News stories about Dallas’ Arts District often try to cite the total price tag, which is slippery (do you include the underground parking garage? What about all the related civic improvements, like the re-working of Flora Street?). I’ve been guilty of the same thing. Tossing around a (possible) billion dollar figure is not just bragging, though. It does give some indication of the city’s investment in culture as a downtown revitalization project, if nothing else.

But to give some humbling sense of scale, here’s Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s biggest construction projects currently underway. These include Las Vegas’ CityCenter,which despite the civic-sounding name is actually being built by MGM: the “largest privately funded construction project in the United States … a multi-use plaza with three hotels, a casino, luxury apartments, and retail and dining facilities, [costing] as much as $8.4 billion.”