welcome good to see large crowd seems
like that's becoming more and more
typical for the series really quick
piece of housekeeping the next lecture
is next Monday night you'll end up
Daniels from studio sumo so go ahead and
make sure that you can schedule that one
in for those of you that don't know me
I'm Gale Fulton director of the school
of landscape architecture and it's my
pleasure to be able to welcome our guest
tonight Chris Marcinkoski is an associate professor
of landscape architecture and urban
design at the University of Pennsylvania
he's also the founding director of port
which is a public realm and urban design
consultancy whose work includes projects
in Philadelphia Chicago Cleveland Denver
New York New Jersey Highlands and as
many of you probably know now nowadays
they're doing work in Knoxville
Tennessee on a couple projects some of
you may have seen this work certainly
the landscape architecture students saw
this work last fall when the co-founder
Andy module was here he was at the state
SLA conference and then we saw some of
that work again in the the work of
Sanders Pace when they were here for the
dialogue series which was late last
semester prior to his work at Penn and
with port Chris was a senior associate
at James corner field operations where
he led the offices urban design and
planning work including work in Shenzhen
China and Shelby Farms Park in Memphis
Tennessee which again I think it's
another project that certainly some of
the landscape architecture students had
a chance to tour a couple of years ago
and I'm guessing that more of you have
had a chance to be at that project so
far chris's design work and research
have been widely published in academic
professional and mainstream media
platforms recognized by such important
organizations as the Van Alen Institute
Bauhaus Dessau findout foundation the
Graham Foundation Skidmore Owings and
Merrill foundation the American
Institute of Architects and the Chicago
architecture club and in the 2015-2016
year he was awarded
home price and Landscape Architecture
from the American Academy in Rome in
2016 he published the city that never
was you haven't seen this book I
encourage you to check it out
and and that's where he began to explore
this phenomenon of speculative
urbanization which we'll hear more about
tonight in a current project called
Africa 2050 an atlas of speculative
urbanization I situate Chris's work
amongst other important late 20th and
early 21st century landscape and urban
thinkers for me the work of corner
Charles Waldheim Keller Easterling Neil
Brenner is another person that's looking
at kind of planetary urbanization so
it's it's important work that he's doing
and like I say I encourage you to read
it because I think he makes concepts
that aren't necessarily always easy for
designers economics politics some of
that type of stuff very accessible and
meaningful and I recently came across
the following quote from an essay by
Chris appearing in the recent book
infinite suburbia and it's one that I
think landscape architects and
architects should certainly be taking
serious with regard to their role in the
process of urban production speaking
broadly about the disciplines typically
involved in the design planning and
implementation of the built environment
Chris writes it is imperative that urban
design and planning become far more
cognizant of and conversant in the
political and economic motivations
driving this production without such a
reorientation it will become even more
difficult for these disciplines to have
any agency in the speculative
urbanization processes that will be a
primary source of much of their future
work with that please join me in
welcoming Chris MarcinKoski
guys hear me okay is this working it all
seems to be working
Gale thank you so much for the
introduction and thank you for the
invitation to be here I have a lot of
colleagues who have come to UT and raved
about how cool the building this is so
I'm super excited that I actually get to
speak here I will tell you that I'm
gonna be distracted by your Pizza aroma
and if I have to stop and take a bite
halfway through this I apologize
so as Gale said I'm not going to talk
about port port as the other half of my
life the professional work what I want
to talk about today is really my
academic research and as he said really
it's to kind of phenomenon to Mike all
speculative urbanization I'm gonna try
to do three things
and actually that reminds me I should
set my timer I'm gonna talk a little bit
about the the work from where this
started in looking at Spain and the kind
of building boom and bust in Spain
during the early 21st century shifting
then to my ongoing research related to
urbanization in Africa and then sort of
trying to wrap it up a little bit with
some of the research and student work
that I have been conducting at Penn as
part of my teaching in the landscape
architecture program they're typically
these kind of lectures tend to show you
really good work work that you want to
emulate work that as of high quality
today is not one of those examples the
design projects I'm going to show you
aren't highly problematic many of them
are flawed from their point of departure
and so I don't want you to take what I'm
showing you as things that are good but
actually things that we really want to
be critical of in terms of our practice
as urban designers and landscape
architects and architects um
speculative urbanization at least as I
define it relates to the construction of
infrastructure and settlement and it's
motivated by political and economic
purposes that means it's not a real
market demand or demographic demand but
it's artificially motivated this can be
built or it can also be policy so the
rezoning of land 3 designation repartialization these are all acts of
urbanization even if they don't lead to
a kind of a physical transformation
that's really important to know in these
projects now
everything I'm gonna show you today is
intended to be built but it has a kind
of political economic motivation behind
it my work and this research is really
interested at the periphery of cities so
at the edges or in entirely green field
sites so when we talk about development
we're not talking about the
redevelopment of cities we're talking
about the construction of new settlement
and new infrastructure outside of
existing conurbations and finally we're
talking about things that are really big
so I'm trained as an architect I teach
in landscape architecture school I
practice as an urban designer I'm
interested in the big scale so the
projects I'm going to show you today are
really hundreds if not thousands of
hectares in size and because of that
they have a lot a number of programs and
a number of activities embedded in them
in the sense they are cities unto
themselves so for most people when we
talk about speculative urbanization we
think about real estate speculation we
think about housing and there's lots of
examples of this that you're familiar
with whether it's the the Sunbelt
housing boom sort of pre 2008 the Irish
ghost estates that sort of work
contemporary with that that cycle of
building you have Dubai not just the
spectacle but the housing that was
produced during this period of time and
so for most people there's an idea that
real estate speculation is really
connected to housing primarily and maybe
office space secondarily for most in
terms of the media and kind of
mainstream perception of this phenomenon
we tend to think about it being the the
product of the banks of the financial
industry as being the motivators behind
these kind of activities and while this
is true the reality is that we are
complicit in this work as planners and
designers
we're complicit in it because we don't
take into account the realities of what
motivates these projects as well as the
realities and what they're likely to
produce so for example it's not just the
production of excess housing but sort of
radical social environmental and
economic disruptions that occur from
these kinds of projects and it's this
sort of mix of of implications mix of
consequences that I think are essential
for us as designers in the 21st century
these are things that we need to be
aware of as potential consequences of
our professional activities
so I got started looking at this because
of a kind of accidental trip to Spain in
2010 not next little trip a trip that
was intended but an accidental visit at
the end of my trip and Spain is a really
great case study for this for a number
of reasons it's a Western democracy as
you all know but it also was a place
that was economically underdeveloped as
recently as the late 1990s so it was
