Megaprojects are large scale, complex projects which usually
involve massive capital investment and take years to
build. They're often in sectors like
infrastructure, energy or transportation.
Examples include building new cities, airports, power
stations, high speed rail networks or massive buildings.
In today's video, let's look at some overly ambitious ideas that
made no practical sense and so failed.
Everything from sinking Man Made Island to cities no one wanted
to live in, to giant abandoned buildings or futuristic
transportation solutions that made no sense.
First up we have Dubais, man made islands.
In the 1990's the government of Dubai decided to diversify away
from its reliance on oil to building a service and tourism
oriented economy. In 1991 there was just one
skyscraper in Dubai. There were six in 1998 and today
there are 265. The property development boom
around the turn of the Millennium turned Dubai into one
of the fastest growing cities in the world.
Apparently 25% of the construction cranes in use
worldwide are operating in Dubai today.
They built the world's tallest building, the world's largest
shopping mall, the world's largest fountain, and the
world's tallest hotel. They're apparently developing a
theme park called Dubai Land, which is planned to be twice the
size of Walt Disney World but significantly less woke.
One of the problems Dubai identified in becoming a tourist
hotspot was its short coastline, especially if it was going to
become a beach resort. They built their first
artificial island for the Burj Al Arab Hotel, where
construction began in 1994. They then laid out plans for
three palm shaped islands, an archipelago of island shaped
like a map of the world, and another archipelago called the
universe in the shape of the sun, moon, Milk Way and solar
system. Construction on the Palm
Jumeirah began in 2001. From above it looks like a palm
tree inside a circle. Unlike the Burj al Arab island,
this was built entirely from sand and rocks, with no concrete
or steel used. A mega project wouldn't be a
mega project without a monorail. So of course there's a 3.4 mile
long monorail running down the centre of the Palm and the
leaves are filled with homes and hotels, creating a sort of
suburb in the ocean. By late 2007, most of the
properties were available to be handed over to their new owners
right as the global financial crisis hit, causing Dubai
property prices to fall by around 60%.
A list of notable residents on Wikipedia includes a who's who
of fugitives like a sanctioned Russian oligarch, 2 notable
narcotics traffickers and a few international money launderers.
My take away is that it's probably not wise to get into an
argument with your neighbors on the Palm Jumeirah.
In 2009, it was reported that NASA satellite data showed that
the Palm was sinking into the sea at a rate of about an inch
every five years, which isn't great.
The outer break water, unfortunately acts as a barrier
preventing the water within the palm from moving, which caused
it to become stagnant and to stink.
Well, that doesn't sound great either.
On the positive side, it keeps the plague of jellyfish that
surround the outside of the island from getting in.
And yeah, that's because there seems to be a plague of
jellyfish. And really, a plague of anything
is usually not considered good. According to a 2009 New York
Times article, when you turn the faucets on in the hotels on the
Palm, only cockroaches come out. So you, you probably shouldn't
do that. It's it's probably best if you
bring a bottle of water along with you.
After launching the project, the developer, who must have No Fear
of the drug traffickers, money launderers and various other
island mobsters, increased the number of residential units on
the island, reducing the space between them to make up for some
of their losses, which didn't make the home buyers happy.
There were other problems reported too, like human waste
being dumped in the water, not to scare off the jellyfish, but
because most of Dubai's development went ahead without
proper sewage facilities, meaning that it has to be
trucked out of the city where the trucks reportedly wait up to
16 hours in line to deposit it in the city's only sewage
treatment plant. I should note that this is the
most successful of Dubai's man made islands.
The others are considered failures.
The Palm Jebel Ali is another artificial palm shaped island in
Dubai. It began construction in 2002
and was supposed to be completed by mid 2008.
It was badly located outside of the city in an industrial area
near the port. The project was put on hold when
real estate prices started collapsing in in 2007 and it was
relaunched last year. It was originally supposed to be
50% larger than the Palm Jumeirah.
