Others, like Kakha Pachkua, 38, have their doubts about the plans. A Megrelian, from the ethnic group that has lived here for centuries, he works at the edge of the site and says the ground there is so saturated that the proposed high-rises would require foundations nearly 80 feet deep.

Image Credit... The New York Times

“Any Megrelian will tell you it is impossible to build there,” he said, looking over at the wetlands. “Lazika is only a word — Lazika. There is nothing else. Those are huge buildings; I don’t know how the swamp will hold them.”

Government officials have little time to engage with skeptics. The headlong pace of new construction in Georgia has not allowed for public debate over the projects’ financing, environmental impact or merit. Despite queries raised on all of these scores, Lazika’s first building — a futuristic Public Service Hall for the new city — is already under construction, and due to open in September. Ten years from now, President Mikheil Saakashvili has said, Lazika will be Georgia’s second-largest city after Tbilisi, which has a population of about 1.5 million, and a leading Black Sea trading hub.

Since taking office in 2004, Mr. Saakashvili has based his leadership on one big idea after another: the dissolution of the notoriously corrupt traffic police; changing the country’s second language to English from Russian; moving Parliament from Tbilisi to Kutaisi, a small city a three-hour drive away; and, now, confronting poverty in the agrarian west by building a city from scratch.

“The main reason we are changing our country so fast is that we are quite smart and very young and we want to do everything fast,” said Giorgi Vashadze, a deputy minister of justice, who is overseeing the construction of sleek new government service buildings in cities across Georgia. “We don’t have time, like in Europe and America, to think about the project for 10 years and then start implementation. That’s why these kinds of crazy ideas are sometimes coming to our mind.”