going through a period of economic
maturation it was going through a period
of kind of political restructuring but
at the same time it had this sort of
democratic base this kind of economic
base that's similar to what we see in
the United States and elsewhere in
Western Europe in some ways Spain
connects with both the developing
countries of say China in the Middle
East as well as with the West and thus
it's a kind of useful case study for
thinking about these questions this is
my shameless plug for my book Gale
already mentioned it this basically was
a book project that was released in 2016
I'm gonna use it to frame kind of a
bigger discussion today this isn't
primarily what I'm gonna spend my time
on this evening to give you a little
context with what's happened in Spain
there's a lot of data here the GDP more
than doubled 75 hectares per day which
is about 150 acres was being urbanized
15% of the GDP was devoted to
construction sector that's a very very
conservative estimate it was likely over
20% to give you a frame of reference
during the the sort of real-estate
bubble here in the United States sort of
between 2000 and 2008 we never got above
5% of our total GDP being related to
construction real-estate activities in
Spain it was more than four times that
of that percentage seven million homes
were constructed that's roughly enough
housing for 20 million people
you had new airports toll roads metro
lines all sorts of infrastructure and
cultural venues in addition to the
housing most of what the media focused
on was the excess of residential
properties that were produced but really
there was a whole other kind of
catalogue of projects that were created
during this period of time what you had
as a result was a country that boomed
economically despite not necessarily
having the population the corresponding
population growth that one would imagine
driving that all that's to say that
basically one third of all urbanized
land
Spain was produced during this decade
alone when you think about the history
of that country you think about the
significant kind of story it played in
in colonial times that urbanizing the
quote/unquote new world the fact that
one third of this urbanized territory
was produced in a single decade alone is
a pretty astronomical figure as I said
most of the kind of discourse around
this event focused on housing but really
to understand the housing you have to
understand two other things which are
land policy and infrastructure policy
now in design school we tend to not talk
about land policy and infrastructure
policy I think that's a planning concern
that's something that you know
economists do or political scientists do
but the reality is that those policies
shaped the way that design urban design
and architectural design landscape
design went about their work during this
decade so this slide is super small it's
probably difficult to read the point of
it is basically to say that essentially
land policy in Spain had always been a
kind of political football when the the
sort of center-right party was in power
there was a belief that land policy was
too restrictive and they wanted to open
up the development of lands as a way of
increasing economic production when the
center-left Party was in power they
wanted to limit where urbanization could
take place they wanted to control where
Building occurred as a way of not you
know denude into landscape and causing
excessive sprawl what's fascinating
about what happened in Spain is that by
2000 1998 2000 you had the kind of
belief in urbanization that crossed
party lines so whether you were in the
Communist Party or you are in the kind
of fascist party or anywhere in between
that spectrum you understood
you understand urbanization as the kind
of recipe for economic development in
the country so what happened in Spain
was actually a national policy that was
enacted that basically said any land
that isn't environmentally significant
or dangerous to build in can be
developed essentially open up the whole
country to urbanization that law was
struck down because it was at the
national level and Spain is essentially
governed by more regional regional
legislation but what happened is after
that national law was struck down every
individual municipality every
region in the country enacted a law a
similar law of their own so regardless
of their political party they but they
wanted to promote urbanization as a way
of increasing economic growth in
combination with that you had the
arguments for the fact that a lot of the
housing in Spain was was conceived of or
considered to be a substandard so much
of what was built in the 1950s and 60s
was intended to be replaced by this
policy what ended up happening is that
it wasn't replaced simply new housing
was built the other ingredient that went
into this was a massive amount of
infrastructural investment so for those
of you who know a little story of the
European Union there's something called
cohesion funds cohesion funds are
basically a way for the countries within
the EU to balance their economies and
countries that whose economies are
lagging get cohesion funds to elevate
the the production of their economies
Spain was one of these countries in the
late 90s it's its economy was not as
strong as France or Germany or in
England or even say Italy at that moment
in time much of this funding that came
in from the EU went to things that were
intended to build economic growth
infrastructure so railway high-speed
railway highway lines airports a massive
infrastructure building boom took place
during this period of time that was
unlike anything that had been seen in
Europe really at this scale during this
this relatively compressed period of
time in addition to housing in addition
to infrastructure you also had a huge
amount of cultural production so you had
the calatrava's that had needs the eyes
immense the Niemeyer's
building museums building cultural
facilities throughout the country not
just in the major cities not just in
Valencia in Madrid and Barcelona but
really throughout the country in the
small towns and and regional capitals
well outside the population centers as a
result you had a kind of celebration of
building in Spain 2005 the Museum of
Modern Art in New York stage and
exhibition called on-site during in the
catalog to this exhibition Terry Riley
who was the curator at the time
basically said there had been more
building in Spain during that decade
that had ever occurred at any point
since the Roman Empire so basically
comparing the scale of building to the
aspirations and the significant of the
transformation during during the Roman
Empire what this also implied was that
the center of design culture in Europe
and shifted from the Netherlands to
Spain and so there was a kind of
celebration of this both economic model
but also this model of architectural
production what you got was a massive
expansion of lands as I mentioned and so
what you see in this drawing is
basically the growth quantity wise of
each of the major cities you know
everywhere from Madrid growing by nearly
a third
to smaller municipalities like
Guadalajara growth almost doubling their
size during this period of time now it's
a little bit tough to read but basically
what it's saying is that the dark gray
is the urbanized land in Madrid in 2013
the pink is the land that had been
started to be urbanized but was never
finished basically abandoned or stopped
because of the economic crisis it's
basically 25 percent of the land mass of
the urbanized landmass in Madrid has not
been completed and likely will never be
so what you see here is basically a
drawing that talks about the historic
core of Madrid the 19th century
expansion which took approximately 50
years to complete the 20th century
expansion which was roughly a hundred
years and then the growth that was
intended to occur in about a 10-year
period that was the scale of
transformation that was going on here
and so it produced landscapes like these
this is an area to the southeast of
Madrid that's considered complete
despite the fact of the numerous number
of vacant parcels as well as the kind of
little occupancy rate of many of those
those housing developments and as you
can see much of this is fermented by
this massive amount of infrastructure
that's produced around it at the ground
level these are the kinds of landscapes
that were produced this is about housing
populations that were going to emigrate
from South America that we're going to
immigrate from Eastern Europe
populations that as soon as the economy
in Spain tanked left Spain and went
elsewhere looking for jobs and looking
for Economic Opportunity these are a
