, the spectre of cheaper hydropower from the south will not vanish soon.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

These were not the very large companies whose logos are familiar at gas stations across the country. Those “majors” were still divesting from their on-land U.S. production because they thought it was a dead end. Instead, they were putting their money into the Gulf of Mexico’s deep waters and into multibillion-dollar “megaprojects” around the world. As they saw it, the U.S. onshore was too picked over, too obviously in decline, to provide new resources of the scale they needed. The onshore was left to the independents—companies focused on exploration and production, unburdened with gas stations or refineries, more entrepreneurial, faster-moving, and with the lower cost structures required to make money in the increasingly depleted onshore.

Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century
by Tom Bower
Published 1 Jan 2009

During the negotiations in Moscow, Tillerson and Longwell expressed no sentiment. Their task was not to help Russia — although the country would benefit from Exxon’s expertise — but, after crunching the detail, to impose a contract ensuring Exxon’s profit, and to abide by it. They had no doubts that a familiar cycle — as in Venezuela and the Middle East — would recur: “Mega-projects are lumpy, so there’s no easy way to show continual progress. There’ll be the thrill of agony, victory and defeat.” Success at Sakhalin encouraged Raymond’s optimism. Exxon’s most experienced teams had assembled 40,000 tons of equipment to drill nearly two miles down and over six miles horizontally into the Pacific Ocean.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
by Nick Bostrom
Published 3 Jun 2014

Many of the scientists who participated claimed to be primarily motivated by the wartime situation and the fear that Nazi Germany might develop atomic weapons ahead of the Allies. It might be difficult for many governments to mobilize a similarly intensive and secretive effort in peacetime. The Apollo program, another iconic science/engineering megaproject, received a strong impetus from the Cold War rivalry. 25. Though even if they were looking hard, it is not clear that they would appear (publicly) to be doing so. 26. Cryptographic techniques could enable the collaborating team to be physically dispersed. The only weak link in the communication chain might be the input stage, where the physical act of typing could potentially be observed.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

How you think about that question determines what you believe the world should be doing about climate change. Finance is central to this debate. If no political solution to climate change is forthcoming, finance can also be helpful in funding innovative technological solutions. These would involve megaprojects on a global scale, such as liquefying atmospheric carbon dioxide and sequestering it deep underground, also known as geo-engineering. Some of these projects will require considerable research and development to implement. For example, there are species of bacteria that metabolize methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.22 Would it be possible to aerosolize these bacteria in the upper atmosphere, so they can eliminate a major source of greenhouse warming?

Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide)
by Lonely Planet , Carolyn Bain and Alexis Averbuck
Published 31 Mar 2015

Iceland is also hoping to expand its power-intensive industries – including a vision to become a global datacentre hub, home to the servers housing all our digitised information. But if such initiatives go ahead, the power must still be harnessed, and power plants and power lines must be built for such a purpose. Where will these be located? What other tracts of Iceland's highland wilderness may be threatened by industrial megaprojects? Landvernd, the Icelandic Environment Association (an environmental NGO; www.landvernd.is), has proposed that the central highlands be protected with the establishment of a national park. Economic profit versus the preservation of nature – it's an age-old battle. Watch this space. The Impact of Tourism on Nature A million visitors per year are now clamouring for their dream holiday in Iceland's vast natural playground.

Energy and Civilization: A History
by Vaclav Smil
Published 11 May 2017

Brussels: TREND Final Workshop. http://www.fp7-trend.eu/.../energyconsumptionincentives-energy-efficient-net. Lardy, N. 1983. Agriculture in China’s Modern Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latimer, B. 2005. The perils of being bipedal. Annals of Biomedical Engineering 33:3–6. Lawler, A. 2016. Megaproject asks: What drove the Vikings? Science 352:280–281. Layard, A. H. 1853. Discoveries among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon. New York: G.P. Putnam & Company. Layard, R. 2005. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. New York: Penguin Press. Layton, E. T. 1979. Scientific technology, 1845–1900: The hydraulic turbine and the origins of American industrial research.

