Preface and acknowledgments

Abstract

The intellectual origins of this book date back to the time when I was researching globalization in the Basque region of Spain in the early 2000s. My research about the city of Bilbao’s revitalization process led me to investigate the Abandoibarra megaproject, a new Central Business District aiming at reconfiguring Bilbao’s linkages with the global economy. I presented my work at the 2006 ISA congress in South Africa, and I later published my book Bilbao. Basque pathways to globalization (London: Elsevier, 2007), which features a chapter devoted to Abandoibarra. One of the lessons of my research about Bilbao was that urban megaprojects (UMPs) cannot be understood in all their complexity from the perspective of a single discipline, not even from the broader angle of the social sciences. Another lesson learned during my research was that the ambitions of local elites to rebuild cities via urban megaprojects often met severe resistance from civil society, particularly in a context where the meaning of public and collective action is being redefined. Both lessons had an impact on the planning of this book, which is a work including specialists from several disciplines (sociology, architecture, planning, geography) and one where the role of local elites in urban revitalization is severely questioned. I continued working on UMPs after my research on Bilbao ended. In 2008 I taught a graduate seminar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on “Cities, Regional Restructuring and Globalization” where I devoted several sessions to discussing urban megaprojects and benefited from feedback by my MIT and Harvard students. More recently, in 2009, I participated in the Arrested Development conference at The Cooper Union in New York City and gained insights allowing me to better understand the fate of UMPs under constrained economic conditions. My graduate class in New York, “Urban Projects and the Architectures of Globalization,” attempts to reconcile research on UMPs with larger social-scientific concerns about globalization, as does the book that you have in your hands. I was very fortunate to have been able to put together an outstanding group of scholars with whom I share a deep intellectual curiosity about urban megaprojects. If this book creates any interest, it will be because of their passion, commitment, creativity, and professionalism.

Citation

(2013), "Preface and acknowledgments", del Cerro Santamaría, G. (Ed.) Urban Megaprojects: A Worldwide View (Research in Urban Sociology, Vol. 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. xiii-xiv. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1047-0042(2013)0000013004