series of image
from the eastern edge of Madrid showing
you the kind of scale of transformation
these are not creams in process these
are cranes stopped this is a fascinating
image because this is actually the
largest and formal settlement in Europe
interestingly enough the planning
stopped short of displacing done
informal settlement but that's actually
higher than any of this new development
this is another image that begins to
show the scale one project two projects
three projects residential a massive
industrial state and then in the
distance in adjacent municipality which
is undertaken its own residential
development projects during this period
of time what that gets to is this idea
that it wasn't just the major cities
that were urbanizing that were
urbanizing and I kind of speck to the
fashion it was every town in
municipality so villages that have been
200 people for centuries suddenly felt
that they were going to be able to
occupy more than a thousand 1500 new
homes and so it was this kind of lack of
coordination between the capital and the
core and many of these smaller
municipalities outside of it that really
exacerbated the the consequences of this
event so one of those examples to see
Dada lose this is a new town development
that was intended for about 35,000
people to live here 65 kilometers
northeast of Madrid he was predicated on
the high-speed rail line that was being
built from Madrid de Zaragoza
no stops between Madrid and Zaragoza
until a certain politician convinced the
state to build a stop on land that they
owned
once that stop was designated they were
able to sell that land and this new
development was initiated this
development ultimately resulted in the
largest bankruptcy in Spain's history
the the property developer behind it and
just to give you a scale of what was
proposed which roughly the same size as
the historic core of Madrid intended to
be developed in occupied in ten years
with a population density of 1/10 what's
actually there now is a population
density of about 4 or 5 people per
hectare and that's the kind of denuded
landscape
about an infrastructure that's installed
huge amounts of housing that are under
occupied and really no amenity or no
provisions for life other than the basic
housing in addition the high-speed rail
line that was supposed to connect this
place to the city doesn't operate what's
interesting is that the same
municipality that undertook the
development of this project also
undertook smaller developments like
these and so this massive expectation
that both simply by building it the
people would come the investment would
come and you're left with these
landscapes of incomplete and unoccupied
urban
it wasn't as I said just housing he was
also infrastructure so you have a
massive privately developed Airport 265
kilometers south southwest of Madrid
this was supposed to be Madrid's second
airport 265 kilometers south of it its
second airport again it was predicated
on an idea that if you had a high-speed
rail connection people could land at
this airport hop on the rail and be in
the capital in an hour and an hour and
20 minutes the high-speed rail
connection never came the airport opened
for six months and then was shuttered it
was recently sold to a Chinese investor
for about one-fifth or sorry about 1/10
of what its original investment value no one's quite sure what they're gonna
do with the property this drawing
basically makes the point that in this
context this is not just about
urbanization but it's about the economy
so what you see here is all of the small
regional savings banks that were behind
these projects these were small banks
that loaned the money to the developers
who are behind these initiatives what
you see is that in 2008 you know this
radical consolidation of more than a
hundred individual regional savings
banks into about ten actually twelve
larger state or national national scale
base so the connection between
urbanization between the design and
planning work that we do and kind of
economic consequence is explicit there
should be no question about it the
question is how do we take that into
account and the work that we do so many
of you probably quite young in 2008 but
I'm sure you remember the kind of stress
on your parents faces during
kind of economic downturn the kind of
protests that were going on during this
period of time and I would argue that
you know although the financial
institutions had a major role the
political institutions had a major role
in these events design and planning also
had a role in some regards what's
interesting is if you think back to that
moment in time there was this kind of
sense of never again that this was such
a catastrophic circumstance that we as a
culture we as a society can't allow
these events to reoccur the reality is
for years later you had the same kind of
speculative building going on not only
in New York but also across the globe so
any lessons learned that if any lessons
that were learned from 2008 from 2009
were quickly forgotten in favor of new
projects and new opportunities to build
what's fascinating about Spain is that
they subscribe to that solution they
subscribe that the answer to their
economic crisis that was induced by
building was to build more so in 2012
they're pursuing a project called Euro
Vegas Madrid was competing with
Barcelona to build the largest casino in
Europe Sheldon Adelson who I'm sure you
all know was behind this project
ultimately it was awarded to a suburb of
Madrid and the only reason the project
wasn't initiated was because Adelson
couldn't get the European Union to waive
their smoking laws so he wasn't gonna
build Euro Vegas if you couldn't smoke
at the same time at the same time you
also had Madrid pursuing the Olympics
for the third time most of us know that
Olympics are not the kind of economic
penisy a that they're often sold to be
so what you had is a country in a
capital who thought the way out of their
building crisis was to build more and
while shocking that maybe to us when you
actually look across history it's not
surprising there's a number of events
that occur particularly in context of
developing economies where you have
massive amounts of speculation
so the Harvard economist said Glazer has
identified these just within the United
States at least eight of them that have
occurred in our country alone and what I
attempted to do is sort of identify
other ones throughout Western Western
economies
so you had examples panic of 1873
real-estate investment about the
Transcontinental Railroad the
checkerboarding of land and a massive
speculative bubble that ensues because
of that you have the opening in
California a decade or so later a whole
series of examples within the United
States of real estate speculation
leading to economic catastrophes and
social crises Florida is a really
interesting one from the 1920s those of
you who know any of this sort of history
know that there are a number of
historians who basically say that the
real estate bust in Florida led directly
to the Great Depression in the sense
that everybody thought that real estate
was a risky proposition and that the
stock market was safe so they took all
their money out of land and out of
housing and they put all their money in
the stock market inflated a bubble and
we all know what happened in 1929 so the
kind of relationship between building
and the economy becomes again very clear
what's fascinating though when you start
to look at these these speculative
projects this real estate speculation is
what the focus is and how that focus has
changed so in the in the 19th century
you're looking at speculation or even
earlier than the 19th century
speculation of land and agriculture the
kind of things that can be grown off a
piece of land by the late mid to late
19th century you had speculation on
infrastructure that canals the railways
other kinds of large-scale
transportation investments by the 20th
century you had speculation and on
buildings housing office space what you
saw in in Japan and Malaysia and in
Korea as well as here in the United
States but when you get to the 21st
century all of those things get
conflated into speculation at the scale
of the city it's no longer speculation
about a product but it's actually a
speculation about the entirety of the
urban complex um what I argue is that
that is is indicative it's indicative of
a particular shift that has occurred
where City Building is now seen as the
answer or the ultimate form of economic
production so whereas in the past as
economies grew you would build what we
now see is a desire to build as a way of
creating an economy and that's
fundamental because we're no longer
