03. Cities — Skylines Versus Secondary Cities

Overrated · Skyline and megaproject prestige

Iconic skyscrapers and megaprojects — rail, dams, Olympics, stadiums — are commissioned to signal economic development. Bent Flyvbjerg (Oxford, BT Centre for Major Programme Management) published the pattern from a global megaproject database in 2014. Total megaproject spending runs to US$6–9 trillion a year, about 8% of global GDP, and nine of ten run over budget. Benefit shortfalls of 40–50% are common, and up to 75% are not uncommon. Flyvbjerg calls this the "iron law": over budget, over time, over and over, unchanged across 70 years of data. Prestige value to sponsors is real; measured returns are not.

Underrated · Secondary cities

Cities Alliance and the World Bank count more than 2,400 secondary cities worldwide, populations 150,000 to 5 million. Nearly two-thirds are in Africa and Asia, and over 60% are in developing regions. Brian Roberts and Rene Peter Hohmann documented the pattern for Cities Alliance in 2014. The one or two largest cities in a country take a disproportionate share of per-capita public investment, leaving secondary cities under-resourced. Secondary cities already hold a large, fast-growing share of the world's urban population and will absorb most future growth.

The gap

Megaprojects are visible by design — a skyline, an opening ceremony, a stadium — while a mid-sized city's underinvestment produces no comparable image. The overrun statistics are not disputed; the live debate is whether a megaproject's prestige and political "sublime" value justifies the overruns anyway, a judgment call rather than a measurement. Secondary cities lack a single ribbon-cutting moment, so their under-investment accumulates unphotographed across two-thirds of the developing world. Visibility bought the megaprojects their budgets before the returns were in; secondary cities are still waiting for a comparable audience.

Example: A national government can spend $6–9 trillion a year on projects that run over budget nine times out of ten, while a city of 150,000 to 5 million people nearby receives a fraction of the public investment per resident.

Verdict. Megaproject prestige is overrated against its 70-year record of cost and benefit overruns; secondary cities are underrated against the share of the world's urban population and growth they already hold.

Overturned if: a future decade of Flyvbjerg's database shows benefit shortfalls closing below the historical 40–50% range, or secondary-city investment is shown to already match primary-city, per-capita spending.

Sources. 2014 · Bent Flyvbjerg, "What You Should Know About Megaprojects and Why: An Overview," Project Management Journal, 45(2), 6–19 — Wiley/DOI · 2014 · Brian Roberts & Rene Peter Hohmann (Cities Alliance), "The Systems of Secondary Cities: The Neglected Drivers of Urbanising Economies," CIVIS Sharing Knowledge and Learning from Cities, No. 7 — World Bank/Cities Alliance PDF