MEGA PROJECTS

CMWE
March 2013
• Megaprojects (sometimes also spelled
"mega projects") are very large investment
projects.
PALM ISLAND DUBAI
 MEANING
• In 1968, Ralph Wilcoxon defined a
megastructure as any structural framework
into which rooms, houses, or other small
buildings can later be installed,
uninstalled, and replaced; and

which is capable of “unlimited” extension.

 MEANING
• Many architects have designed such
megastructures. Some of the more notable
such architects and architectural groups
include the Metabolist Movement,
Archigram, Cedric Price, Frei Otto,
Constant Nieuwenhuys, Yona Friedman,
and Buckminster Fuller.
WONDER ISLAND DUBAI
 MEANING
• This type of framework allows the
structure to adapt to the individual wishes
of its residents, even as those wishes
change with time.
 MEANING
Other sources define a megastructure as
“any development in which residential
densities are able to support services and
facilities essential for the development to
become a self-contained community”.

[Link]
HOOVER DAM concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon 1935
 MEGA PROJECTS
• The US Federal Highway Administration
 defines megaprojects as
major infrastructure projects that cost more
than US$1 billion,
 MEGA PROJECTS
• or projects of a significant cost that attract
a high level of public attention

• or political interest because of substantial

direct and indirect impacts on
the community, environment and
budgets.
• Mega" also implies the size of the task
involved in developing, planning, and
managing projects of this magnitude.
• The risks are substantial.
• there’s a good word to describe it all –
Megascale Engineering.
 MEGASCALE ENGINEERING
• Megascale engineering is a form of
exploratory engineering concerned with
the construction of structures on an
enormous scale.
• Typically these structures are at least 1,000
kilometers in length—in other words, at
least 1 megameter, hence the name. Such
large-scale structures are termed
megastructures.
MADEIRA AIRPORT, PORTUGAL
MEGASCALE ENGINEERING
Megascale engineering is also defined as
including the transformation of entire
planets into a human-habitable
environment, a process known as
terraforming or planetary engineering.
MEGASCALE ENGINEERING
This might also include transformation of
the surface conditions, changes in the
planetary orbit, and structures in orbit
intended to modify the energy balance.
 Rio-Antirio bridge is a cable-stayed bridge near Patra  , Greece
 MACROPROJECTS
• In contrast to conventional engineering
projects, macroengineering projects (called
macroprojects or megaprojects) are
multidisciplinary, involving collaboration
from all fields of study; they involve not
only engineers, but scientists, lawyers,
industrialists, soldiers, and politicians as
well. 
 MEGA PROJECTS
•  Macroprojects are usually international;
they override political boundaries because
most countries lack the social, financial, or
physical ability to undertake them alone.
• As a consequence, macroprojects have the
power to fundamentally transform its area
of focus.
BERLIN WALL
WORLD’S TALLEST BUILDING
• The world’s tallest building scales 828 m |
2716 feet of height and sprawls sky-
towering floors cutting through the
clouds. 
• It is a built to total cost of
US$800,000,000.00! (only) and spreads on
a now-historic area of land in the
BurjKhalifa Boulevard.
• Zhang Yue, CEO, Broad Sustainable Building, a
Chinese construction firm, told Reuters he plans
to build a two km high, 636-floor tower.
• He also revealed plans to build a 838-metre high
tower, 10 metres taller than the BurjKhalifa, in
four months’ time .
• The tower dubbed ‘Sky City 220’ will have
schools, a hospital, 17 helipads and house 30,000
people.
• 
Qingdao Taiwan Sea bridge 26.4 miles long, 5.5 billion pounds
 OTHER VIEW
• Substantial benefit shortfalls trouble many
megaprojects.
• Regional development effects and
environmental impacts often turn out very
differently from what proponents promised.
• Cost overruns of 50% are common, overruns of
100% not uncommon.
• Cost overruns combined with benefit shortfalls
spell trouble.
Bent Flyvbjerg’s Theory
of Megastructure Parodox
• An interesting paradox exists for
megaprojects:
• More and bigger megaprojects are being
planned and built despite their poor
performance record in terms of costs and
benefits.
• All over the world, we are confronted
with a new political and physical animal:
the multi-billion dollar mega
infrastructure project.
• Europe we have the Channel tunnel,
• the Øresund bridge between Denmark
and Sweden,
• the Vasco da Gama bridge in Portugal,
• the German MAGLEV train between
Berlin and Hamburg,
• the creation of an interconnected high-
speed rail network for all of Europe,
• cross-national motorway systems,
• the Alp tunnels, the fixed link across the
Baltic Sea between Germany and
Denmark,
• plans for airports to become gateways to
Europe,
• enormous investments in new freight
container harbours,
• DM 200 billion worth of transport
infrastructure projects related to German
unification alone,
• links across the straits of Gibraltar and
Messina,
• the world’s longest road tunnel in
Norway,
•
• new and extended telecommunications
networks,

