The book, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment, discusses different methods of funding public projects. In all honesty, I really didn’t understand the private investment aspect. What I got from it is that American cities fight for private investors’ money in order to support the projects necessary to revitalize them. If that is correct, then I find it pretty awful that cities have to compete for these things. It appears that the government refrained from helping because it received negative feedback when it did so, but I don’t see why. This is something that I think is the government’s responsibility, so I don’t understand why people wouldn’t want the help. It’s actually not the government’s fault, but having the cities battle it out for investors is just ridiculous.

However, it seems that cities are perfectly capable of attaining this funding. Once that happens, the main focus becomes the actual construction. Recently, cities have been building expressways in areas with little to no urban development. As expected, there has been criticism: it encourages the expansion of cities and increases traffic. However, people also dislike when expressways are built through areas that are already urbanized. Somebody is unhappy either way, but I think it’s best to build the expressways before the urbanization occurs. In the long run, it works out better for everyone to grow a city around this central structure instead of forcing it into the middle of something that is already established and functions well. This complies with the “do no harm” paradigm, and its potential problems probably would’ve happened anyway.

Something that violates the “do no harm” rule, on the other hand, is the renovation of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. It involves the displacement of 300 residential apartments, but it services a lot of people and companies. This brings up the question of if it’s okay to sacrifice a little in order to gain a lot. It sounds reasonable, but I’m sure that the people being moved out of their homes don’t feel that way. I think the “do no harm” clause is great. There must be other ways to go about building or rebuilding structures that avoid harming people in the process. This “do no harm” concept can definitely be followed, so it should absolutely be enforced.

The criticisms of these mega-projects really made me think about how cities avoid expansion. With New York City, the population has steadily risen over time, yet the allocated space for the city has hardly increased, and not nearly at the same rate if it has at all. This would mean that cities just have to recycle their land over and over again whenever they start to run out of space. How do planners come up with new ways to do this all the time? Will there ever be a point where they can’t continue? Is there a backup plan for when that happens?

This book focuses on the mega-projects of the twentieth century. Now in the twenty-first century, there don’t seem to be as many. This is mostly because they have become increasingly expensive, but I also think it has to do with the fact that so many things have already been built. There isn’t really a need for another airport or highway in most American cities; they are all doing just fine with what they have as of now. Since we no longer need new transportation facilities, we have turned to creating space intended for living and recreation. Mega-projects have just changed in nature, and they are fortunately still happening profusely.