Colorado
by Lonely Planet

Unfortunately, his vision collided with the interests of influential cattle barons. Nor did it appeal to real estate speculators. These interests united to undermine Powell’s blueprint; what survived was the idea that water development was essential to the West. Twentieth-century development took the form of megaprojects, such as the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, and water transfers from Colorado’s Western Slope to the Front Range and the plains via a tunnel under the Continental Divide. These, in turn, provided subsidized water for large-scale irrigators and electrical power for users far from their source.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco
by Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan
Published 15 Feb 2002

Originally a 195-acre development, to be built over a fifteen- to twenty-year period, it has since—following four discarded plans—been expanded to 303 acres (well over three times the land area of the Yerba Buena project), to be developed over a twenty- to thirty-year period, at a total cost of $4 billion. The changing plans, conflicts, and controversies surrounding this mega-megaproject may turn out, retrospectively, to make the YBC saga look like a piece of cake. At the outset of the plan, all of the land was under the ownership of Southern Pacific (SP), the city’s and state’s largest private landowner.75* As originally announced in mid-1982, the project, designed by I. M. Pei, was to contain up to seven thousand market-rate housing units; possibly 18.4 million square feet of office space (attempting to take advantage of the early eighties office boom); fifty-eight thousand jobs; two thousand hotel rooms; canals, lagoons, and islands; and eighteen thousand enclosed parking spaces.76 Various elements in San Francisco are, of course, deeply concerned about the impact of this development, including · those who fear their magnificent views will be blocked, particularly residents of neighboring Potrero Hill (a Southern Pacific representative at one community meeting assured: “We’re not ruining your view, we’re just bringing it closer”); · housing activists angry that the plan showed no intention of helping to meet the city’s need for lower-income housing, although the railroad originally received most of its California land, including large parts of the Mission Bay site, from the state as a grant or at bargainbasement prices; · planners and others wary of the impact of creating what in effect would be a second downtown on a site 50 percent larger than the current downtown district; and · blue-collar workers concerned with loss of the area’s existing industrial and warehousing jobs.

Lonely Planet Iceland
by Lonely Planet

Iceland is also continuing to expand its power-intensive industries, including becoming a global data-centre hub, home to the servers housing all our digitised information. But if such initiatives go ahead, the power must still be harnessed, and power plants and power lines must be built for such a purpose. Where will these be located? What other tracts of Iceland's highland wilderness may be threatened by industrial megaprojects? NGO organisation Landvernd (www.landvernd.is), the Icelandic Environment Association, has proposed that the central highlands be protected with the establishment of a national park. Economic profit versus the preservation of nature – it's an age-old battle. Watch this space. The Impact of Tourism on Nature Well over 1.5 million visitors per year head to Iceland for their dream holiday in a vast natural playground.

Spain
by Lonely Planet Publications and Damien Simonis
Published 14 May 1997

La Lonja is the site for a full calendar of temporary exhibitions. * * * THE SPANISH LAS VEGAS? Overdevelopment in pursuit of the tourist dollar has blighted many coastal regions of eastern Spain, but plans for Europe’s largest casino complex in the dusty badlands southeast of Zaragoza may just be the country’s most controversial megaproject yet. ‘Gran Scala’ is the brainchild of International Leisure Development, a British-based consortium with dreams of a 2000-hectare town of 100,000 inhabitants, 32 casinos, 70 hotels, 232 restaurants and 500 shops by 2015. Mock Egyptian pyramids, Roman temples and even a replica of the Pentagon also form part of the €17-billion project.

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Further west, you can also clamber to the top of the 15th-century Torres de Quart (Map; admission free; same hr), which face towards Madrid and the setting sun. Up high, you can still see the pockmarks caused by French cannonballs during the 19th-century Napoleonic invasion. Bioparc Valencia’s latest megaproject is its new zoo (902 25 03 40; www.bioparcvalencia.es in Spanish; Avenida Pio Baroja 3; adult/child €20/15; 10am-dusk), if that’s not too old-fashioned a term for such a state of the art, ecofriendly space. Six years in gestation and costing 60 million euros, it let the public loose on its animals for the first time in 2008.

