ABSTRACT
Recent research on urban mega-projects has revealed the increased prevalence of large, iconic and costly commercial housing and infrastructure projects underway in cities throughout the world. While this research has been conducted in diverse locations, little attention has been paid to mega-projects' uneven geography and, more specifically, to why this mode of development has become more prevalent in some locations than others. Highlighting the experience of mega-project development in Chinese and Indian cities, where local state government tends to play a key role commissioning, sponsoring and regulating urban development, this chapter argues that variations in the planning and implementation of mega-projects can be explained, in part, through the lens of state rescaling. China's non-electoral, single-party system has enabled the relatively smooth transfer of power to the metropolitan level, thus facilitating the consolidation of the financial and political resources needed to plan and implement Shanghai's large, iconic and usually disruptive mega-projects. While similar efforts have been made in India to rescale power to the metropolitan level, reforms have been hampered by inter-party and inter-scalar competition.
