PMN0315_Cities

30 PM NETWORK MARCH 2015 WWW.PMI.ORG MARCH 2015 PM NETWORK 31
BY EMMA HAAK n ILLUSTRATION BY ROB DONNELLY
Rethinking
Cities With the global challenge of
a booming urban population
comes the opportunity to
create more advanced cities.

MARCH 2015 PM NETWORK 33
While the cities themselves may be new, the
idea behind them isn’t, says Eran Ben-Joseph, PhD,
professor and head of the department of urban
studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Whereas most cities develop organically over time,
the practice of building new ones from scratch
became common after World War II in countries
like China, England, Japan and Russia, where they
were primarily government initiatives.
“What sets these new and future cities apart, how-
ever, is that sustainability and ecological technology
are being incorporated into them, and while they
often have government involvement, they tend to
come from the private sector,” Dr. Ben-Joseph says.
ENVISIONING TOMORROW’S
CITIES TODAY
Before this bold new future can get built, the cities’
project sponsors first must make the same decision
facing any construction project: location. A city set
slightly apart from, yet still close to, other urban
hubs has proved to be the ideal.
The US$35 billion new city of Songdo Inter-
national Business District (IBD), South Korea is
within the metropolises of Incheon and near Seoul.
Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, a US$18
billion project, is just 11 miles (17 kilometers) out-
side the capital of Abu Dhabi. In India, the city of
Today, just over half of the world’s 7.2 billion people
live in urban areas. By 2050, that’s projected to soar
to two-thirds of 9.6 billion people, according to the
United Nations.
To prepare for that tremendous urban growth,
project leaders in both the public and private sectors
are taking action—from rebuilding existing cities to
constructing entirely new ones. These cities of the
future will accommodate unprecedented populations
with projects that extend far beyond new buildings.
The initiatives also run the full gamut of infrastruc-
ture that the millions of new residents will need, such
as power grids, water management, waste removal,
public transit and educational facilities. To support
long-term growth, these city projects, often com-
prising public-private partnerships, also must entail
state-of-the-art sustainability and connectivity.
“We are going to have to think very differently
about how we build cities, particularly in the devel-
oping countries that are urbanizing so fast, so these
cities give us an example,” says Joan Fitzgerald, PhD,
professor of urban and public policy at Northeast-
ern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. “They
point us in the right direction in terms of how we
can totally rethink how cities look and are built.”
Almost 90 percent of urban growth will be con-
centrated in Africa and Asia, while just three coun-
tries—China, India and Nigeria—will account for 37
percent of the projected city surge by 2050.
The world’s cities are
feeling the squeeze.
“What sets these new
and future cities apart
is that sustainability
and ecological
technology are being
incorporated into
them, and while they
often have government
involvement, they
tend to come from the
private sector.”
—Eran Ben-Joseph, PhD, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
32 PM NETWORK MARCH 2015 WWW.PMI.ORG

