Megacompanies Sculpting Megacities

How will these large megacities—and the megacompanies that they house (companies such as Hewlett-Packard [HP], General Electric [GE], Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Google)—address our urban needs as every region of the world begins to encounter severe carbon and capital constraints? Are these places mobilizing a response to poverty and disease, crowding and mobility? Are they rebalancing humanity’s needs for money, people, and rules?

The best of these megacities are embracing more public transportation and learning to do more with less. They are preparing for an overpopulated world, with constraints on capital and carbon.

Those who are aware of the threat of rising waters caused by excess carbon in our atmosphere have already begun climate-change mitigation projects. The new $15 billion, 245-mile water-control system surrounding New Orleans is a climate-change mitigation project. Similar plans are under way in Venice. Firms such as Architecture, Engineering, Consulting, Operations, and Maintenance (AECOM), CH2MHill, and Arcadis, all massive, globe-spanning engineering corporations, have made billions in those cities through competitive frugality profiting from doing more with less.