The city that never was
By: Christopher Marcinkoski
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9781616893903
Subjects: Real estate development; City planning; Urbanization; Case studies; History
Description: "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"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: A brief history of speculative urbanization; title: A new Spanish miracle; title: Products of the boom and bust : case studies from the Madrid Metropolitan Region; title: Urbanization beyond speculation.