Planning and Implementation of Mega-urban Projects Essay

Planning and Implementation of Mega-urban Projects - Essay Example Another aspect of these mega urban projects is the fact that the built environment needs to be based on the social systems and structures in such a way that the economy, culture, and social factors become evident through the arrangement of the landscape. This is what Soja describes as the â€Å"socio-spatial dialectics† These four major factors come together to define the capitalist and socio-spatial elements of a given mega urban project. This is because these indicators provide the basis for evaluating urban development project. This paper examines three urban mega projects in the United Kingdom, Germany, and South Korea. The paper examines the key elements of these three project in relation to the concepts and ideas of urban megaprojects. In arriving at this end, the paper will compare differences and similarities between the base projects. In this process, the paper will examine the trends in urban megaprojects. Liverpool ONE is a major urban development project that was conducted to boost the competitiveness of one of the UK's cities. It involved a total of about  £1 billion in expenditure and it sought to redevelop 42 acres of Liverpool into a retail-oriented zone (Grosvenor, 2007). The project was completed in 2008 and it made that zone of Liverpool one of the top five retail centers in the UK. The Potsdamer Platz in Germany is one of the key areas of Berlin and lies just a kilometer away from the famous Brandenburg Gate and has the German Parliament [Reichstag] just over twenty kilometers away (Weitz, 2007). This makes the region a very sensitive cultural and public section of Germany. The area came under intense Allied bombardment during World War II and it became a buffer zone during the Soviet Occupation (Weitz, 2007). However, after German reunification in the late 1980s, the Potsdamer Platz has gone through a lot of change processes.