Understanding Mega-Infrastructure in 2020: Hudson Yards as a Case Study
Why study mega-infrastructure projects? At the twilight of 2019, infrastructure is a battleground, where global and local interests clash over access, and power. And in the age of mega-cities, mega-infrastructure projects (MIPs) that favour the former while disconnecting the latter are dominant (Castells: 436). They are more complex than ever: just as the world’s networks have intertwined in ways not seen since the Silk Road, so, too, have infrastructure projects, no longer serving the mere function of use — e.g. providing electricity, or transport — but something much greater. This paper aims to clarify said complexity through the study of decision-making processes, utilizing international literature review findings to analyze the planning of modern-day MIPs and challenge their appraisal. The assumptions and premises employed throughout will be explained.
This paper defines MIPs as projects and programmes of national or global relevance, which deliver certain goods or services, and boast a price tag over $1 billion USD. To dissect their rapidly changing nature, it’s first worth noting who or what now has a stake in decision-making. A clear portrait of stakeholder influence is integral to understanding how an MIP is delivered; it offers the chance to link actors to discourses, while maintaining a grasp on the MIP’s original intent, to contrast against evolving arguments. This paper will utilize the stakeholder framework established by the OMEGA Centre, which will be explained later. Furthermore, the literature will offer a basis for the appraisal of MIPs, although the author will contend that factors of equity are of utmost significance in these turbulent times. The literature review will serve as this paper’s analytical framework, putting forth generic observations and lessons for MIPs on the eve of a new decade. This literature review will deploy a relevant case study as a resonance test for themes raised, which will also provide context-specific factors that go beyond the generic. The author has chosen the №7 line extension of the New York City subway, and the subsequent development of Hudson Yards on Manhattan’s Far West Side, as its test subject.
This paper recognizes MIPs as ‘agents of change’ upon two key premises. The first is that infrastructures no longer take singular form in the modern age, but, rather, many, often linking to a larger regeneration effort that they ultimately spawn, or a megaproject that they are a part of. A major flaw in decision-making silos MIPs and fails to give “sufficient attention” to these growing linkages on a wider spatial scale (OMEGA Centre: 16). This larger scope — the convergence of a number of ‘meta projects’ to form a ‘megaproject’ — is where the greatest change can be seen. Their transformation is hastening in pace, due to the second key premise: while the power of context — or the specific settings in a city, region, or country — has always been important for infrastructure development, it is now besieged by the forces of technology, globalization, and climate crisis, designating ‘business as usual’ practices null and void (OMEGA: 24). Entering the 2020s after a decade of turmoil and geopolitical shift holds remarkable implications for infrastructure which are only just beginning to be comprehended.
This paper posits the role of stakeholders into four categories (OMEGA: 14). The first category are politicians and political champions, who push for MIPs through legislative, administrative, or public means. This author will later show how this category’s direct or indirect ties to other categories have an outsized effect on their influence. The second category are public sector officials, who offer a technical dimension to a project’s rationale. These officials are often employed by the previous category, or subservient for political reasons, and are deployed in a ‘cheerleader’ role for justification. The third category are private sector personnel, which are typically made up of financial interests, and offer ‘business cases’ to argue said projects. And the final category are other key MIP stakeholders, which, this author contends, are the new players in a globalized world: a conglomeration of media, real estate, tech, and banking entities, connected to global markets, that seek influence in an increasingly splintered public realm (Graham & Marvin: 311).
Recognizing stakeholders’ positioning can also demonstrate how or why a project evolves over time, and ultimately happens, or doesn’t happen. In short: stakeholders drive power politics, creating winners and losers by shaping the planning process, perhaps against the whims of democratic decision-making (Flyvbjerg: 223–224). In Bent Flyvbjerg’s Aalborg, for example, the mayor allies with the city’s bus company, which relies on his political support, to rewrite plans for a bus terminal as part of a major downtown redevelopment plan. By doing so, the mayor creates “the knowledge and [the] rationality” to carve the plan to his liking (Flyvbjerg: 35–36). The reality is thus created by its rationality, which is a privilege that those in power have over MIPs, and local stakeholders less so (Flyvbjerg: 227). Information is essential; how and when stakeholders release information about the project to the public is a form of power over its decision-making. Flyvbjerg makes good use of Nietzsche’s politics: “Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.”