providing basic services but actually
projecting a kind of potential a
potential status that actually
hasn't yet been achieved you see this
that even during that period of time
during the 2008 2009 2010 that you had
development at this scale speculative
development this scale ongoing outside
of the kind of western context so in
Panama in Turkey as well as in China you
saw examples of these kind of projects
continuing on this is one of my favorite
ones Keep Calm there is no bubble if
there's one thing that I've learned from
this research it's that as soon as you
find a project that says this project is
different this project is unlike all of
the others that preceded it that failed
when someone says this time it's
different you know that it's exactly the
same and you should run as quickly as
you can to get away from it so all
that's to say that the kind of the the
speculative environment has shifted now
it's no longer in the West it's no
longer in Southeast Asia but it's
actually now have found a new epicenter
on the African continent and this is
really where my research is currently
working and I want to sort of spend you
know the next 15 minutes or so kind of
talking about this in terms of its
implications for us as as planners and
designers
so there's a reason for this this shift
to Africa one is population projections
basically in the next 30 years you're
gonna see the population on the
continent double by the turn of the
century it's going to basically qualify
for about 40 percent of the total
population of the earth you have those
projections in combination with
substandard infrastructure and
substandard housing not a dissimilar
story to what we saw happen in Spain not
in the similar story to what we've seen
happen in China there's no question that
there's a need for upgrading
infrastructure and upgrading settlement
in these contexts the question is about
the kinds of formats of settlement the
kinds of formats of infrastructure that
we're utilizing for that upgrading the
appropriateness of these kind of
globalized images of the city in context
where they don't necessarily think so I
want to stop here and make a make a
statement because I know for my
colleagues who are in you know the
sciences or in the social sciences in
particular talking about Africa as a
whole thing gets me a lot of eye rolls
they see how can you possibly think at
the scale of the continent how can you
address anything at this big and the
reality is I acknowledge the radical
range of differences the radical
diversity of contexts both economic
geologic Geographic political historical
on the continent when you see how big it
is you can fit China in the United
States India and most of Western Europe
and there in the context of all of that
difference the fact that urbanization is
being undertaken in the identical
fashion regardless of whether you're in
Egypt or Ethiopia or Equatorial Guinea
is indicative of a problem with that
urbanization process that the image of
the city the model of the city the
recipe of the city is highly flawed in
the sense that it's not being calibrated
in any way to the massive difference
that you have in a continent of the
scale so this is a little out of date
this slide but basically as of right now
we've identified about 120 new town
projects that have been initiated in the
last 12 years across the African
continent those projects are of a
particular scale greater than 200
hectares most of them are much larger
than that or more like a thousand 2,000
hectares and these are all outside of
existing or
and centers these are in peripheral
sites or an entirely greenfield sites
and you see their distribution much of
it is on the coast much of it is related
to countries that have significant
material resources that they're able to
use as the kind of collateral to
undertake these projects the Newtown
phenomenon in Africa is not a new one
new towns have been undertaken on the
continent since the colonial times
post-world War two and while many of
these examples were highly problematic
they did have one thing in common they
tended to be very innovative and they
were testing ideas they were about
experimentation they are about advancing
ideas of settlement and ideas of urban
urban form in urban occupation some of
them were successful some of them failed
but it was about something new different
ideas of settlement what's challenging
today is that much much of the products
that are being deployed are not about
anything innovative nothing about
locally caliber but there are kind of
generic ideal of the city and that
generic ideal is borrowed from other
places it's borrowed from economic
context that are sickness having a
successful recipe or a successful model
to emulate so China in particular is
often held up as one of these places
that is a source of the model of
urbanization being seen in Africa the
Middle East is another source and
there's a lot of question about the
degree of involvement of these states of
corporations and actors from these
states in terms of what's being built on
built across the African continent in
reality China's role in this kind of
work is not that high their involvement
in sort of signature or spectacle
infrastructure projects is quite high
but settlement is not something that
they're actively involved but the point
being is that innovation is not an
interest here simply replication of an
urban model that is presumed to have
been successful from a successful in
another context and is thus being
borrowed and and deployed here so I like
to use this project because it's called
new town and that's exactly what we're
looking at this is a proposal that's
pretty indicative of the kinds of
projects that we're looking at
is a proposal for development outside of
Nairobi in Kenya and they have the same
recipe they have very very similar
recipes you've got a kind of industrial
area you've got a new CBD you've got a
kind of commercial zone a major sort of
public realm feature at the center a
large water feature and lots of
different formats of housing all set
into a lush green landscape that doesn't
actually exist in the place that's being
proposed the other thing that they have
in common is a set of deficiency so
there's a set of ingredients that go
into them and there's also a set of
deficiencies these projects tend to be
highly isolated there's no
infrastructure actually connecting them
they tend to be pretty mono functional
despite all of the ingredients I just
showed you they tend to be housing
driven there's limited access both
physically but also economically many of
them are portrayed as being for the kind
of emerging middle class but are
actually financially inaccessible to
those populations there's no culture
there's sort of nothing there there's no
account of the ground that they're being
built on there's a lack of amenity and
there's a lack of infrastructure but the
thing that I'm most interested in is the
fact that all of these projects are
focused on the outcome they're focused
on an end product an image of
urbanization as opposed to the realities
of the urbanization urbanization process
that will actually get these
developments to those those kind of
conditions so when we look through that
hundred and twenty or so examples that
we have despite the the kind of set of
familiar ingredients we can actually
begin to categorize them into different
typeologies so you have luxury housing
and tourism you have techno
industrial cities you have new national
capitals a number of projects that range
in terms of their disposition from
purely housing into other kind of
identities related to economic
investment and I'm going to go through
some of these with you
when you think about the idea of
projecting economic power and political
status there's probably no better
example than a new national capital to
sort of project that that those
aspirations and those identities so
president there are no fewer than five
national new national capitals being
undertaken being proposed or undertaken
across the African continent in 54
countries you know one in one and 11 is
a pretty pretty good number in terms of
the the frequency of these projects
what's ironic about them is just the
kind of incongruity with what is
actually there so this is called the
green city of bougas ool it's the new
capital of Algeria it's a green city
that's built in the desert funded by
petrol dollars so I don't know how green
you could get with that but that seems
like a pretty good start the one that I
recently visited was the new capital of
Equatorial Guinea which is an
essentially a new city that's being
built as far away from the existing
population as possible so in order to
