North American cities used to be enormously ambitious (see also, for example, Boston's Back Bay). Contrast the fear, trepidation and status-quo obstructionism that characterizes municipal affairs today.
http://wp.streetwise.co/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/filling_i...
Can you imagine anything of this scale happening today?
They should have eliminated the Big Dig completely and spent the money on increasing rapid transit capacity.
That said, eliminating the elevated highway that cut the North End off from the rest of the city seems to have been a major boon.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand
[2] http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/11/16/big_dig...
But I did want to add that it isn't only the north end that was cut off. I doubt the resurgence of the Sea port area/"innovation district" would have happened if it hadn't been for the big dig.
Every time I see a cathedral or dom tower ... :)
Contrast that to Southern China. Lots of insanely ambitious city projects, driven once again by tons of growth.
But it so happens that government projects today are very often financial disasters, particularly when backed by bonds or tax increases. There's no law of the market that says this should happen either, but it seems to be a feature of ossified political systems.
When things work pretty well, it can be more difficult to allocated resources for bigger projects, I suppose.
Same goes for regulation. Notice that the whole reason Chicago needed to be raised was so they could drain run-off. So where do they drain it into? The Chicago River and Lake Michigan, which became toxic cesspools until very recently. And those shop owners didn't have much of a say while they were hoisted into the air. Regulation and democratic involvement are really annoying when you want a large capital project to go through, but they're really important to you when that large capital project is something that's being done to you.
Today, nearly all traditional American cities are on the tail end of a long decline (save a small handful, like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle), or else are the kind of sprawly suburban cities that don't have the same need for the ambitious public works that the traditional, dense, American cities had.
One wonders if those lawmakers, teleported back to 19th-century Chicago, would deny that drainage is a problem and forbid basic public policy on any scientific report linking sewage to disease.
North American cities used to suffer with depressing frequency civil engineering disasters that killed dozens of people at a time. It truly would be odd if fear and trepidation regarding the topic is greater now, if that's actually true.
Caution might be greater, since we know more about the topic and more about what we need to be cautious of, but that's all to the good.
Moving into speculation... I believe that society values lives a lot more. It would be very hard to cost effectively build another Golden Gate Bridge due to the lives involved. Is this really a bad thing? So instead we build skyscrapers.