The City That Never Was

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.