The Rough Guide to France (Travel Guide eBook)
by Rough Guides
Published 1 Aug 2019

Perret and other modernists designed gigantic skyscraper avenues and suburban rings, which now look like totalitarian horror-movie sets. The more acceptable face of modernism, in the 1920s and 30s, was the simple geometry of the modern or International Style, which was allied to the glamorous Art Deco look; you’re most likely to come across it in the capital, either on apartment block facades or in mega-projects such as the Palais de Tokyo. The greatest proponent of this style was Le Corbusier. His stature may now appear diminished by the ascendancy of a blander style in concrete boxing, as well as by the significant technical and social failures of his buildings – not to mention his total disregard for historic streets and monuments – but he remains France’s most influential modern architect.

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As part of the wider reorganization of the Louvre, the Ministry of Finance decamped to a new building in Bercy designed by Paul Chemetov and nicknamed the “steamboat” because of its titanic length and its anchoring in the Seine. Formerly full of wine warehouses, Bercy is now extensively redeveloped. Also in the Parc de Bercy stands Frank Gehry’s (architect of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum) free-form, exuberant American Centre. Another mega-project from broadly the same era is the Parc de la Villette complex, which was built on the site of an old abattoir. It houses the Cité des Sciences, Bernard Tschumi’s 21 “folies” of urban life and the Cité de la Musique concert hall (also now known as Philharmonie 2) and conservatoire complex, designed by acclaimed architect Christian de Portzamparc to be like a symphony, its various sections creating a harmonious ensemble.

Cadillac Desert
by Marc Reisner
Published 1 Jan 1986

The Grand Canal: A Water Resources Planning Concept for North America. Alexander Graham Bell Institute, Sydney, Nova Scotia. King, Laura B., and Philip E. LeVeen. Turning Off the Tap on Federal Water Subsidies (Volume I: The Central Valley Project: The $3.5 Billion Giveaway). Natural Resources Defense Council, San Francisco, August 1985. “Next B.C. Megaproject Looms.” Vancouver Sun, September 29, 1985. Pearce, Fred. “Fall and Rise of the Caspian Sea.” New Scientist, December 6, 1984. Rada, Edward L., and Richard J. Berquist. Irrigation Efficiency in the Production of California Crop Calories and Proteins. California Water Resources Center, Davis, California, May 1976.

Central America
by Carolyn McCarthy , Greg Benchwick , Joshua Samuel Brown , Alex Egerton , Matthew Firestone , Kevin Raub , Tom Spurling and Lucas Vidgen
Published 2 Jan 2001

Between the locks, ships pass through a huge artificial lake, Lago Gatún, created by the Gatún Dam across the Río Chagres (when created they were the largest dam and largest artificial lake on Earth), and the Gaillard Cut, a 14km cut through the rock and shale of the isthmian mountains. With the passage of each ship, a staggering 52 million gallons of fresh water is released into the ocean. In 2006, Panamanian voters overwhelmingly endorsed an ambitious project to expand the Panama Canal. One of the biggest transportation projects in the world, this US$5.25 billion mega-project will stretch over seven years and finish in conjunction with the canal’s centennial in 2014. New locks will be 60% wider and 40% longer, and container traffic is expected to triple. For more information on the history of the canal, Click here. Sights MIRAFLORES LOCKS The easiest and best way to visit the canal is to go to the Miraflores Visitors’ Center ( 276-8325; www.pancanal.com; viewing deck/full access US$5/8; 9am-5pm), located just outside Panama City.

California
by Sara Benson
Published 15 Oct 2010

SOUTH PARK In the southwestern corner of Downtown, South Park isn’t a park but an emerging neighborhood bordering the Staples Center arena, the LA Convention Center and the new entertainment hub under construction called LA Live. City planners and developers are betting the farm that this $1.7 billion megaproject will polevault Downtown LA onto the map of must-go destinations for both locals and visitors. The area got its first jolt in 1999 with the opening of the Staples Center (Map; 213-742-7340; www.staplescenter.com; 1111 S Figueroa St), a saucer-shaped sports and entertainment arena with all the high-tech trappings.