Con-C.3.1 — Megaproject Curse: ResearchCity Will Fail at Scale (Flyvbjerg)

Severity: C (Serious) | Sphere: Se2 | Target: ResearchCity

ResearchCity as described is the largest planned institution in human history: 40 million researchers on 133,333 acres (539 km²), 50 stories high, with 288,000 leaders. For scale: CERN employs ~17,500 people; the NIH has ~27,000 employees; the Manhattan Project employed ~125,000 across multiple sites. ResearchCity proposes to be 300x larger than the Manhattan Project and 2,300x larger than CERN, housed in a single physical location, addressing all existential risks simultaneously.

The megaproject literature predicts failure at this scale. Flyvbjerg (2003, 2011) documents that large-scale projects systematically exhibit cost overruns (averaging 20–45% depending on type), schedule delays that grow with project scale, scope creep (inevitable when the mission is “solve all existential problems”), and coordination collapse as communication channels grow as \(O(n^2)\). Brooks’s Law (1975) generalizes this: coordination costs grow faster than productive output as team size increases.

Scott (1998), Seeing Like a State, documents the systematic failure of “high modernist” centralized institutions — from Brasilia to Soviet collective farms — that shared ResearchCity’s confidence that complex problems can be solved through centralized planning at ambitious scale. No project at ResearchCity’s proposed scale has ever been completed on time, on budget, or to specification.

Connection to prior rounds: C3.1 deepens Con-A.2.2, which questioned whether a Jubilee system can address all extinction pathways simultaneously. Where C2.2 challenged the logic of a single-mechanism solution, C3.1 challenges the organizational feasibility of the institutional vehicle designed to implement it.

(Source: C3.1 from OOv1 Critique Round 3.)