The homes on this island, when built, will be arranged to spell
out a poem by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashad Al Maktoum Reading
Take Wisdom from the Wise. It takes a man of vision to ride
on water. Not everyone who rides a horse
is a jockey. Great men rise to greater
challenges. He's not really a poet by by
trade. I think it's it's much more of a
hobby for him and I'm sure he does other things which he's
really good at. Last May, the Palm Jabel Ali was
relaunched with the announcement that it would now be even
bigger, twice the size of the Palm Jumeirah, which hopefully
means twice as many jellyfish too.
The project aims to house 35,000 families and they say something
about a master plan and renewable energy, which I'm sure
is great. A mega project wouldn't be a
mega project without some master plan and environmental claims.
1/3 palm shaped island was partially built, construction
was halted. It was then renamed twice and
the new master plan that's not my term upstairs seems to
involve it no longer being shaped like a palm, Instead
it'll be shaped like whatever it looks like now.
There will be 80 hotels on this thing, and no official opening
date has been announced yet. And I'm not sure that it really
matters anyhow. They're all slowly sinking into
the sea. Allegedly the most disastrous of
the artificial island projects in Dubai, other than the ones
that were quite wisely cancelled before construction, is the
World Archipelago, which cost around $10 billion to construct.
It's supposed to look like a map of the world, and it kind of
does if all of the countries got chewed up and spat into the
ocean. Unlike the Palm projects, it
doesn't even have a monorail or a Rd.
If you buy an island you then need to brave the jellyfish
infested waters in a boat. A street called Raining St. was
planned as part of the Heart of Europe project where artificial
rainfall would occur whenever the outdoor temperature exceeded
27°C, with the objective being to make a close copy of the
Southern European climate. The initial plan was that
utilities would be routed underwater, with pumping
stations providing freshwater to each of the islands.
Power was supposed to be provided through underwater
cables too. None of this was ever installed
and buyers instead have to provide their own power using
diesel generators. Wastewater and refuse systems
are the buyers problem too. Or at least it's more the buyers
problem than it is on the palm shaped islands.
Construction of the 300 islands that make up the World began in
2003 before being halted due to the global financial crisis. 60%
of the islands were then sold as is to private contractors in
2008, and development on most of the islands has gone nowhere.
The World Archipelago was initially pitched as the
ultimate in exclusivity, which sounds about right, as there's
nothing really more exclusive than being the only person
there. There are, of course, claims
that these islands are sinking into the sea too, which the
developers say are wholly inaccurate.
Now, not all of these islands are entirely abandoned.
The world island called Lebanon was the first to offer a beach
bar and sun loungers and the resort was opened on the
Argentina island in 2021, possibly meaning that the Dubai
versions of Lebanon and Argentina have more successful
economies than the actual Lebanon and Argentina.
OK, so Next up on our list of failed mega projects we have
golden Finance 117, which is the dubious honour of being the
world's tallest abandoned building.
Construction on the skyscraper, which was planned to be the 5th
tallest building in the world, began in 2008 and was scheduled
for completion in 2014. The building was designed to
resemble a walking stick, which in a way all skyscrapers kind of
resemble, but this one would have a diamond shaped three
story tall observation deck at the top where people could eat,
swim, and oddly enough play polo.
I'm not really sure how the horses would get in and out, but
that's not really my problem to deal with.
You're. Not taking that interval then.
We have to stay to kill them. At the time of planning, the
building was supposed to be the centerpiece of its Developers
Golden Metropolan scheme. A1 square Mile High end
residential and business district about 5 miles from
downtown Tianjin in China. The tower topped out in 2015 at
a height of 1957 feet tall. It has 128 stories above ground,
with 117 of them intended for housing, hotel and commercial
space. The 117 occupiable floors gave
the building its name. Construction began in 2008 but
was halted twice. The first halt was in 2010 due
to fallout from the global financial crisis.
Work resumed in 2011 with the new estimated completion date of
2018. In 2015, the Chinese stock
market bubble popped and the developer shares fell 67%.
They were forced to suspend construction later that year
while they reorganized their finances.
