The layers of building a city

A city does not begin with a design. It begins with authority: a decision by the host government that the city should exist, rights over the land it will occupy, a legal status for the zone, and the instruments that give the programme an existence in law rather than in a presentation. This is the first layer, and everything above it rests on how completely it is finished.

Work at this layer is legal and procedural: establishing the formal basis of the programme with the host government, securing land tenure, defining the perimeter and the status of the zone, and setting out the enabling instruments — drafted with local counsel under the host jurisdiction — that determine which powers are delegated to the zone and which remain with the state. It also means establishing the sequence: which approvals are required, in what order, and from whom. None of this is accelerated by adding money or engineering capacity to the programme.

It is a separate layer because it is the only one whose counterparty is the state and whose instrument is law rather than contract. Where the mandate and the land rights sit inside a development company, they become assets on a commercial balance sheet and follow that company’s ownership, its creditors and its commercial fortunes. Held separately, they survive a change of developer, contractor or investor. The practical argument is as important: a defect at this layer is inherited by every layer above it, and no later structure, standard or financing can repair a programme whose legal base was left incomplete.

Above the companies that plan, build and operate sits a layer whose purpose is not to deliver anything. A custodial foundation and a holding structure hold long-term control of the programme: they appoint and remove, they consent or withhold consent on matters that affect the whole city, and they carry the obligations that outlast any individual contract. Global Cities Development is itself held this way, under a foundation as sole shareholder, as the corporate particulars record.

The substance of this layer is constitutional. It defines the purpose the structure exists to serve, the reserve powers that cannot be delegated downwards, how boards are composed and how appointments are made, and the standards of conduct that apply across the programme: disclosure of ultimate beneficial ownership to counterparties, screening of counterparties for sanctions exposure and politically exposed persons, rules on conflicts of interest, zero tolerance of bribery, and no remuneration contingent on the decisions of public authorities.

It is a separate layer because control and delivery reward opposite behaviours. A developer is paid to move and a contractor is paid to build, while a custodian is required to be able to say no — to a schedule, to a counterparty, to a financing that would mortgage the city’s long-term interest for a nearer-term gain. Those roles cannot be held by the same board without one of them being eroded. Separation also fixes the time horizon. Construction is measured in years and a city in generations, so the layer that keeps the programme intact has to be insulated from the turnover of investors, contractors and managers beneath it, and no single participant at a lower level should be able to acquire leverage over the whole.

This is the layer that turns a mandate into a buildable city. One master development company holds the plan: the phasing, the land-use rights and the development standards that every participant must build to. It is also the single point of contact with government for the programme as a whole, so that the state deals with one accountable counterparty rather than with a shifting set of contractors and financiers.

The work is planning and administration. The master plan and its phasing are prepared and kept current; land is held and allocated as serviced plots or long leases on defined terms; trunk corridors and sites for ports, energy, water and transport are reserved before land is committed to anything else; and development standards — building codes, design rules, environmental and social requirements — are written once and passed down into every contract below. As districts come into use, the same layer takes on city management: enforcing standards, maintaining land and property records, coordinating the sector operators, and administering the services the zone itself is responsible for.

It is a separate layer because the plan has to outlive the projects and sit apart from the money. A master developer that also financed and operated each sector would concentrate every risk of the city in one balance sheet: a difficulty in a single terminal or power plant would put the plan, the land records and the government relationship at risk. Kept distinct, the plan constrains the sector vehicles rather than depending on them, and a failure in one of them is a contained commercial event. The separation works upwards as well. The master developer is accountable to the custodial layer above it and does not hold the mandate or the reserve powers itself, which is what allows it to be replaced without the programme being replaced.

A city is not one project. It is a port, a power system, a water and sanitation system, roads and public transport, digital networks, social facilities and built districts, each with its own technology, its own timetable, its own regulator and its own economics. At this layer each of them is delivered through a dedicated special-purpose company, built to the standards set by the master development layer above it.

Each vehicle is given a defined perimeter and then stands on its own: its own board and licences, its own concession, offtake or service agreements, its own construction and operating contracts, and its own financing secured against its own assets and revenues. A specialist technical or industrial partner may take equity in the vehicle for the sector it knows, alongside the capital arranged at the layer above. What the vehicle may not do is reach beyond its perimeter, and nothing it signs binds the city as a whole.