But the arena of power politics has vastly changed from mid-1990s Aalborg. In Castells’ definition, the dominant form of today’s capitalism is the network: this immense constellation of multinational entities and interests, and the places where they converge on a temporal level, spawned by the rise of electronic transactions and instant movement of capital (Castells: 502). A new office development in Hong Kong, for example, may be occupied by a tech company that is in constant communication with other global nodes, yet simultaneously services local infrastructures and interests. Networks are where power flows in informational capitalism, an era where time and space has compressed indefinitely. But even seemingly limitless reach has its limits in reality: networks need to be geolocated in places, or milieus, like Hong Kong, with access to micro-networks that only said place can provide (Castells: 34). Where they choose to be and what they need on the ground is now shaping MIPs at an unprecedented rate.
Those interactions vis-à-vis the needs of local populations create the splintered landscape that we see today; metropolitan regions that cater faster transport, private security, or other non-public, high-quality goods and services to those who can pay (Graham & Marvin: 376). The infrastructure that forms as a result stays well-connected to the high value of a city’s micro-network, while supplanting its components through a number of different means, often paid for by dominant stakeholders. This ‘glocal’ desire should be seen as a key driver of change for MIPs, without ignoring the power that metropolitan centers hold to counter this growing influence (Graham & Marvin: 390). The emerging pushback against tech titans’ appetite for footprints in cities are telling of this new phenomenon.
On that note, the appraisal of MIPs is often construed as physical in nature: displacement; development; disruption; pollution; generation; gentrification; etc. In effect, nuisance and location are correlated (Glaeser & Ponzetto: 30). If the MIP is built in a highly populated area, then nuisance skyrockets: residents are more affected by the issue, and thus more likely to organize. This process has been accelerated by technology, with news and organizing efforts spreading instantly. Thus, it can be deduced that MIPs going forward will be planned in areas with lower inconvenience costs, where local resistance is unlikely, even if the project is meant to attract people once completed. However, this author argues that this traditional cost-benefit analysis disregards issues of equity in a divisive time. Rather, it may be more pertinent to ask: when a MIP is implemented, what other projects aren’t funded as a result? Why are those projects prioritized less? And perhaps more importantly looking ahead, does the MIP drive sustainability, or hinder it? Residents do not only have to be physically affected to lose out; one project’s impact on another that could have benefitted said residents more in the short- or long-term is of equal significance here (Flyvbjerg: 223). This approach extols MIPs as the ‘glocal’ infrastructure they truly are, by weighing both global and local interests together on the same scale.
It bears repeating that context is essential to developing a proper framework for MIPs. It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the anatomy of decision-making without accounting for what was happening in the city, or country, at the time (OMEGA: 24). Consequently, that may entail other factors beyond the ones discussed here, such as the influence of mega-events. The prospects of a mega-event allow stakeholders to neatly package their discourses into a digestible narrative, one that often invokes wide scale “hard” regeneration and “soft” socioeconomic effects (Duminy & Luckett: 13). Again, the impact of a mega-event cannot be viewed with tunnel vision; what else the region needs then must also be heavily considered. As is increasingly the case for cities worldwide, the mega-event factor plays a role in the case study, which will be discussed shortly.
In sum, this paper enters the next section with the following lessons learned from the literature review. Due to their integral role in ‘network societies,’ MIPs are overwhelmingly influenced by an evolving landscape of global interests, which are amassing strategic power over public space. The divided metropolis has arisen as the standard urban form, but with its limits: context still affects how decision-making plays out. MIPs are defined by the changes they drive, yet their appraisal defy solely physical outcomes in light of emerging themes; what could be perceived as economically beneficial in one year could be construed as wasteful spending in the next. And, finally, the author puts forth the notion that appraisal must hold a lens of equity, utilizing systems thinking. These observations and derived lessons will now be tested against the case study of the №7 line extension in New York City.