The Golden Finance 117 failed for a number of reasons.
The primary reason was its location in the outskirts of a
secondary Chinese city, Tianjin, where the kind of people who
could afford to live in a luxury building like this didn't live.
The wealthy people who could afford to buy these apartments
probably wouldn't want to relocate to the outskirts of
Tianjin, so there was no real market for this building to
begin with. The other problem was that the
developer, Golden Properties, ran into significant financial
difficulties after the 2015 Chinese stock market crash.
In 2018, China passed a new regulation outlawing new
buildings more than 1640 feet tall.
By this point, Golden Finance 117 was already more than 300
feet taller than the new regulations permitted in 2016.
The building drew a lot of media attention when a Russian couple
filmed themselves climbing with no safety harnesses to the top
of a construction crane on top of the building.
There was a warning on screen in their video that viewers
shouldn't attempt to imitate this.
Now, I don't think that that warning was aimed at me, as I've
had a light bulb out for over a year in my house because I've
been too lazy to stand up on a chair to change it.
To be clear, I'm not afraid to stand on the chair, I just
haven't got around to it, that's all.
When the building was put up for sale a few years ago as part of
the liquidation of the developer Golden Metropolitan, it didn't
attract much attention and no attempts have been made to
resurrect the building since 2018.
Golden Finance 117 was simply a case of building a luxury
skyscraper in a location that couldn't support the demand for
such a property. Next on our list of failed mega
projects we have Forest City Malaysia.
There are at least 50 ghost cities in China where around
65,000,000 properties are unoccupied.
Chinese developers poured more concrete between 2011 and 2013
than was used in the United States throughout the entire
20th century. In the US, more than half of
Americans invest in the stock market and around 65% own
property. In China, only around 7% of the
population own stocks, but around 90% of property
investments in the 20 tens. As prices rose, Chinese citizens
borrowed a greater multiple of their wealth than people did
anywhere else in the world to invest in property.
Chinese property developers didn't just build in China.
The country's largest developer, Country Garden, unveiled Forest
City in Malaysia in 2016, a $100 billion mega project under
President XI's Belt and Road Initiative.
The Belt and Road Initiative, which is sometimes referred to
as the New Silk Road, was launched in 2013 as one of the
most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.
It was originally devised to link East Asia and Europe
through physical infrastructure like roads and ports.
It later expanded to Africa, Oceana and Latin America,
significantly broadening China's economic and political influence
while also allowing the country to diversify the investment of
its vast foreign exchange reserves.
In Malaysia, the plan was to build a futuristic eco friendly
metropolis featuring vertical green spaces, surveillance and
security drones, as that's what people seem to want, a golf
course, water park, offices, bars and restaurants.
The city would be built on four man made islands of course, and
the developer said that Forest City would eventually be home to
nearly 1,000,000 people. Now I'm a little bit
disappointed in this one, as I did a bit of Googling and can
find no evidence of even plans for a monorail.
I'm not sure that you should go straight to the surveillance and
security drones without first building a monorail, but there
were fortunately plans for solar roadways.
A a megaproject just wouldn't really be a megaproject without
some sort of nonsense eco transportation promise.
Solar freaking roadways. In this picture you can see what
are quite possibly the vertical gardens, but it might also just
be stuff growing on the outside of the abandoned buildings.
It's it's sometimes hard to tell.
To a pessimist there are weeds in your gutters, while to an
optimist they're hanging gardens.
Despite being marketed as an energy efficient, ecologically
sensitive, land conserving, low polluting offshore city, the
development was built in the middle of a rank one
environmentally sensitive area and destroyed coastal wetlands
and a mangrove forest. I'm not sure if building an
artificial island should be counted as land conserving, but
I suppose we'll let them away with that one.
BBC reporters who visited Forest City in 2023 describe seeing a
children's train that someone forgot to turn off, doing
endless loops around the abandoned shopping mall play,
saying head, shoulders, knees and toes in Chinese despite
there being no children inside. Residents told the reporters
that they were desperate to escape the city, which they
called a lifeless husk that quickly erodes the sanity of
anyone trying to live there. They probably shouldn't put that
in their real estate listing. Only one of the four man made
islands originally planned was ever built.
