megaproject

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The Story of Crossrail by Christian Wolmar

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Crossrail, data acquisition, driverless car, Kickstarter, megacity, megaproject

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, Eric Schlosser

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, big-box store, California energy crisis, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, deindustrialization, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, full employment, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, hydrogen economy, Kickstarter, land reform, megaproject, microcredit, Negawatt, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social contagion, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

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

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

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, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

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

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

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, Joshua Kahn Russell

addicted to oil, Bakken shale, bilateral investment treaty, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, decarbonisation, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, failed state, gentrification, global village, green new deal, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, liberal capitalism, LNG terminal, market fundamentalism, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, profit maximization, public intellectual, race to the bottom, smart grid, special economic zone, WikiLeaks, working poor

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

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

Ascot racecourse, British Empire, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Crossrail, driverless car, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, pneumatic tube, railway mania

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

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

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

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

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

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

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

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

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

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

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

addicted to oil, air freight, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, big-box store, BRICs, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, energy security, food miles, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Just-in-time delivery, low interest rates, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit maximization, reserve currency, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, work culture , zero-sum game

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

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, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

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.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

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

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

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

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

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

bread and circuses, carbon footprint, clean water, commons-based peer production, failed state, impulse control, machine translation, megaproject, negative equity, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, semantic web, sexual politics, social software, space junk, starchitect, stem cell, supervolcano, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

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.

…

“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.

…

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, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

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.

…

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, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

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, Robert McLean

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, business logic, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deep learning, Donald Trump, driverless car, drop ship, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fail fast, fake news, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Hyperloop, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, iterative process, loss aversion, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, nudge unit, Occam's razor, pattern recognition, pets.com, prediction markets, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart contracts, stem cell, sunk-cost fallacy, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, WikiLeaks

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.

…

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

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

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?

…

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.

…

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

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.

…

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.

…

., 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, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

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.”

…

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).

…

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.

Straphanger by Taras Grescoe

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, financial deregulation, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, indoor plumbing, intermodal, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, jitney, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, parking minimums, peak oil, pension reform, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional, Zipcar

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.

…

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.

…

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.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

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.

Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, American ideology, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, car-free, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, congestion pricing, desegregation, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, operational security, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, price mechanism, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration

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

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, business cycle, car-free, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Enrique Peñalosa, functional fixedness, gamification, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, self-driving car, sharing economy, smart cities, starchitect, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

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

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

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.  

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

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

“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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., 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.

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan

autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, business cycle, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, fixed-gear, gentrification, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, megaproject, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, self-driving car, sharing economy, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

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.

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

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.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

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

clean water, congestion charging, Crossrail, index card, John Snow's cholera map, market design, megaproject, New Journalism, New Urbanism, railway mania, urban sprawl

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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., 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

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

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

affirmative action, airport security, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, corporate governance, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, estate planning, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, high net worth, high-speed rail, informal economy, intermodal, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, place-making, rent control, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, the High Line, time value of money, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, value engineering, white flight, young professional

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

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

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, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

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.

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

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

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.

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

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

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

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.

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

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

., 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

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

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, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

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

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

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

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

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

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, financial independence, game design, Libby Zion, megaproject, Rubik’s Cube, Ted Nelson

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.

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

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.

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

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

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.

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

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

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

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

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, anti-fragile, autonomous vehicles, car-free, carbon footprint, Jane Jacobs, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, place-making, smart cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city

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

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

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).

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

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

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.

The New Depression: The Breakdown of the Paper Money Economy by Richard Duncan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bretton Woods, business cycle, currency manipulation / currency intervention, debt deflation, deindustrialization, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, inflation targeting, It's morning again in America, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization

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.

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

airline deregulation, business cycle, carbon footprint, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, longitudinal study, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, price elasticity of demand, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, selection bias, Suez crisis 1956, urban planning, young professional

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

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

British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, digital map, European colonialism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, megaproject, off grid, off-the-grid, period drama, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, urban sprawl

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

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Bear Stearns, City Beautiful movement, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, New Urbanism, the High Line, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, Y2K

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.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

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

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

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.

…

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.

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

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 Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

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.

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

“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.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy

Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, business process, complexity theory, financial engineering, Iridium satellite, Long Term Capital Management, megaproject, NetJets, old-boy network, shareholder value, six sigma, social software, Socratic dialogue, supply-chain management

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 Sport and Prey of Capitalists by Linda McQuaig

anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, diversification, Donald Trump, energy transition, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, green new deal, Kickstarter, low interest rates, megaproject, Menlo Park, Money creation, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, payday loans, precautionary principle, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sidewalk Labs, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing

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

Bretton Woods, corporate governance, corporate raider, Julian Assange, mega-rich, megaproject, new economy, Occupy movement, Silicon Valley, WikiLeaks

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

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.

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

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

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 Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

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.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

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 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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

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

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

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.

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

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.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021 by Greg Clark

Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, congestion charging, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, global value chain, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, housing crisis, industrial cluster, intangible asset, job polarisation, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rent control, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

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

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

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.

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

anti-communist, Cape to Cairo, Crossrail, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, railway mania, refrigerator car, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban planning

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.

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", additive manufacturing, airport security, Buckminster Fuller, City Beautiful movement, classic study, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Jane Jacobs, kremlinology, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Eisenman, rent control, Silicon Valley, the High Line, urban renewal, young professional

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

banking crisis, barriers to entry, Beeching cuts, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, combinatorial explosion, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, independent contractor, intermodal, iterative process, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, linear programming, low interest rates, megaproject, Network effects, New Urbanism, performance metric, price elasticity of demand, railway mania, rent-seeking, strikebreaker, the market place, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration

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.

The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, full employment, megaproject, New Urbanism, planned obsolescence, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban planning, urban renewal

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.

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

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, antiwork, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collective bargaining, Corrections Corporation of America, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, energy transition, extractivism, fake news, financial deregulation, gentrification, Global Witness, greed is good, green transition, high net worth, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, new economy, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, tech billionaire, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

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.

Down the Tube: The Battle for London's Underground by Christian Wolmar

congestion charging, Crossrail, iterative process, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, megaproject, profit motive, transaction costs

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.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

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?

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

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, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

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?

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

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 Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

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.

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

air gap, banking crisis, blood diamond, book value, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, family office, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, mega-rich, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, optical character recognition, out of africa, race to the bottom, vertical integration, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks

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.

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

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

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.

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova

anti-communist, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, megaproject, Skype

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.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

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.

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

airport security, animal electricity, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frederick Winslow Taylor, glass ceiling, Iridium satellite, medical residency, megaproject, meta-analysis, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Walter Mischel

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.

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

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.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement by Dave Cullen

3D printing, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Columbine, crisis actor, gun show loophole, impulse control, Lyft, megaproject, side project, Skype, Snapchat, uber lyft

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, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

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.

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

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

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.

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

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

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.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

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.

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

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.”

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

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.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

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.

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day