visit this place you have to take a
240-mile of 240 kilometres highway that
no one else is on to basically go to the
birth village of the dictator who is in
charge of the country and he's built
this new capital administrative capital
because he was threatened with coo
about a decade and a half ago and the
idea is to move the government away from
the population so the population can't
overthrow the government seems like a
logical basis a new city so we were
lucky enough to visit this place with an
architect who was our driver actually
but it was also doing an audit of the
project the project was essentially
stopped now because they run out of
money and they don't actually know what
they spent all the money on and it
included you know a huge number of you
know pretty significant investments both
in terms of infrastructure but also in
terms of some of the architecture that
was involved and basically set into a
lush verdant
tropical rainforest that was essentially
cleared for the purposes sorry jungle
that was cleared for the purposes
there's a new city so you have these
little moments of completion set into
context of lots of incompletion so a lot
of the images that I'm gonna show you
look self-similar they look like things
that are under construction but in most
cases they've stopped construction
they've been abandoned this project
included not only the kind of
governmental facilities but a new
university massive amounts of new
housing and the only part of it that's
actually open is a hotel a six star
hotel with about 350 rooms we were one
of about eight people that were in the
gloaming here you know it's got all the
amenities you need if you were taking a
touristic trip to the middle of the
jungle in Equatorial Guinea the point
being here is that there's no reason for
the city to be and in fact this is not
the only speculative city in Equatorial
Guinea there's another one just adjacent
to the existing capital the question
that comes about is the amount of
resources that are being poured into
these projects when you have a country
that basically the population lives on
six dollars a day is this is this an
appropriate investment and we know the
answer to that the most common example
of development that we hear about it
that we found is called middle-class
housing or what's characterized as
middle-class housing and again this is
about a population that's coming of age
a population that that's reaching
Economic Opportunity and giving them
options in terms of where they want to
live outside of the existing urban
center so Morocco is a sort of wonderful
example of this it has one of the most
robust New Towns programs and you know
their initial projects started with a
scale of intending something for 450,000
people as they went on with the new
towns programs they continuously
readjusted them and calibrated them to
be smaller and smaller and smaller but
what you're left with in many of these
cases are images that are not dissimilar
to what you saw in Spain the
installation of infrastructure and the
installation of utilities a bit of
housing that's isolated surrounded by a
vast landscape that's completely disconnected
from the existing city so this project
outside of Marrakesh was intended for
450,000 people the city of Marrakech is
900,000 people so basically it was going
to be half the size of the city that's
existed for millennia which is a pretty
astronomical undertaking and maybe not
surprising that it's not yet the next
one in that sort of period was a smaller
project only 250,000 projected residents
outside of rabat which is the capital
and again you see this kind of island of
urbanism urbanization isolated from you
know any life any culture any place any
job opportunities truthfully that
anybody living here would want to access
and we can go and again you know the
question that I always get is well one
of these things eventually be occupied
and maybe they will be but in most cases
especially in the Moroccan examples it's
been over a decade since these projects
have been built and they're basically
not completed then they're not occupied
the reality is that the majority of the
population simply can't access these
projects and so until there's sort of
financial incentive or subsidization by
the state these projects are going to
remain
this was one that was again another
adjustment there was a desire to build a
kind of Industrial Estate next to the
project as a way to provide a kind of
Job Center eventually it was decided
that that still wasn't going to be
wasn't going to work and the project was
finally abandoned so despite the fact
that there is this robust New Towns
program in Morocco that all the projects
are ongoing many of them have been sort
of stopped or so rather than market rate
housing what the continent really needs
is social housing and there's very few
examples of that social housing being
undertaken ones that we have identified
are in Ethiopia and Angola and they have
two very different back stories behind
them this project you've probably seen
this is in it was in the BBC it was in
CNN this is basically a massive new
housing estate that was built by the
Chinese engineering
corporation in exchange for petrol
dollars or access to petrol the petrol
resources of Angola this project
remained unoccupied until the state
opened it up to subsidies to allow
people to actually afford to live in
this context the one for us that was
much more interesting with it outside of
Addis Ababa in Ethiopia where you had
not a external source of building but
actually building from within the
foreground of a new new area of social
housing and this was one of the few
projects that we saw that was actually
occupied it's the same vintage it
started about the same period of time as
these other ones that I've shown you but
this was a place that was super active
the quality of the architecture is in
great quality of the infrastructure is
in great but there's a demand in this
place that gives it a quality of life
and gives it and the kind of experience
that one can see the potential successes
of this as a first stage of urbanization
not an end stage but a first stage of
urbanization what's fascinating about
these projects is that they're all self
built itself built in the sense that me
the local government is behind them
they've not brought in
general contractor to build these and
they're really not using any sort of
advanced technological means they're
pretty much structures on the other end
of that spectrum you have a huge number
of tourists ticket that endeavors and
this one is actually just next to the
the social housing Ethiopia which is
basically a new area of villas for the
wealthy in the political political elite
classes in Addis Ababa that's the
same cows that we saw in the other image
what's nice about this and what's really
fascinating on this project is that much
of it is being constructed by female
laborers and so this was something that
we didn't see anywhere else on the
continent and frankly I've never seen
any in any other context but these
villas were all being built by women and
they were almost exclusively built by females I don't
know the story behind it but it was kind
of an interesting kind of context to
look at so again luxury housing the
desire to attract capital from outside
of the context not in service of the
population but in service of growing an
economy by building not through any sort
of any sort of productions other than
urbanistic production and then finally
in South Africa this is Don Stein who's
considered to be the sort of Donald
Trump of South Africa this is a large
new development called Stein City at the
center of it is a villa that he built
for him and his wife 90 rooms 120 staff
two people live in this villa this was
formerly the site of a one of the
blanking of the word they displaced
informal settlement essentially to build
the Golf Course in there and as you see
there's a very clear wall about what's
inside and what's outside of this new
development it's not all housing they're
also examples of sort of industrially
driven projects so whether they're their
techno cities or industrial cities and
these projects tend to be tied to state
development so many of the other ones
that I was showing you were privately
motivated they were kind of partnerships
with the state and a private developer
these are projects that tend to be
from the states you know cons the
outside of Nairobi wonderful master plan
by shop that is being proposed and the
likelihood is that this project doesn't
have any economic impetus because
there's no infrastructure that connects
it there's no real motivation for
investment to come to this place so it's