The plan was that when the first apartments were sold out, the
next three islands would be built in 2014.
Almost as soon as construction began, problems arose.
Construction was halted for months after officials in
Singapore, a few miles across the Strait from Malaysia, raised
concerns about the environmental destruction.
The real problem came two years later, however, when China,
fearing the collapse of its currency, stopped citizens from
buying property abroad. While built in Malaysia, Forest
City was not built for Malaysians.
It was instead built to be sold to Chinese property investors
who had been priced out of buying apartments in China.
The prices were way too high for Malaysians, and if the Chinese
could no longer buy real estate abroad, there was no real market
for Forest City. To make things worse, in 2018,
Malaysia's Prime Minister restricted visas for Chinese
buyers, citing his objection to a city built for foreigners.
Next came the pandemic and then the bursting of the Chinese real
estate bubble. Finally, in 2023, the one road
to Forest City collapsed in a giant sinkhole.
I don't believe this was caused by overuse.
Local Malaysian authorities, who have a 40% stake in Forest City,
made efforts to revive interest in the project over the last few
years. They promised to turn it into a
special financial zone with a tax deal for the family offices
of ultra wealthy investors hoping to attract them.
According to the BBC, the biggest draw is the area's duty
free status. And people travel to Forest City
to buy cheap cigarettes and alcohol.
And that's really the kind of tourists you want, the ones that
will travel long distances for cheap booze and cigarettes.
They've also built attractions like a stairway on the beach,
which is supposed to be a tourist attraction.
Apparently it's very Instagrammable.
You know the way tourists will travel miles out into the middle
of nowhere to take a photo on the stairs and hang out on the
crocodile infested beach? Oh yeah, I, I forgot to mention
the crocodiles, didn't I? Yeah, there's, there's
crocodiles. In fact, that sign on the beach
near the Instagram stairs is there to warn you about the
crocodiles. No wonder they call it the
Stairway to Heaven. There's a good chance that
you're not getting out of there alive.
That photo might be your last Instagram upload.
Sorry, we we seem to have taken a bit of a a dark turn here.
It's not that bad. Let's see what the BBC has to
say about the attractions of Forest City.
Well, they say that on the beach you'll find piles of discarded
alcohol bottles and pockets of local drinkers who provide the
bulk of human activity in Forest City.
Yeah, I mean it, it doesn't sound great, but equally it
won't sound entirely unfamiliar to anyone who's taken a a day
trip from London to Brighton. I'll tell you, the people of
Brighton really like a a can of special brew on the beach.
The BBC says that when night falls, Forest City becomes pitch
dark and the empty streets become really creepy.
OK, so it's it's a bit of a tough sell.
Let's see if I can find a more uplifting mega project for the
next one. OK, so Next up we have the
Hyperloop. That would be good.
At least there won't be jellyfish and crocodiles
everywhere. That's the good thing about the
CGI based megaprojects, the designers can usually keep the
wildlife out of them. The Hyperloop was reinvented by
Elon Musk, a man whose hand gestures are so awkward that he
had to put a special steering wheel in his cars back in 2013
when he wrote the 53 page long white paper on what he called a
fifth mode of transport. Now the idea of the vacuum
train, which is what the Hyperloop is, has been around
since at least 1799, when George Menthurst patented an
atmospheric railway that could convey people or cargo through
pressurized or evacuated tubes. But Elon Musk also invented it
in 2013. Musk's Hyperloop capsules were
supposed to float on a bed of air within a vacuum tube, and
the entire system was supposed to generate more power than it
used through the use of solar panels on the outside of the
tube. The first Hyperloop was supposed
to run from Los Angeles to San Francisco, meaning that it would
require a 400 mile long airtight tube and pumps that could pull a
2,000,000 cubic metre vacuum, which is 50 times the volume of
the largest vacuum chamber ever built.
