{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017891130567186907, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0015226494099733537, 'mean_word_length': 5.67005076142132, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment

In this era of vicious competition among cities for private sector investment and jobs, Mega-Projects should be required reading for every big city mayor, cityplanning director, and director of economic development in the United States before undertaking the next major infrastructure enhancement or capital improvement project ostensibly to attract business investment or tourism dollars. As cities accumulate more debt to pay for larger and increasingly complex public structures, the findings in Altshuler and Luberoff’s book on the new politics of infrastructure development become more important for responsible local officials, both elected and appointed. Without question, this book needs to be read by students, researchers, teachers, scholars, observers, and practitioners in the fields of urban politics, city planning, and community and regional development. Mega-Projects describes and catalogues the factors that changed the political environment of urban infrastructure development since the 1960s, giving rise to the increased complexity and cost of civic projects. In addition, the authors show how local political interests promoted a wider variety of urban projects, undertaken to secure their future development. Altshuler and Luberoff provide the reader with indepth and historically detailed discussions of several massive urban projects in major American cities. But the authors go beyond well-written and interesting case studies of individual urban infrastructure projects; they also include a careful and wellconstructed outline of classic and emerging urban theory. They then link these theories to the actions of cities engaged in large-scale infrastructure development. The successful connection of theory and practice in a very readable text constitutes the major contribution of Mega-Projects. This text reaches a level of explanation and understanding of the factors influencing the growth of massive urban projects that similar books fail to achieve. Mega-Projects contains the right mix of storytelling and theory to be both informative and predictive. In other words, this book can help the reader understand the political process behind the construction and financing of massive projects in major metropolitan areas, like the Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel, as well as the infrastructure activities of smaller metro areas, such as the riverfront development project and convention center complex in Omaha, Nebraska. The authors identify significant patterns from their various cases, such as the underestimation of