with taking these cities from grand vision to on-
the-ground reality must be able to adapt to change.
Such long-range initiatives demand flexible plans.
Cutting-edge technology is standard in these new
cities, but what’s forward-thinking today won’t be
down the road. Project managers need to determine
how the technologies they’re implementing now
can be updated when the time comes.
“That’s one of the elements that can be quite
problematic—when you build a whole new town out
of scratch and you just build it for a particular era
or time, it doesn’t necessarily modify itself very well
to changing circumstances,” Dr. Ben-Joseph says.
“You might have a place that looks great now, but
the question is how will it look 10 years down the
line. And as technology and elements that deal with
sustainability and infrastructure change, how will
you adapt?” That means creating flexible, adaptable
systems that allow for disruptive innovation, he adds.
Project plans also must consider the city’s future
growth—and determine how to direct it. “City
Location is crucial, but it isn’t enough. To attract
and retain more and more people and businesses,
tomorrow’s cities must be better than yesterday’s—
more advanced with regards to sustainability and
technology. In the cities of Gujarat, India and Songdo,
that means an underground network of vacuum-
powered tubes that shuttle garbage from homes to a
central processing facility. In Masdar City, it means
designing a city layout that creates cooling breezes.
These cities also will sustain burgeoning pop-
ulations with reliable public transportation that
replaces the need—and desire—for private trans-
port. “You have to put your money in good public
transit,” says Carolina Barco, senior adviser, Emerg-
ing and Sustainable Cities Initiative, Inter-Amer-
ican Development Bank, Washington, D.C., USA.
“You want to make taking public transit attractive
because you want people to want to take it and not
be forced to take it. Otherwise, they’ll start looking
for alternatives, like cars and motorcycles.”
Project sponsors can’t agree to every sustain-
able initiative that promises to ease the problems
of overcrowding, however. In Masdar City, original
plans called for small, two-person vehicles that oper-
ated on a system separate from mass transit. After
research into the development and implementation
of the vehicles revealed they would be far pricier than
anticipated, the plans were dropped.
“Planners and city officials have to be open to
learning during the process and be willing to shift
course,” Dr. Fitzgerald says.
FROMVISION TO REALITY
Like project sponsors, the project managers tasked
Lavasa aims to take advantage of its proximity to
Pune, a booming software hub 40 miles (64 kilome-
ters) away. Konza Techno City, Kenya, a US$14.5
billion development, will be 37 miles (60 kilometers)
from the capital of Nairobi.
China has offered a counterpoint lesson. As many
cities have sprung up in remote areas, the country
has seen an epidemic of ghost towns—newly con-
structed urban centers that did not attract busi-
nesses and residents and now sit largely empty.
“These Chinese cities were built mainly as specula-
tive housing projects, not necessarily corresponding
to where people want to live,” Dr. Ben-Joseph says.
It may seem counterintuitive to build a new city
near another, more established one, but such urban
clusters carry distinct advantages. “You can ben-
efit from and complement the social and economic
dynamics of the metropolis. This makes the new city
much more attractive for companies and the types
of tenants they envision hosting,” says Luis Carvalho,
PhD, senior researcher, European Institute for Com-
parative Urban Research, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
To help future residents and businesses appreciate
the allure of their city over others, project sponsors
must coordinate with nearby cities to make sure
they’re complementing others’ appeal, not duplicat-
ing it. “Many new cities are designed to provide heavy
incentives to lure companies, but those are often
insufficient to match the social advantages of other
places, let alone the fact that they can hardly be kept
over time,” Dr. Carvalho says. “This would call for the
integration and coordination between the new city
and other nearby locations, to avoid negative-sum
competition for companies and tenants.”
Source: United Nations
“[New] Chinese cities
were built mainly as
speculative housing
projects, not necessarily
corresponding to where
people want to live.”
—Eran Ben-Joseph
The Urban FutureThe world will see not only more cities, but bigger ones too.
Project managers
tasked with taking
these cities from
grand vision to
on-the-ground
reality must be able
to adapt to change.
City Dwellers
Percentages and populations of
the world living in urban areas
Big
Medium-sized cities, each with 1 million
to 5 million inhabitants
1950
100%
10%
50%
2014 2050
30% 54% 66%
746
million
people
3.9
billion
people
6.4
billion
people
417827 million people
8 percent of the global
urban population
2816 in Asia, 4 in Latin America,
3 in Africa, 3 in Europe,
2 in North America
453 million people
urban population
urban population
41Top two:
Tokyo, Japan, 37 million;
Delhi, India, 36 million
5581.1 billion people
Bigger
Large cities, each with 5 million to 10
million inhabitants
Biggest
Megacities, each with more
than 10 million inhabitants
2014 2030
2014 2030
2014 2030
medium-
sized cities
large cities large cities
medium-
sized cities
Top two: Tokyo, Japan, 38 million;
Delhi, India, 25 million
megacities megacities
Views of Songdo, South
Korea, above, and Masdar
City in the United Arab
Emirates

areas have a tendency to spread geographically
faster than their population increases,” says Stel-
lan Fryxell, architect and partner at architecture
firm Tengbom, Stockholm, Sweden. “Urban sprawl
results in substantially higher energy and resource
use, and makes it more difficult to organize services
compared with more compact cities.”
The right plans can help control that sprawling
tendency, Ms. Barco says. “Plan your major roadways,
parks and green spaces first. Those public spaces
define a city and give it quality. Then you’ll find that
the city will fill 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.
That 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 financial 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, conflicts can rise and important stakeholders
might withdraw,” Dr. Carvalho says. “It’s happened
before, and new financial 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 effective 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 definitely 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 figuring 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
stakeholders to work together, they also must do so
as stakeholders change over the course of projects
that typically last many years. “These kinds of projects
involve governments and public authorities, com-
panies and real estate developers, universities, but
also other actors from the civil society at large,” Dr.
Carvalho says. “And they can also last for years and
years. So the development and management of new
cities always have to consider this complex patchwork
of interests, that can—and very likely will—change
during the long planning and development process.”
The Songdo project team learned those lessons
firsthand. “Due to the dynamic nature of a large city-
scale development spanning a long time horizon,
we have had to withstand and ride through many
market and financial cycles,” says Scott Summers,
senior vice president of the city development firm
Gale International Korea, Songdo, Korea. “Sidelin-
ing or minimizing stakeholders in the planning
and development process does not foster strong
partnerships and relationships that are needed in a
development with a long time horizon.”
When successful, these new cities can have an
impact that spreads far beyond their own borders.
“These developments can become important test
beds for new ways of living,” Dr. Carvalho says,
“helping to visualize what we consider now as
unrealistic solutions and create momentum for the
formation of new stakeholder coalitions and tech-
nology development.”
“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
“These
developments
can become
important
test beds for new ways
of living.”
—Luis Carvalho, PhD, European Institute for
Comparative Urban Research, Rotterdam,
the Netherlands
A
city in India boasts the lofty ambition
of becoming the world’s newest hub
for financial services and information
technology. Strategically located near
the Ahmedabad airport in the state of Gujarat—
whose economy has seen rapid growth over the past
decade—the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City
(GIFT) intends to answer India’s increasing need for
professionals in the financial services and IT sectors
by providing hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
The Noida, India-based Fairwood Group, which
is designing and planning the infrastructure and
buildings for the megaproject, has taken cues from
other central business districts—such as Shinjuku
in Tokyo, Japan; Lujiazui in Shanghai, China; La
Gujarat International Finance
Tec-City, Gujarat, India
CASE STUDY / City on the Horizon
“The global
financial
meltdown led
to investors
abandoning the
project, leading
to delay in the
implementation.”
—Nitin Kumar, Fairwood Group,
Noida, India
PHOTOBYANAYMANN