Musk claimed that the pods would travel at twice the speed of an
airplane and trips would cost $25 per ticket, apart from the
near impossibility of maintaining a vacuum tube that
would be hundreds of miles long. The plans involved pods of 14
people launched every two minutes, which would involve
rapidly repressurizing and depressurizing the tube as the
pods were loaded. There are hundreds of videos on
YouTube explaining why this system couldn't work.
For example, if there was a small hole in the tube, the
whole system would implode, killing everyone inside.
And actually, actually almost everything you can think of that
could cause problems in a vacuum train would not only cause
problems, but the problems would kill all of the passengers,
which is not really what they would want.
Nonetheless, hyperloops were announced for the United States,
India, Saudi Arabia, Italy and Canada, despite the whole idea
having been thoroughly debunked by scientists and engineers.
From the day of its announcement, Hyperloop One
managed to raise about $450 million from investors and build
a small test track near Las Vegas.
Another start up named Hyperloop TT secured $108 million in
investment, according to Bloomberg.
Hyperloop 1 employed more than 200 people at its peak, but laid
them all off in December 2023 after failing to reinvent
transit. Its biggest investor, Dubai
Ports, apparently owns the remain intellectual property.
Carlo van der Weyer of the Technical University of
Eindhoven described the Hyperloop as a very complicated
solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist.
He went on to say that putting money into a Hyperloop as a
serious transportation system was a stupid idea from the
beginning. The number of people that could
be transported per Hyperloop tube would be tiny relative to
conventional trains or airplanes.
Well, the good thing is that people have now worked out that
the whole idea made no sense whatsoever.
After spending more than half a billion dollars, the longest
Hyperloop ever built was just 420 meters long, providing
neither transportation nor a solution.
Wait a minute, hold on, it's not over yet.
I guess based on that huge success, Elon Musk announced
just a month ago that he could build a tunnel from the United
States to Europe with a Hyperloop in it and that it will
be affordable. Well, as far as I'm concerned,
there's no reason to doubt him. After all, he is successfully
building a human colony on Mars. I believe the Rockets will be
leaving any day now. I'm sure that the Boring Company
learned a lot from those small tunnels that they dug under a
parking lot in Las Vegas, and I can't see how tunneling under
the Atlantic Ocean would be any more complicated than that.
The Atlantic Ocean doesn't ever get much deeper than about 5
miles. I'm actually a little bit
surprised that no one's done it already.
It's kind of crazy that people are getting in airplanes rather
than digging a simple 5000 mile long tunnel.
Apparently the boring machines that Musk has developed make
bricks out of the soil that they dig so that they can actually be
sold and make a profit from tunneling.
And then we were making bricks out of the dirt, and these are
bricks that are made by compressing the dirt at
extremely high pressures, adding a little bit of the small amount
of concrete. And we have bricks that are
rated for California seismic loads.
And then these bricks we're actually, we can sort of sell
the bricks for like $0.10 a brick or something like that.
And then we, we do some fun things like make life-size Lego
kits with where you can like order a set and like, well, you
know, anything like, I think we was like thinking of starting
with the Egyptian pantheon. OK, so there are a few things
that seem to sum up to being a bad mega project.
Artificial islands may not work that well.
New cities in the middle of nowhere where no one wants to
live may not be a winner either. Skyscrapers in out of the way
areas don't seem to work that well.
And until Elon has completed his tunnel to Europe, which is
probably only a year or two away, I wouldn't bet on projects
that involve a Hyperloop. Now, there's one project in
Saudi Arabia, Arabia, the Line, which combines pretty much all
of these features. But as I said in my video last
year, I'm actually a big believer in that project.
And the respected journalist Johnny Harris even went out
there a few months ago and filmed a bunch of dump trucks,
which means that the project is definitely going ahead and that
it will definitely be successful.
If you haven't seen it yet, I'll put a link in the show notes to
my YouTube video on Neon the Line.
Have a great week and talk to you in the next podcast.
Bye.