The №7 line extension was a $2.5 billion transport project that opened to the public in 2015. It was chosen as a case study for a number of reasons. For one, it marked the first expansion of the New York City subway in nearly two decades, adding a new western terminus to the train line at 34th Street and 10th Avenue. It was ultimately a meta-project for the Hudson Yards megaproject, a previously dormant 14-block-long tract west of Midtown Manhattan, home to railyards for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). It is now the largest private real estate development in the United States by area, and still being constructed. Subsequent critiques of Hudson Yards and the subway system’s handling are what inspired a second look at this project’s decision-making process.
The timeline of how this MIP became a reality offers a window into the aforementioned issues. First, it is worth noting that the project idea existed for some time, stymied, however, by economic constraints (Moss: 24). Tides changed in June 2001, when New York Senator Chuck Schumer, representing a coalition of corporate, labor, and academic figures called the ‘Group of 35,’ released a report asserting that the city needed huge amounts of new office space in order to compete in the 21st century economy (Bagli: 2001). The group highlighted the area of Hudson Yards as a potential site and endorsed the then-$3 billion №7 line extension. It also said that the city should have broad powers in rezoning lands for development. That reality grew stark after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which devastated the city’s downtown financial center. In 2003, a master plan was produced by the new mayoral administration of business media mogul Michael Bloomberg, on the back of another report by Cushman & Wakefield — a major real estate services firm — calling for more office space.
This economic argument fit seamlessly into the city’s 2012 Olympics bid. New York was a finalist in the competition, and its bid — led by deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, who had worked in private equity and banking — rested on a Hudson Yards stadium and the subway extension to deliver it. Even with media and business interests behind it, the bid failed due to resistance to the stadium; that bounty, instead, went to East London. But the momentum for Hudson Yards did not slow: in 2005, the City Council approved the first of the mayor’s proposed en masse rezoning of the area, heralding it as the only untouched frontier still left in Manhattan (Fisher & Leite: 2018). The MTA refused to pay for the extension as part of its capital plan, and so the Bloomberg administration took the unusual step of paying for it with city funds, rather than the state. This funding scheme was partially done through the sale of $1 billion in development rights to Related, a developer, which was given unfettered access to the entire land mass (Davidson: 2019). On the same day the first phase of construction was completed in 2009, the City Council approved the rezoning of the other half of the railyards. The extension saw its inaugural riders in 2015, and the first towers in Hudson Yards opened to the public in 2019.
Now, consider the generic stakeholders here. The first category are politicians and political champions, starting with Senator Chuck Schumer in 2001, who aligned himself with private sector personnel to call for more development. However, the most important actor was Michael Bloomberg, whose 12 years as New York’s mayor allowed his administration to fully push the MIP through City Council, which played a supportive ‘rubber-stamp’ role. The second category are public sector officials, which should include Dan Doctoroff as a primary ‘cheerleader’ in City Hall for the project; and MTA officials, after the financing deal was struck. The third are the private sector personnel, namely the Group of 35. And finally, the other key MIP stakeholders should include the globalized alliance first brought together by the Olympic bid, particularly in the media, real estate, and business worlds, who were given higher priority by Mayor Bloomberg. Aside from anti-stadium voices, notably missing is any major community presence, which will be explained shortly.
The timeline gives partial background to the decision-making that led to this MIP’s completion, but certain context-specific factors are worth highlighting. The economic headwinds in the early 2000s favored development, especially after the 9/11 attacks and the 2001 recession. The Olympics bid added a coherent structure and turned the plans into a vision. And one stakeholder’s overlapping influences were crucial: Mayor Bloomberg’s status as a billionaire who made his fortune in media and financial telecommunications renders him a major ‘network society’ player and proponent of ‘glocal’ infrastructure, beyond just a politician. Real estate development was a hallmark of his tenure, not just in Hudson Yards. The populist backlash more familiar today arose long after plans had been approved. The alignment of both generic and context-specific factors created what can retroactively be deemed a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ set of circumstances.
