Disruptive Impacts
摘要
This chapter develops a set of inferences from the empirical chapters. This chapter sheds light on the notion of disruptive complexity, which aims to express the variegated and interdependent web of impacts that megaprojects have on urban areas: cost overruns, negative environmental impacts, gentrification risks, accentuation of socioeconomic inequality, drawbacks of top-down cultural engineering, neglect of local cultural identities, uncertain economic success, population displacements, spoiling of cities’ visual and structural uniqueness, rise of congestion and overpopulation, political gridlock, threats to ecosystems, environmental risks of many kinds, and others. The chapter offers a typology of disruptive impacts: socioeconomic; environmental; spatial/territorial/visual; political (including geopolitical); financial; cultural; and systemic. Impacts can generally be defined as probable consequences or materializations of risks, exposure, and vulnerability. Risk can then be defined as the probability of an impact. Some materialized risks (impacts) are never identified in the original risk assessment and are not included in any sustainability planning, leading to negative megaproject impacts. Thus, uncertainty—the reason for conceiving a risk—is also present when risks materialize into impacts. This is expected because the urban impacts of megaprojects are a function of megaproject embeddedness in the polity, economy, and society. Therefore, impacts can sometimes, but not always, be predicted by examining the risks. In other words, impacts are emergent properties of megaprojects that cannot always be predicted in advance in any meaningful or comprehensive manner.