Défense in Paris, France; and London, England’s
Docklands. “The study of these world-famous cen-
tral business districts was used to prepare a frame-
work of aspects of GIFT’s central business district
functioning and its relationship with the city,” says
Nitin Kumar, CEO, Fairwood Group, Noida, India.
When complete, GIFT will be more than a busi-
ness district, however; it will be a self-sustaining city.
“We designed a city where people will love to take the
public transport system,” Mr. Kumar says. The city
will feature “free-flowing, extensive and usable green
spaces, the ability to walk to work because all cars will
travel underground, and skies that are completely
free of wires, which will be underground.”
While job creation and commercial enterprises
will be at the project’s core, comprising 67 per-
cent of GIFT’s 62 million square feet (5.8 million
square meters), residential and social buildings will
take up 22 percent and 11 percent of total space,
respectively. The city also will benefit from high-
tech infrastructure, including district cooling and
automated solid waste management.
The INR780 billion project, a 50/50 joint venture
between the public Gujarat Urban Development
Company Ltd. and the private Infrastructure Leas-
ing & Financial Services Ltd., has benefited from
strong government support—fortunately, given the
early funding challenges it faced.
When planning began in 2007, the project team
had a 10-year timeline, and the design process was
completed “in record time compared to the design
time for similar projects,” Mr. Kumar says. Real estate
developers quickly signed memoranda of understand-
ing. Soon afterward, however, the global recession
hit, and promised investments did not materialize, he
says. “The global financial meltdown led to investors
abandoning the project, leading to delay in the imple-
mentation,” Mr. Kumar says. The project team had to
push back the completion date to 2022.
The government sponsor overcame the setback
by proving itself a worthy partner for private inves-
tors. In 2012, a two-year U.K. review of India’s
infrastructure sector lauded Gujarat’s performance
in implementing public-private partnerships.
“Now,” Mr. Kumar says, “things have started
moving again.”
E
ntirely new cities in China have not met
the best of fates: Many have failed to
attract businesses or residents. So more
recent projects in the country have
focused on rebuilding existing cities—among them,
Karamay and Guangzhou.
Once a small town, Karamay experienced a
population boom after the discovery of oil there in
the 1950s. In 2010, the city opened a competition
to design a master plan that would accommodate
the expected population surge from 250,000 to 1
million by 2050. NBBJ, an architecture firm, won
with a plan focused on sustainable design and con-
servation, including solar and wind power, storm-
water management, and a central business district
surrounded by pedestrian-centered neighborhoods.
Launched in 2011, the project is on target for
a 2017 completion of all planned buildings—yet
it is not without challenges. “Karamay is in a
very remote area of China,” says Kim Norman
Way, principal, urban design and planning, NBBJ,
Columbus, Ohio, USA. For the international team,
that remote location meant three separate flights
each time it needed to reach Karamay, which was
“very taxing and wearing on the planning and
design team,” Mr. Way says.
A lack of strong, clear communication with local
clients and stakeholders has also proven prob-
lematic at times. The most challenging phase of
work, Mr. Way says, involved planning the city’s
university campus. “Our planning was directed by
city officials who did not yet have a clear under-
standing of the future academic programs for this
new university due to the unpredictability of the
region’s growth,” he says. To get past that challenge,
the project team used the city’s desired enrollment
numbers along with its own experience designing
universities.
Similar problems arose when planning the city’s
hospital. “The city’s vision for this new, contempo-
rary, state-of-the-art hospital was greater than the
existing hospital staff could provide input on,” Mr.
Karamay and
Guangzhou, China
“We designed a city where
people will love to take the
public transport system.”
—Nitin Kumar
“Our planning was directed by city
officials who did not yet have a
clear understanding of the future
academic programs for this new
university.”
—Kim Norman Way, NBBJ, Columbus, Ohio, USA
Two views of
the Karamay
city plan
PHOTOBYANAYMANN

