Book Review
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
In How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner delve into the challenges of executing large-scale projects, offering critical insights particularly relevant to charter cities and new urban developments. Through a blend of case studies and empirical data, the authors dissect why big projects often fail, highlighting 11 straightforward heuristics for successful leadership of megaprojects. Each of these ideas offers clear lessons for charter cities and other new city projects, which can be among the most complex megaprojects in the world. We discuss three of these ideas and their implications for charter cities below.
Hire a Master Builder
It’s hard to find people and organizations experienced with building new cities. Many urban developers, design firms, and other groups will have experience with large districts, but few will have experience of the scale a new city eventually requires. City development firms like Rendeavour, Africa’s largest new city builder, with experience successfully developing multiple city-scale projects are difficult to find. This is especially true in lower-income countries where the opportunities, challenges, and constraints differ from those in higher-income countries.
The importance of leveraging relevant expertise in building large urban, special economic zones/industrial parks, and infrastructure projects scales with the planned size of a new city. A 10,000 person town requires less megaproject experience than a 1,000,00 person new city. Finding the right “master builder” for a charter city who can pull together and manage the consortium needed to see a project through to completion is critical.
Get Your Team Right and Ask “Why?”
Hiring the right team is a key responsibility of the master builder. But for charter cities, this level goes a step further. A charter city doesn’t just require a competent team that can execute the building of a city, but also a competent team who can effectively operate and govern the city.
The investment into a charter city is wasted if the team and the policymakers who will ultimately make key decisions at a policy and an operational level “miss the forest for the trees.” Charter cities are a unique opportunity to improve governance and accelerate economic development and project leaders must recognize that they’re not just building a residential community or an industrial park, but a long-run project in governance as well. There are many complex reasons for the great success of “proto-charter cities” like Hong Kong, Singapore, Shenzhen, and Dubai. But competent, ambitious, and forward-thinking leadership is present throughout each case.
Build With Lego
Successful urban expansion requires flexibility and modularity. Although we can make estimates about demand for housing, retail, public space, industrial land, etc in a new city, plans must remain responsive to conditions as they appear on the ground. This is especially true in rapidly urbanizing countries, where urban expansion typically occurs faster than governments can plan for.
In new cities at higher price points, and therefore more limited demand, modularity is relatively less important relative to fidelity towards a master plan. But for charter city projects where the goal is to push down the cost of housing to provide access to a far greater number of people, the city builder must be proactive about planning things like arterial roads, critical infrastructure, and land subdivision, while remaining flexible about what is ultimately built within the city.