It is a separate layer because risk is sector-specific and is priced that way. The traffic risk of a terminal has nothing in common with the tariff risk of a water utility or the resource risk of a generation plant, and lenders will only finance on a limited-recourse basis where the assets, revenues and obligations of one sector are ring-fenced from the others. Separation therefore does three things at once: it makes each sector financeable on its own merits, it contains a failure within the sector where it occurred, and it defines exactly how far the rights of any investor extend. An investor in the port is an investor in the port, and acquires no influence over the plan, the mandate or the city.

This is the layer where money enters, and the layer most programmes reach too early. Development finance institutions, institutional investors and specialist industrial partners each have a level of the structure that corresponds to the risk they are able to hold, and the purpose of this layer is to match them to it rather than to assemble a single pool of capital for everything.

The work here is sequencing and preparation. Early structuring and programme preparation are carried at the top of the structure; sector financing is arranged at the level of the individual delivery vehicles, against their own contracts, revenues and security. Before any of that is possible, the programme has to be documented to the standard institutional lenders require: a clear ownership and control chain, disclosed beneficial ownership, verified counterparties, procurement that respects public rules, and environmental and social performance designed in from the start rather than retrofitted. Global Cities Development designs programmes to meet the environmental and social standards applied by development finance institutions, such as the IFC Performance Standards.

It is a separate layer because capital has to follow the structure rather than create it. Money raised before the mandate, the custodial arrangements and the plan are settled buys influence over all of them, and the cost of that influence is usually paid by the city later. Treating capital as a distinct layer also makes each financing reviewable on its own terms: a lender examines one vehicle, with its own assets and obligations, and takes a view on that risk alone, instead of taking a view on an entire programme that has yet to be built.

Construction is finite; a city is not. The last layer covers everything that has to work on the day after handover and for every year after that: water and sanitation, power distribution, waste collection and resource recovery, roads and public realm maintenance, and the administrative services that residents and businesses deal with when they connect a building, register a property or apply for a permit.

Designing this layer means deciding, in advance, who operates each asset and under what terms. Operating entities and service contracts are defined for each utility; service levels, tariffs and the basis on which they may be revised are set; the division between services run by the zone and city management layer and those that remain with the state is agreed; asset registers and lifecycle maintenance budgets are established; and the handover from construction to operation is planned as a controlled transfer rather than an afterthought. Local employment, training and the transfer of operating skills belong here as well, because the operators of the city will be recruited there for decades.

It is a separate layer because the common failure in new cities is not building the infrastructure but running it. Assets are completed and handed to no one, with no operator in place, no tariff basis and no maintenance budget, and they degrade faster than they were built. Operations also have different economics from construction: recurring, tariff-based revenue over a long life, financed and governed differently from a construction programme. Keeping the layer distinct means the city’s day-to-day services do not depend on the balance sheet or the continued existence of whoever built the assets, and the obligation to keep the city working survives the completion of the works.

The digital layer is drawn vertically because it is not a stage of the work. Connectivity, identity, the authoritative registers of land and property, the systems through which public services are delivered, and the systems through which public revenue is administered appear in every other layer at once, and each of them is a public asset rather than a product bought at the end of construction.

In practice this means the digital questions are settled where they arise. The legal layer has to make room for electronic documents, data protection and the lawful basis on which registers are kept. The custodial layer depends on records and audit trails that cannot be quietly rewritten. The master development layer administers the plan, the standards and the land records as data, not as drawings in a cabinet. Each sector vehicle runs its own operating and metering systems, and reports from them to its lenders and its regulator. The services layer is where residents and businesses actually meet all of it. Across these, the layer sets what has to hold in common: open interoperability rather than one vendor’s integration, defined ownership of the data, a decision on where it is held and under whose law, and specialist technology partners engaged under contracts that leave the systems and the data with the public side.

It is treated as a cross-cutting layer rather than one more sector precisely because the alternative is so common. Procured sector by sector and late, digital infrastructure arrives as a collection of platforms that do not recognise the same person, the same plot or the same payment, and the cost of reconciling them falls on the city permanently. Decided once, at the start, identity, records, payments and connectivity become a shared foundation that every layer is required to use — and, equally important, a capability the state retains, rather than a dependency on whichever supplier or sector investor happened to build it.