not to say that these projects shouldn't
occur it's to say how they're undertaken
and what the kind of process of that
development is is the question that we
need to be asking ourselves as we start
to think about their production new CBDs
again another format that becomes quite
familiar creating the skyline of
Manhattan or Shanghai or Dubai in the
context of the countries that don't even
have the capacity to provide electricity
or healthcare or education
again so it's just sort of disconnect
between the kinds of investment that are
going on and the reality of what's
actually in need what's fascinating
about these projects is how much they
begin to borrow from the center you can
find architectural spectacle and
architectural icons in these projects as
signifiers to their aspiration not not
anything that's grounded in place but
about a kind of identity for the future
Egypt is a particularly interesting case
study in this regard in the sense that
they've been building new towns for
almost 40 years as a way of trying to
solve the kind of crisis in Cairo the
overpopulation in the most recent one
the capital Cairo which is replacing New
Cairo is intended to basically be a
development the size of Singapore that's
achieved in about 15 to 20 years what's
interesting about these projects is it's
not like these are hack firms that are
behind them these are major
architectural corporations SWA som shop
subhana these are these are firms that
really frankly should know better than
to be promoting these kind of specular
projects than they are and that's where
I think we have to start to question the
disciplines role in
these sort of exercises one of the
incidents to have the
so this is what you get you get sort of
an economy that's rooted in building an
economy that's rooted in housing
production an economy that's rooted in
the kind of the image production of the
city and not necessarily any other real income
sort of familiar they all start to look
the same is this Spain I don't know
anywhere and that's exactly the point it
could be anywhere they're not grounded
in any real meaningful way and very
rarely do you get sort of radical
redevelopment of existing fabric and
when you do get it you tend to get it oh
there's the what you do tend to get is a
kind of a jump
so in Kigali and Rwanda a Singaporean
planning firm basically said that will
recreate the model of Singapore in the
Rwandan capital and we'll turn this into
this in 15 years it took Singapore 50
years half a century to get to its
current economic status they established
the model how you get from this to this
in 15 years is it's a it's a blatant lie
it's a it's a fallacy it's a way to sell
an idea that is likely gonna end in
catastrophe so the motivation behind
these projects is simple project power
attract investment create jobs create
revenue through tax resources elevate
value of public land create an image of
modernity it's a reason that King
Mohammed the sixth doesn't turn projects
like these down it's the reason that any
politician doesn't turn a development
project down it's too good of a story
it's a way to to cultivate support and
get a population behind you so there's a
number of reasons why these projects
happen one that I'm particularly
interested in is this idea of City
Rankings and why these projects are
really so self-similar --the one one
another so city rankings are something
that started to emerge in the early
1990s and we're actually a scientific a
social scientific metric as a way of
measuring capacity but what we've seen
in the kind of two decades since then
are various other ways of measuring a
city against
one another how big is your airport how
many cultural institutions do you have
how many high-speed rail station
passengers pass through your city
the rankings start to get connected to
physical products so the city is built a
part of the city is built as a way to
elevate the status or rise up in some of
those rankings and so that's why you
start to see cities start to become
self-similar that the recipes for growth
are always identical I like the look at
economists not because I understand them
but because I think they have particular
ways of framing these phenomena that are
useful to us as designers and planners
so the the Finnish economist Bent 
FlyBerg has looked at what he calls mega
projects and these are not urbanization
projects per se as I've been showing you
these are projects like nationalized
healthcare national high-speed rail
systems IT projects that provide
telecommunication services to large
populations but in studying those
projects those large-scale initiatives
he's identified they're kind of
inevitable deficiencies are they're
inevitable failures they always cost too
much
they're always misrepresented as being
more successful than they actually are
always fewer people use them that are
projected they always have a much bigger
environmental impact which i think is
really important to us because as we
design these projects it's important to
understand that these they're always
going to serve far fewer than projected
and always going to produce far less
revenue than anticipated so mega
projects are inevitable going to be
failures in some regards there's risk
and there's volatility associated with
them why don't we take that into account
in our work so what that tells me as a
practitioner as an academic as a teacher
is that there's a kind of absurdity in
focusing on outcome there's an absurdity
and focusing on the end and we actually
need to think about is the process by
which those urbanization
take place so rather than to prefer the
the preferred result we actually focus on
the way that we start so what that means
is that we know that we're unlikely to
sort of shift global capital design and
planning is not going to fundamentally
change the way real estate development
undertakes its practices but we should
at least be cognizant of it on the other
hand it's irrational to ignore the kind
of risk and volatility that's embedded
within these projects and as such we
need to sort of build that into the way
that we think about our work and that's
regard as I said we're sort of
jettisoning the idea of preferred
outcomes to really focus on what we call
dynamic contingency and that is to
prioritize the way that we begin a
project how do we create adaptation
correction revision in the way that we
structure our initial investment in our
initial physical modification this is an
idea of urban planning that doesn't try
to say completion is the only way that
you can measure success we actually have
to find other terms and other metrics by
which we measure urbanization
initiatives to say yes they are
achieving what we needed them to achieve
or yes they are producing something
positive getting to the end getting to
the outcome is not a way to establish
that level of success
so the title of my lecture was why
landscape and I sort of used that title
for a number of reasons one I'm an
architect pretending to be a landscape
architect 2 I actually think landscape
is uniquely positioned to undertake and
guide these projects in a way that is
much more appropriate than say
architecture or sort of conventional
planning and the reason behind that is
what you sort of see in this diagram
when you look at the non-governmental
organisations that are funding these
projects that are behind these projects
they tend to have focus areas that
include agriculture transport water and
sanitation land use and land tenure
these are these are in fact landscape
issues and if those are the priorities
of these sort of governmental
organisations then we should be using
them as the basis of as the basis for
rethinking how these systems begin to
work and and such that's the essence
what I've been trying to do with my
studios so over the last four years or
so we've been conducting studios in
Africa and various places in Botswana
and Morocco that with the intent of
creating a kind of operating system for
urbanization and again this isn't about
a kind of final plan or a final
framework but thinking about those sort
of activities and infrastructures that
can lead to lead to urbanization but can
also be stopped at any point and still
proved to be successful still proved to
be productive this is kind of work in
progress at this point basically
thinking about a set of actions a set of
activities that might allow us to
reframe or inflect the development
process as opposed to trying to blow it
up and completely offer some other
alternative we're actually interested in
sort of coming at it from the inside as
opposed to standing outside of it and
casting stones at its deficiency so I'll
