In the making of a city with tall towers, wide expanses of commercial areas, swanky gated complexes and retail outlets, metro networks and airports, complete with busy thoroughfares, traffic congestion, and ceaseless neon signs, what do the trees, water, and the land that have stood there for centuries say? This is a question that governments, planners and private capital hardly ever pause to think about and reflect upon. Their approach and motivation to planning and building a city are driven by the mutually dependent twin lenses of economic efficiency and profit maximisation. At some stage, though, the land, water, and trees force us all—they who build and profit and the rest of us who live and work—to face the question.

Engineering Marvels And Urbanisation

Planning and making cities, especially in the neoliberal economy, focuses on what engineering marvels can be manufactured—the tallest towers, the longest tunnels, viaducts below acres of forests, turning floodplains of rivers into real estate, bending rivers to fit an airport, landfilling creeks and coastal areas, constructing the longest road in the sea, and putting the fastest train on rails between two cities. These are legitimate engineering achievements, especially for a nation that seized its own future barely 80 years ago.

But, as the tunnel boring machines and the massive cranes crank to work round-the-clock, lacerating the land and trees and water in their path, the engineering marvels must be countered with questions from other disciplines, in this case........

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