A new focus for this blog: megaprojects

You may have noticed that I have started to pay attention to real estate megaprojects and how to civilize them. (I won't be focusing on the even more numerous utility and transport megaprojects such as dams, power plants & grids, marine and air ports, highways, tunnels etc. etc.)

Here's why.

I had the opportunity recently to spend a few fascinating days in the Middle East. I was invited to give a talk at the Jeddah Economic Forum 2008 on the subject of "megaprojects." Never having thought very much about megaprojects the prospect took me slightly aback. (If you know City Comforts then you know that it is about anything but praying to large-scale.) But as I got into writing the talk (which I will post here soon) and then visiting the Middle East I realized several things which had never occurred to me.

1. There are an incredible number of real estate megaprojects in design or under construction across the globe, often in some relationship with a utility or transport megaproject. That's the big story.

2. We don't have many megaprojects, if any, in the USA (military operations aside) which is why I hadn't thought much about them. The Middle East and East Asia, mostly China, seem to have them in abundance. Let's put it another way. If we have megaprojects in the USA, then they have hyperprojects elsewhere. There is not one single proposal (much less under anything construction) for a brand new city in the USA. In the Middle East and China there are several hundred such projects (the most numerous in China, of course, but seemingly the most glamorous ones in the Arab world.)

3. These megaprojects are going to get built. I come from a 1960s tradition of "small is beautiful." And that may well be true. But mega has its political and econoomic charms. Many magaprojects, whether I particularly like them or not, are being built and will continue to be built for several interrelated reasons:

• Capital is available to build magaprojects — vast capital, on a scale unimaginable to most of us and is concentrated in the hands of a very few decision-makers. That's the basic reason: megaprojects per se are created by capital-push, not market-demand.

• These decision-makers are often or even usually political figures in their nations and they need to put that capital to work to keep their people content — which usually means jobs — and it is easier to do ten megaprojects than a thousand merely large ones. The leader who can keep people employed and well-fed remains on top of the greasy pole. That is known in Chicago and DC and it is known in Riyadh and Peking.
• Most of these men (and they are mostly men) are  decision-makers in nations in which there is a tradition, being diplomatic, of centralized power. There are no NIMBYs to slow dow the process because, well, there is no political process as we in the the USA or Western Europe know it. These projects in most cases are born in a top-down world with which Robert Moses would be familiar, the only American developer who ever worked close to the scale of what I believe is happening overseas.
• The politics of mega-projects are interesting. It's my surmise that — taking the Middle East as an example — there is a window of opportunity to build these huge projects of perhaps another 30-50 years. By mid-century or so — assuming we haven't destroyed ourselves — the populations in what are now top-down authoritarian regimes will have developed their own NIMBYism. For example, Saudi Arabia is building a new city which is suppose to have 1 million residents — and it is being built about 1.5 hours drive from Jeddah, the business capital of Saudi Arabia with its own population of 2 million. That couldn't happen in the USA. No way could you assemble the political will to establish a new city of a million people 90 or so miles from an existing city of that size. If nothing else, the business-people of the existing city would simply put up too much of a fuss and resist diversion of such massive capital investment to a piece of raw land; they'd want it for their city. Saudi Arabia does not appear to have such issues — yet. So there is a political window of opportunity to build brand new cities from scratch which will only last a few generations, with any luck.

•••

One question: is it megaproject? or mega-project?

Comments

[keith]

Not that this compares to a new city of one million, but it's the largest project I know of in the US: City Creek Center in Salt City.