give you just very quickly a couple of
examples just to wrap up as I mentioned
this is this sort of new development
outside of camp year that we were
looking at
about 200,000 people was connected to
factory and a kind of new
Industrial Estate between it that was
then you know 35 40 kilometers from the
Port of Tangier here the newly constructed
Port of Tangier and we basically used
this project as our case study because
the Moroccan government had had stopped
it just as an aside they tried to sell
this project to a Chinese developer who
said we don't want that new town we want
to build another one up here and they've
actually started construction on that
project which has the identical format
the identical set of programs it's just
closer to the port so you can throw away
in the new town if you want it's not
something to hang on to but we thought
it was worth looking at this one just in
terms of what's possible there one of
the things that my students looked at
was the vernacular and how do you use
basic systems of managing water managing
land managing erosion and begin to think
about how you scale those things up for
the purposes of urbanism for for
development at the kind of urban scale
and what we did is basically took those
ideas that were appropriate in Morocco
and then started to find similar
examples as almost prototypes for other
contexts so looking at Kenya and sort of
the sand dam as a model other sort of
context that we could borrow from not to
propose a specific solution but to say
there's a logic of urbanization there's
a format of settlement that can be drawn
from this place that's radically
different than maybe what is being
imported from outside and so again
thinking about consider landscape
considerations as the basis of
settlement as opposed to the thing that
you kind of decorate it with at the end
similarly the idea of contingency land
uses that provide economic production
whether it's through selling crops or
it's in sort of temporary uses and
thinking about how you choreograph this
those interim land uses in the in the
space of time when development does not
have the pressure behind it the
development comes you can displace them
very quickly they're cheap you can
replace it with new urban fabric in the
case where that urban fabric doesn't
come it still provides a kind of
resource and a service to those local
populations without actually displacing
glowfish urbanism is about
the image of production rather than
building out the entire city simply
building the edges of it and then using
the middle as a place that can be filled
in overtime so some of these strategies
are a little bit more playful some of
them are a little bit more serious but
the idea is saying okay what where can
we inflect in this process to produce
different outcomes
produce outcomes that don't have the
kind of environmental and economic
catastrophe that tends to go with these
projects as we saw in Spain as we saw in
the United States as we saw in Ireland
but acknowledge the kind of risk that's
embedded with them and once you reach a
stage of certain level of development
then you jump to the next area so all of
these are about contingency they're
about sort of a dynamic relationship
with planning that's not fixed that's
not set but actually adapts to the
realities of demand in time and finally
the idea if you're going to invest in
infrastructure it doesn't always have to
be transport infrastructure it doesn't
have to be roads and rail and highways
you can start to think about
infrastructural investment related to
water related to land management that
becomes the basis for settlement in a
way that transport infrastructure has
previously always been thought of as the
basis for new settlement so all of that
is as I said really embracing this idea
of volatility and risk in these
speculative endeavors as a way of
rethinking urban design and you know
when I was in school urban design was
kind of a bad word it was where the not
really good designers went to do work
I actually think urban design and
landscape architectural lead urban
design in particular has an enormous
capacity an essential role in the
urbanization process when we really
think about how many new cities how much
new settlement is going to be built over
the next century if we don't sort of
grow our capacity to negotiate these
realities all we're going to do is
simply exacerbate the failures that come
along with them and with that I'll end
it thank you very much
there any questions I'm happy to answer
questions you first and then
I never used that word but I did suggest
at it I mean there's so you have I the
whole thing is about the whole question
relates to that notion of waste you have
limited arable land on the continent
right you're consuming that arable land
despite these massive population
projections you're basically creating a
situation where you will not be able to
feed the populations that are projected
to grow you have you know huge amounts
of concrete and steel and other
materials that are produced they're
installed and then they're left they're
sort of abandoned and so yeah the whole
thing is it's it's waste it is a waste
landscape that ultimately gets produced
the only example that I know of where
any of these projects have ever been
torn down is in Ireland they actually at
a national policy level decided that
seeing the seeing the speculation was to
psychologically burdensome so they
demolished them threw them in a landfill
but debts still there all of the
economic burden is still there but the
image of the failure was removed from
from the countryside which to me is a
sort of fascinating response in the
sense saying we screwed up but we don't
want to acknowledge it by seeing it
every single day so we're gonna hide
that you know and not pay attention to
it so I think the question of
sustainability is really a question of
how do we plan appropriately so that
we're not destroying or deluding a
landscape but maybe even enhancing it so
some of the images some of the projects
I showed you a skin at work we're
actually about increasing the kind of
ecological production of those
landscapes in the interim before the
urbanization took place and so I think
that it's a matter of how do you argue
for that how do you demonstrate that as
a kind of potential value that you can
use to argue for a different way of
undertaking the development process to
say actually there's a there's a revenue
source over here that you haven't
thought about that we can use that in
the interim allows us to do something
different until the market says yes
gonna develop in the way that you know
we've we want as a developer we want to
kind of undertake that work I don't know
if I answered your question but
that's a super interesting question
because I think in in many regards the
examples that I've looked at are all
they all occur when an economy is sort
of maturing right so the the
nineteenth-century examples the United
States the US economy haven't yet
reached full maturation in China the
economy hasn't yet reached full
maturation there's an inevitability of
over building during that period of time
the challenge is building in a way and
occupying in a way that can last or can
be can be repurposed in some ways I
think in the examples you know a sort of
American cities where you have the sort
of populations moving back into them and
repurposing many of those facilities you
have a core around which those
facilities exist the problem with many
of these projects is that they are 20 30
40 50 60 80 kilometers outside of the
core there's no reason to be there
there's not job opportunities there's
not amenities they're entirely conceived
of as satellites that exist on their own
so this is a different conversation if
you're talking about sort of tearing
down and rebuilding an existing fabric
you're basically plotting these things
in areas where there's nothing there
other than land and so there's no other
motivation to return to them at some
future point unless you can introduce
you know a job center or some other
activity that's the sort of point that I
made about urban growth used to follow
on economic growth right you'd have job
centers and then the city would grow
Detroit right for example here you have
no job center you're simply growing a
city with the hope that maybe an economy
will grow up around it so it's the the
inversion of it in my mind
basically precludes the eventual
occupation of these places
I don't know
yeah
yep
yeah I mean when so I spent three weeks
this summer sort of traveling and
meeting with surreptitiously meeting
with private developers not knowing the
critical sort of point that I was making
but I had a number of them tell me that
