The City That Never Was ─ Reconsidering the Speculative Nature of Contemporary Urbanization

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.

Christopher Marcinkoski is an assistant professor of landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a licensed architect and founding director of PORT A+U, a leading-edge urban design consultancy with ongoing projects in Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland and Philadelphia. Prior to his appointment at Penn, Marcinkoski was a senior associate at James Corner Field Operations in New York where he led that office's large-scale urban design work including the QianHai Water City in Shenzhen and Shelby Farms Park in Memphis.