The city that never was

• Main Author: Marcinkoski, Christopher (Author)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: New York Princeton Architectural Press 2015
• Subjects: Real estate development > History; City planning > History; Urbanization > History
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.
• Physical Description: 256 pages colour illustrations 28 cm.
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and index
• ISBN: 9781616893903

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 urbanization" 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.