It is significant to note that almost all major capital projects are urban in character and place. Or they have an immediate impact on the urbanization process, urban expansion, and competitiveness.

Urbanization

We are inheritors of the globalized city. It is no longer conceivable to imagine anything other than the restoration of areas near to waterways and bays, the restoration of areas previously devoted to warehouse and manufacturing districts, and the construction of new transport infrastructure.

However, the urban marketplace that supports these major capital projects also manifests challenges. Also, urbanization faces various structural impediments with direct consequences for the design and development of megaprojects in cities and regions.

Linking to the global economy

We could define megaprojects as large-scale urban construction projects with various components and complex array of stakeholders. Major capital projects could include an iconic design element to transform a city’s image. These large-scale designs are often advertised and regarded by the urban elite as critical incentives for growth and even as linkages to the broader global market.

The urban elite often perceives linkages to the global economy as necessary to secure continued local economic progress. This is because we exist in an era characterized by the upward shift in urban governance from management to entrepreneurship. In our modern age, cities are imagined as links in a global chain of relationships.

Urbanist writer Monika Grubbauer contends that recovering global visibility is not only a quintessential financial approach. It also serves the goal of representative change, which is especially beneficial for districts and cities with different political identities.

In search of the global metropolis

Each of these two objectives – the material and the symbolic – are currently in many cities’ new, combined efforts to regain status as globalizing centers. This has been achieved through the application of urban megaprojects and major capital projects in municipal revitalization. Revitalization itself is a political approach that questions approaches emphasizing the solely economic and commercial nature of globalization.

It is also crucial to recognize the social and socio-cultural circumstances that are most favorable to the construction of megaprojects and major capital projects. It seems apparent that it’s necessary to have widespread cultural and political support, or perhaps even a certain degree of permission, for these great projects to thrive. That’s because the sheer enormous size of the megaprojects and major capital projects – and the resulting impact on broad areas of a town – can carry tremendous economic sacrifices. Megaprojects can also have extensive environmental consequences which can lead to public distrust.

Protests and activism against megaprojects and major capital projects are not as strong as they were several decades before. The rationale for this might be that, in most cases, megaprojects are favorably marketed as agitators for economic advancement from which many citizens will benefit.

Read the source article at The Conversation

Megaprojects are reconfigured spaces in which the role of the local, regional, and national elites, as well as the role of national and sometimes transnational capital, is usually prominent. They can include urban regeneration schemes, transport and energy infrastructure, industrial corridors, city clusters, new towns, innovation districts, science and technology parks and sports infrastructure.

Megaproject design and implementation usually brings together a range of big players. This is because of increased urban competition and the global visibility of the projects. It is also due to the fact that the configuration of political power exhibits distinct relationships between the local, regional, national, and global domains of social action.

Read the source article at The Conversation