Juxtaposed against the literature review, Bloomberg’s ability to “define reality,” according to Flyvbjerg, is evident; each rationality — need for office space; then the Olympics; then, simply, growth — begets the next, which can be observed in the changing tone of press releases. The funding scheme for the subway extension gave City Hall firmer control over the project’s direction. It also had the ease of geolocality: with little population on Manhattan’s Far West Side, there was minimal resistance atypical of Jane Jacobs’ former home (Glaeser & Ponzetto: 14). There were no residents to move, or neighborhoods to raze, à la Robert Moses. But what the №7 line extension and Hudson Yards represent as infrastructures is more prevalent: with ‘smart city’ technology controlling heating, power, and web access, as well as a developer-paid security force, the privatized neighborhood is effectively a walled-off fiefdom for those who can work there, or afford the consortium of high-end retail destinations (Nolan: 2019). As Manhattan’s ‘newest’ neighborhood, it could be ominous for the 2020s; a shining souvenir of ‘splintering urbanism’ (Graham & Marvin: 376).
The principal outcomes have again been realized in terms of physical development, which include, also, street-level improvements, like green space and pedestrian walkways that connect to the nearby High Line park, a popular tourist destination. However, a more valid appraisal of this MIP would be to think systematically, particularly in two areas of focus. First, the subway, which, in 2017, was declared a ‘state of emergency’ due to rampant delays, one of the main culprits being the MTA’s spending on vanity projects, rather than much-needed system upgrades (Rosenthal: 2017). The №7 line extension — at almost $3 billion, serving a little less than 11,000 riders a day in 2018 — qualifies: the average New York City subway rider may have benefited more from $3 billion in signaling work, than a gleaming new station they’ll rarely go to. The second area of focus is income inequality, which widened during Bloomberg’s tenure (Badger: 2019). It’s worth evaluating whether it was financially equitable to invest in Hudson Yards, which has no public housing, as more New Yorkers fell below the poverty line, and affordable housing dwindled behind demand. The crux in this paper, however, is that Hudson Yards still needed public transport, at $2.75 a ride, to function.
Infrastructure, no matter how global in scale, still seems constrained by the parameters of context. The same city that initiated Hudson Yards in the 2000s also rejected Amazon’s HQ2 plans ten years later, with debates over infrastructure and equity now at the forefront. Increasingly, cities are following suit, leveraging their appeal in ‘network societies’ as a negotiating tactic for local gains. The generic themes mentioned in this paper, such as stakeholders’ influence in decision-making and globalization’s effect on rationality, will be tested against these context-specific lessons in the 2020s unlike ever before, as waves of populism and societal upheaval toss out the modus operandi for MIPs. Infrastructure will continue to be agents of change, but just what exactly that change is remains to be seen.
References
Badger, E. (2019). As Bloomberg’s New York Prospered, Inequality Flourished Too. The New York Times. [online] 9 Nov. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/upshot/bloomberg-new-york-prosperity-inequality.html [Accessed 19 Dec. 2019].
Bagli, C. V. (2001). Schumer Proposals Address Shortage of Office Space. The New York Times. [online] 11 Jun. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/11/nyregion/schumer-proposals-address-shortage-of-office-space.html [Accessed 17 Dec. 2019].
Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Davidson, J. (2019). I Have a Feeling We’re Not in New York Anymore. [online] Intelligencer. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/hudson-yard-billionaires-fantasy-city.html [Accessed 17 Dec. 2019].
Duminy, J., & Luckett, T. (2012). Literature survey: Mega events and the working poor, with a special reference to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. South Africa: African Centre for Cities. University of Cape Town.
Fisher, B & Leite, F. (2018). “The Cost of New York City’s Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project.” Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research, Working Paper Series 2018–2.
Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and power: democracy in practice. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Glaeser, E. & Ponzetto, G. (2017). “The political economy of transportation investment,” Economics of Transportation.
Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London, Routledge.
Moss, M. (2011). “How New York City Won the Olympics.” Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. New York University.
Nolan, H. (2019). New York’s Hudson Yards is an ultra-capitalist Forbidden City. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/13/new-york-hudson-yards-ultra-capitalist [Accessed 17 Dec. 2019].
OMEGA Centre (2012). Mega Projects Executive Summary: Lessons for Decision-Makers: An Analysis of Selected International Large-Scale Transport Infrastructure Projects. University College London.
Rosenthal, B.M. (2017). The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth. The New York Times. [online] 29 Dec. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html [Accessed 28 Feb. 2019].