water, waste, public transit and communications
such as fiber-optic cable—will be accomplished
through public-private partnerships.
The city is being implemented in phases, allowing
time to address challenges like funding, timelines
and investors. In addition, a master plan for the
entire city helps keep the project’s goal clear.
Still, the team has met some obstacles—and oth-
ers likely lie ahead. As project sponsors recognize,
the city will result in the loss of natural habitat and
the displacement and disturbance of wildlife. To
minimize that negative impact—and offset poten-
tial objections from public stakeholders—the team
will create a 2.4-square-mile (6.2-square-kilometer)
wildlife corridor.
In addition, an in-progress water and sanita-
tion project had to be redesigned to accommodate
Konza’s estimated water needs of 100 million liters
(26.4 million gallons) each day. To ensure those
needs will be met, the team must create boreholes
to provide around 2 million liters (528,000 gallons)
per day. PM
K
enya is pursuing what it hopes will be
its answer to U.S. tech hub Silicon Val-
ley: Konza Techno City, or what’s being
called Silicon Savanna. Near Nairobi,
the city will rise from 7.7 square miles (20 square
kilometers) of African grasslands over the next 20
years—and aims to attract about 200,000 IT jobs.
The US$14.5 billion project is a flagship initiative
in Vision 2030, the government program to make
Kenya a globally competitive country by 2030.
In October, the project team began construct-
ing the preliminary access roads and Kenya Power
started laying power lines. By building 35,000
homes as well as schools, hotels and hospitals,
the development authority intends to entice IT-
related businesses and jobs. While the govern-
ment-backed authority is overseeing the project,
infrastructure components—including power,
Way says. Again, the team had to combine the cli-
ent’s general goal with its own expertise as well as
its research on other new Chinese hospitals. In the
end, the team successfully planned and designed a
modern, 2,000-bed facility.
GIVE AND TAKE
The government of Guangzhou, the
third biggest city in China, has under-
taken a US$7.5 billion effort to revital-
ize large swaths of the city, dubbed the
north axis and south axis.
“Our objective was to create a sustain-
able and livable area for about 500,000
people in Guangzhou, without creating
a negative impact on the surroundings,”
says David Masenten, senior associate,
Heller Manus Architects, the San Fran-
cisco, California, USA-based firm that
won the redesign bids.
In 2009, the team began the first
phase: the north axis. “This comprehen-
sive urban core master plan of 2.4 square
miles [6.2 square kilometers] redesigned
the central business district,” Mr. Masenten says.
The project comprises commercial and residential
buildings, a sports facility, a railway and bus trans-
portation hub and extensive open spaces. With
a completion date of 2025, the south axis has
fewer original features than its counterpart but
more space: 15.5 square miles (40.1 square kilo-
meters) of the southern city center.
Dealing with existing city structures pre-
sented both opportunities and challenges. “By
choosing not to demol-
ish buildings of suf-
ficient quality, we were
taking a very sustainable
approach of saving the
energy that would be
lost in demolishing and
recycling materials,” Mr.
Masenten says. “How-
ever, most of the existing
buildings on site were not
built to any larger master
plan, thus creating a con-
flict with planning goals
and design.”
He credits precise planning for the
mitigation of potential risks. “We care-
fully phased the plan to leave some exist-
ing buildings for the short term, while
slating them for eventual removal,” Mr.
Masenten says. “This gives the city time
to re-evaluate the structure and the loca-
tion in the future when the quality and
needs of the building may change.”
While typical Chinese grid systems
cater to cars, not to pedestrians, Mr.
Masenten says, this project had sustain-
able mobility as one of its core objec-
tives—so Heller Manus had to convince
local stakeholders to think differently. “By
using examples of walkable cities, we were
able to convince local planners to adopt a
much smaller block network—200 to 300
meters [656 to 984 feet] as opposed to 400
to 600 meters [1,312 to 1,969 feet] in block
length—which greatly enhances walkabil-
ity,” he says.
“Our objective
was to create
a sustainable
and livable
area for about
500,000 people in
Guangzhou, without
creating a negative
impact on the
surroundings.”
—David Masenten, Heller Manus
Architects, San Francisco, California, USA
Konza Techno City, Kenya
A rendering of
Guangzhou’s central
business district
Two artist renderings of
Konza Techno City
IMAGECOURTESYOFAEDAS

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