• systems of cross-border pipelines for

transport of oil and gas, and

• cross-national electrical power networks to meet

the growing demand in an emerging European
energy market.
• It seems like every country, and pairs of
countries, are in the business of promoting
this new animal, the megaproject, on the
European policy-making scene.
• And the European Union, with its grand
scheme for creating so-called “Trans-
European Networks”, is an ardent
supporter and even initiator of such
projects, just as it is the driving force in
creating the regulatory, and de-regulatory,
regimes that are meant to make the
projects viable.
 

Oasis of the Seas  ,Cruise Liner

• The situation is similar in industrialised
and industrialising countries in other parts
of the world, from Asia to the Americas.
• There is, for example, Hong Kong’s Chek Lap
Kok airport,
• China’s Quinling tunnel,
• the Akashi Kaikyo bridge in Japan,
• Sydney’s harbour tunnel,
• Malaysia’s North-South Expressway,
• Thailand’s Second Stage Expressway,
• and proposals for an integrated Eurasian
transport network.
• In the Americas there is Boston’s “Big Dig”,
• freeways and railways in California,
• Denver’s new international airport,
• Canada’s Confederation bridge,
• the São Paulo-Buenos Aires Superhighway,
• the Bi-Oceanic highway right across South
America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the
Venezuela-Brazil highway.
• Even a proposed US$50 billion project to
link the USA and Russia across the Bering
Strait – the “biggest project in history”,
according to its promoters – is not missing
in the megaproject scheme of things.
• Outside the field of transport
infrastructure there is the Three Gorges
dam in China,
• Russia’s natural gas pipelines,
• the Pergau dam in Malaysia,
• flood control in Bangladesh,
• the Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline,
• the Venezuela-Brazil power line and,
again and everywhere,
• the ultimate megaproject, the Internet
with associated infrastructure and
telecommunications projects.
 The Megaprojects Paradox
• Megaprojects are central to the new
politics of distance because infrastructure
is increasingly being built as megaprojects.
 The Megaprojects Paradox
• Thus the past decade has seen a sharp
increase in the magnitude and frequency
of major infrastructure projects, supported
by a mixture of national and supra-
national government, private capital and
development banks.
 The Megaprojects Paradox
• There is a paradox here, however.
• At the same time as many more and
much larger infrastructure projects are
being proposed and built around the
world, it is becoming clear that many such
projects have strikingly poor performance
records in terms of economy, environment
and public support. 
 The Megaprojects Paradox
• ject viability at risk and redefine projects that
were initially promoted as effective vehicles to
economic growth as possible obstacles to such
growth. The Channel tunnel, opened in 1994 at a
construction cost of £ 4.7 billion, is a case in
point with several near-bankruptcies caused by
construction cost overruns of 80 percent,
financing costs that are 140 percent higher than
those forecast and revenues less than half of
those projected
• The cost overrun for Denver’s US$5 billion
new international airport, opened in 1995,
was close to 200 percent and passenger
traffic in the opening year was only half of
that projected.
 The Megaprojects Paradox
• Operating problems with Hong Kong’s
new US$20 billion Chek Lap Kok airport,
which opened in 1998, initially caused
havoc not only to costs and revenues at
the airport; the problems spread to the
Hong Kong economy as such with
negative effects on growth in gross
domestic product.
 The Megaprojects Paradox
• After nine months of operations, The
Economist dubbed the airport a “fiasco”,
said to have cost the Hong Kong economy
US$600 million. The fiasco may have been
only a start-up problem, albeit an
expensive one, but it is the type of expense
that is rarely taken into account when
planning megaprojects.