Why autocrats get high on skyscrapers
THE Ryugyong Hotel towers over the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, a 105-storey concrete pyramid that’s been dubbed the Hotel of Doom and even the “worst building in the history of the world”.
Construction began in 1987, halted five years later, then resumed in 2008. The exterior was eventually completed, but according to reports the hotel has still not opened.
It’s the kind of building only a dictator could love.
Political scientists have long noted how fond autocratic rulers are of “white elephants”, expensive and useless construction projects.
Yet quantifying the relationship between concentrated power and vanity skyscrapers has presented a tricky problem: not all autocracies are alike, nor are all boondoggles.
In a working paper published last month, two researchers at the University of Oslo proposed a clever solution, cross-referencing a database of completed skyscrapers against a mechanism for scoring governments across time, country and the degree to which power resides with the people.
After controlling for population, income, urbanisation and other factors, the researchers found that a harsh autocracy builds 1.6 more skyscrapers a year, on average, than a high-quality democracy. Crunching the numbers another way, the worst dictators can be expected to build an additional 150 metres of skyscraper a year.
While not all skyscrapers built by authoritarian regimes are white elephants, the paper found that autocracies are more likely to construct tall buildings even in the absence of clear economic incentive.
“It could just be that they think the building is cool, or it could be that building has the power to put them on the international stage,” said Haakon Gjerlow, a PhD candidate and lead author of the paper.
Alternatively, it could be a connection between dictators and corruption. “They can give valuable construction contracts to their allies in the system,” Gjerlow said.
The model was not designed to describe why countries build specific buildings. The point, said Gjerlow, was to filter out factors such as population density and relative wealth as a way to isolate the role of a government.
Autocracies are more likely to build skyscrapers in countries that haven’t experienced the sort of urbanisation that traditionally leads to high-density construction, according to the research. Political strongmen are also more likely to build what Gjerlow calls vanity meters — buildings with uninhabited floors or structures intended to increase the height.
Of course, dictators don’t have a monopoly on vanity height. Manhattan’s One World Trade Centre is topped by a spire designed to take the building to a symbolic height of 1 776 feet (540m). The US Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776.
But autocratic rulers routinely exhibit a flair for the superfluous. Gjerlow’s paper cites the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast, which was built in the 1980s as a replica of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The project doubled the national debt in a nation where only 20% of the population was Catholic.
Research on the links between popular government and skyscrapers also allows for some interesting alternate history. Based on Gjerlow’s ranking system, for instance, the 1920 ratification of the 19th amendment to the US constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, improved the US score for self-government by enough to lower the nation’s expected output of skyscrapers.
Had women’s suffrage movement failed, the US would have built about 17 more skyscraper metres by 1923 and 1 500m more in decades to follow. That finding is based on the degree to which the expansion of voting rights improved American democracy.
❛ They can give construction contracts to their allies in the system
A casual survey of worldwide skyscraper construction tends to support the theory that autocrats build higher. In recent years, of course, China has dominated the field of tall structures: of the 128 buildings higher than 200m completed last year, 84 were in China — the ninth year the country has built the tallest buildings.
The United Arab Emirates and Singapore — both of which have built notable skyscrapers in recent years, and neither of which boast flourishing democracies — weren’t included in government rankings used by researchers, but fit the pattern.
A skyscraper can also sound a call to urbanisation. “Maybe the leaders had a developmental strategy,” Gjerlow said of the dictators who loom large in the tower boom.
Is there a broader economic benefit to paying for a tall building? “If that’s the case,” he said, “autocrats tend to use that strategy more than democracies.” — Bloomberg