Hudson Yards, the biggest private real estate development in US history, may be slightly less offensive to the memory of Jane Jacobs than a freeway running through Greenwich Village, but not by much. As urban planning visions go, it is a familiar one: an ultracapitalist equivalent of the Forbidden City, a Chichen Itza with a better mall and slightly better-concealed human sacrifice. The development has been dubbed a “billionaire’s fantasy city”, but it is something more sinister than that. It is a billionaire’s reality city. The other 8.6 million of us are just character actors in this drama starring the most unbearable people you can imagine.

If someone were to give you a 28-acre blank canvas in the Manhattan metropolis, what might you create? An urban green space to rival Central Park? A forest of affordable housing? Or just an unpredictable jumble of organically grown city blocks, the sort of untamable warrens of shops and stores and spaces that allow culture to arise from chaos, the hallmark of all of the world’s truly interesting cities? The fact that you would consider any of those ideas just goes to show why you are not worth $7.7bn like the Related Companies CEO, Stephen Ross, the man who shepherded Hudson Yards into existence

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