areas have a tendency to spread geographically
faster than their population increases,” says Stel-lan Fryxell, architect and partner at architecture
;rm Tengbom, Stockholm, Sweden. “Urban sprawl
results in substantially higher energy and resource
use, and makes it more di;cult to organize services
compared with more compact cities.”
;e right plans can help control that sprawling
tendency, Ms. Barco says. “Plan your major roadways,
parks and green spaces ;rst. ;ose public spaces
de;ne a city and give it quality. ;en you’ll ;nd that
the city will ;ll in a more organic way.” In Songdo, 40
percent of the city will be devoted to green space—
one of the highest percentages in the world.
Because these long-term megaprojects often
encounter budgetary changes, project plans also
must include contingencies for funding shortages.
;at can help projects avoid the “painful process
of scaling down visions,” Dr. Carvalho says. Many
projects, particularly in China, saw funding erode
during the recent global ;nancial crisis.
Change during these years-long initiatives can
impact—and even drain—the social and political
support driving them. “If debts start to mount or the
job creation that’s been touted hasn’t materialized
yet, con;icts can arise and important stakeholders
might withdraw,” Dr. Carvalho says. “It’s happened
before, and new ;nancial deals had to be negotiated
between developers and city authorities. From a
project management perspective, preventing this
erosion is a critical challenge.” Case in point: After
questions arose about possible human rights viola-
tions at the construction site in Lavasa—one of
India’s two dozen planned smart cities—several
educational stakeholders, including Oxford Univer-
sity, pulled out of the US$30 billion project.
Sustainable and technological features not only
help create a more e;ective city as the end goal, they
also help project managers overcome the challenge
of wavering support—especially if those features are
well communicated. “Evidence shows that capital
and support drains out before the development
starts to prove itself,” Dr. Carvalho says. “In this
sense, it can be important to specialize in a few
features in which the new city can de;nitely excel
vis-à-vis similar developments elsewhere.” As an
example, the multinational corporation Cisco will
install its video-chatting technology into Songdo’s
new residential buildings and hotels.
To help secure ongoing support, project leaders
must work to ensure that both sides of these cities’
public-private partnerships are partners in more
than name alone. “You need a government setting
standards, but then giving the private sector leeway
into ;guring out how to meet those standards,”
Dr. Fitzgerald says. “If the private sector is acting
alone, they’ll make cost-based decisions. If it’s all
public sector, there’s a tendency to be much more
conservative and limit the experimentation that’s
necessary for these projects.”
When public stakeholders don’t clearly communi-
cate what they want from their private partners, the
latter understandably will try to do what’s in their
own best interest, Ms. Barco says. “If the private
sector doesn’t have rules to work with, they work on
projects that aren’t clearly oriented toward respond-
ing to the city, because that isn’t their job,” she says.
Project managers not only have to get myriad
“We are going to
have to think very
differently about
how we build
cities, particularly
in the developing
countries that are
urbanizing so fast.”
—Joan Fitzgerald, PhD, Northeastern
University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
