The city that never was : reconsidering the speculative nature of contemporary urbanization One of the most troubling consequences of the 2008 global financial collapse was the midstream abandonment of several large scale speculative urban and suburban projects. The resulting scars on the landscape large subdivisions with only marked out plots and half finished roads are the subject of The City That Never Was an eye opening look at what happens when development particularly what the author calls speculative urbanism is out of sync with financial reality. Presenting historical and recent examples from around the world from the sprawl of the US Sun Belt and the unoccupied towns of western China to the ghost estates of Ireland and focusing on case studies in Spain Marcinkoski proposes an ecologically based model in place of the capricious economic and political factors that typically drive development today The City That Never Was considers the increasingly speculative nature of contemporary urbanization by exploring the consequences of the massive building boom and bust seen in Spain between 1998 and 2008 as a lens through which to reconsider the theory methods and agency of contemporary urban design and planning praxis