Picture a highway overpass. Engineers finished it on time, on budget – success by every official measure. But it also impacted the neighbourhood underneath, fragmented green space, cut off pedestrian routes, and sent a steady stream of pollution into the lungs of people who never had a say in its construction. One project ticked off the list. A dozen slow-burning problems quietly created.
This is how most of our cities get built: one decision at a time, in silos, by teams optimising for their own narrow brief and rarely talking to anyone else. The result isn’t dramatic failure it’s something more insidious. It’s a world that functions, technically, while making ...