the reason they're developing where
they're developing is because it's just
that much it's just easier there than in
the existing cities because there's no
issue with property ownership that it
was easier for them to acquire the land
in these peripheral areas and it is to
acquire the land in the cities which
which makes sense the other aspect of it
is yes in fact their public space as an
ideal is fundamentally different in this
context than than in the West the number
of gated communities and walls and sort
of level of security that is almost all
of these projects are gated in some ways
they're enclaves and as a result that
kind of inside outside is something
where the idea of sharing public space
is an alpha to an idea of status or
economic maturity so I think I think
part of the failure is that we talk
about these projects in western terms we
talk about them in modernists modernist
planning terms and we've not yet
developed a language of being able to
talk about urbanization that is you know
I don't want to go all Kenneth Rampton
but is is somewhat vernacular is
somewhat local to where they're being
deployed and i think one of the one of
the agreements i didn't talk about but
is implicit in this is this question of
speed how quickly do you need to build
these things the Chinese model says you
need to build them as quickly as
possible because you're good there's
going to be demand for them in most of
these cases that speed what is in demand
is different than what's actually being
being built and so I think how you
negotiate that speed the way that you
talk about it
in terms of the language of urban form
needs to be recalibrated or actually a
whole new grammar needs to be created
for these projects because the the
Western model is not applicable in these
contexts which is in some ways you know
I didn't show you any design work in
some ways that's where we're trying to
get
next is to not proposals for specific
places but start to think about
priorities or topologies or as I said
moments of inflection that one could
then translate and begin to calibrate to
a specific place but I think we have to
be willing to operate on those terms not
and what the ULI tells us a good city
you know
recipe includes
I get that question every single lecture
I give and I have yet to be able to
answer it literally so I mean one thing
that I will acknowledge is that these
projects take time right these
developments are not they're not the
city does not occur instantaneously
everything that I'm showing you is is
twelve years or less so they've not yet
reached maturity that said given their
sort of geographic location relative to
the existing city given their kind of
the the cost of being able to access
those places I can sort of presume that
they're not going to be fully successful
I don't have an example of one that has
has work that has has succeeded I think
the ones that in the long term likely
will are the ones that are closer to the
existing city
I think these developments that are you
know 50 60 70 kilometers outside of the
city there's no reason for them to be
unless there's no reason for them to be
currently unless there's some other
ingredient that's inserted into them
which is why I think the borracho
project is interesting because it's
trying to create a job center around
auto manufacturing as the basis for that
that development so if they hadn't
abandoned schefren I would say chef ROC
may be the one that's most likely to
succeed but the Moroccan government has
abandoned it at the at the request of
the Chinese investors behind it
so maybe yeah right now I don't have one
that I can point to that I can say yes
that's that's successful
right right right know so the idea was
that you there you know there's no train
line to it there's no train line you
know one of the one of the criticisms is
that you have private development who
undertakes this projects and then they
stay say to the municipality or the
state you need to build the
infrastructure to connect to our project
so it puts the burden back on the state
to actually connect these places to to
the core in the context of Morocco part
of the reason that they are they are
using the automotive industry is because
of subsidies from the European Union
basically opened the first first
Western Factory Western automotive
Factory in Africa however the all the
cars that are manufactured there cannot
be sold in Europe they have to be sold
outside of the outside of the European
Union as part of the agreement for the
funding model of it so the automobile
yeah in some ways unless you have a car
you can't access these projects but you
can barely afford housing reporting car
as a whole and their whole other
question
I I think like I know the you that
un-habitat has a kind of research agenda
related to gated communities gated
housing we've talked them a little bit
about scaling that up into the sense of
kind of gain in urban enclaves so
there's a potential there I think what
you what starts to become really
interesting is when you look at the
marketing for these projects the
rhetoric behind these projects they all
talk about sustainability they all talk
about equity they all talk about you
know mixed use and and and sort of
active public realm and they use all of
the rhetoric of Western development the
projects don't actually have those
ingredients in them they're used as a
kind of marketing device so even
something like the UN habitat
sustainable development goals projects
will make reference to those as the
basis of what they're doing but there's
no evidence of that actually in what is
being undertaken so what we've tried to
look at a little bit it's a it's a
little bit of a black hole it's just to
understand you know the role that
institutions like the World Bank or the
IMF or the EU or any of these kind of
you know nongovernmental organizations
play in promoting the activities behind
some of these projects I think the idea
with this research is not to necessarily
you know I often get asked do you want
to design one of these and I actually
have in the Chinese context and I did it
not with the kind of awareness that I
have now but my the interest that I
actually have is basically sort of
calling attention to this is a
phenomenon that there starts to be some
discourse that emerges around other ways
of undertaking these these initiatives
well look I I mean I have a firm I know
when someone comes up to me and says I
have a massive project for you it's hard
for me to say no to it
I think part of what you have to do is
think about how how your intelligence
and your awareness can begin to subvert
or influence the process in a way that
might not be a hundred percent you know
you might not turn the aircraft carrier
all in one swing but you slowly start to
kind of modify those things so part of
the interest now is in as I said trying
to find those inflection points that one
could begin to argue for and I think one
of those places that that I've
identified is this idea of value
creation and how do you create other
sources of value for an investor that
allows you to ask them to operate on a
different time scale that allows you to
operate with a different kind of
physical format but you've got to kind
of play the game it's got to have you
know it's got to have an image it's got
to be politically compelling it needs to
sort of I mean it's a development
project it's got to generate revenue or
some sort so I think I think the ethical
dilemma is how do you participate yet
begin to inflect that process in a
meaningful way so they you know you
could make the argument I could imagine
an som or a shop or someone saying you
know well if we don't do it someone else
is gonna do it they're gonna do a worse
job didn't we do it it's probably true
you know so the question is if you are
going to do it how do you do it in a way
that is not naive or unaware of the kind
of backstory or the bigger context of
these projects tend to have behind them
and as I said like I you know the last
project I worked on in field operations
was the design of a 4,500 acre new
district in Shenzhen and you know we
were moving we're moving subway lines we
were making land you know weird it was
it was fun it was great you know making
a city it was awesome
when you go back and look at it and you
sort of start to question the kind of
the ethical motivation behind that you
know to make that new city they were
literally chopping down the mountain
throwing it in the program or Delta not
not a great project to be part of but
you know so I think I think the
obligation comes from being aware of
what's going on and thinking about how
you can how you can participate in
