Informal settlements are expanding, with a new occupation attempt every 11 days, and the threat to the rainforest is severe
Antonio Pinto’s makeshift home on the outskirts of Manaus is an open-air shack, one of dozens of similar dwellings of timber and tarpaulin scattered around the hills.
Around them is the evidence of the use of flame and iron: the hills are scorched and brown, littered with fallen logs and toppled, twisted trees.
Continue reading...The kingdom has long been a man’s world, where women have the legal status of children. Do the latest reforms represent progress – or a PR exercise?
At the Luna food factory on the south-east outskirts of Jeddah, Mashael Elghamdi sits at her computer in an artfully ripped AC/DC T-shirt and jeans. The faint whirr of machines processing cans of beans, cream and evaporated milk can be heard over the sound of eight women typing and sometimes laughing. A screensaver of a smiling Cameron Diaz gazes out from one corner of the room. This is an all-female office. And because there is no need for the full-length abayas women are legally required to wear when interacting with men at work or in public, it is a riot of colour.
On the factory floor below, women in custom-made overalls on an all-female production line apply labels to cans. “All the women you see here do everything themselves,” says supervisor Fatima Albasisi, who oversees 90 workers. A staircase and a corridor separate the female factory workers from their male counterparts, while the men-only offices are in a different building. “If there’s a problem with the machines, they can fix it,” Albasisi adds. “If I could, I’d have a factory entirely run by women, no men at all. In my experience, women show up to work on time and make fewer mistakes.”
Continue reading...The illustrated city: artist Ariel Aberg-Riger pieces together the history of New York state’s second largest city via second-hand postcards, pottery and tchotchkes
Continue reading...How an urbanist dream of fixing Brazil’s chaotic metropolises became a nightmare
Inside Maria Cleudimar da Silva’s flat, gospel music plays softly on the stereo, family photos and religious posters decorate the walls, and a wicker rocking chair and computer furnish the living room. The only evidence of her past life is a faded photo of the home she lived in for 11 years, a shack she called Noah’s Ark for its frequent floods.
She moved in in 1996, pursuing the promise of a better life from Brazil’s rural north-east to São Paulo, its largest city, where she settled in Paraisópolis, the city’s largest favela.
Continue reading...Wood smoke smothers Coyhaique, Chile, in June and July. Yet despite the WHO ranking its air worst in the Americas, residents are reluctant to alter their habits
Photographs by Claudio Frías
“I was born and raised beside a roaring fire,” says Yasna Seguel proudly, as wet snowflakes tap against the kitchen window behind her and orange flames warm an outstretched palm. A tobacco-yellow stain soaks into the table cloth as she sets her mate gourd down to select a fresh log for the fire.
Every evening through the bitterly cold winter months of June and July, the southern city of Coyhaique, the most populous in the region of Aysén in Chilean Patagonia, is smothered by a thick, fragrant blanket of damp wood smoke that clings to the hillsides.
Continue reading...You might think of Hong Kong, given its famous skyscraper skyline, but by different measures of verticality other cities come out on top
Looking out from sky100, Hong Kong’s highest observation deck on the 100th floor of the city’s tallest building, the 494-metre-high International Commerce Centre, you get a 360-degree view of one of the world’s most famous skylines – an urban jungle framed by mountains and the gleaming Victoria harbour, with endless clusters of high-rise buildings packed so closely together they resemble a game of Tetris.
It’s little wonder a city of such visible density has more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Hong Kong has 355 buildings over 150m in height.
Continue reading...Ridership is high and there’s plenty of work for drivers, but success has come at a cost to this Ontario town
Photographs by Cole Burston
When Daniel Arrega, 19, heads to work at a mall in Innisfil, he has few options for his commute. Walking along the highway would take nearly three hours. A taxi is faster but expensive.
So he takes the town’s public transit: Uber.
Continue reading...Thousands of Aleppians are using a Facebook group to share their way of life before the Syrian war
Going to the hammam was once a beloved ritual for Aleppo resident Atef Shikhouni and his friends. Recalling the boisterous, joyful experience, the 55-year-old wrote: “Here is a man shouting, ‘Where is the soap?’ while another one is asking for the shampoo and a third wants someone to rub his back. It becomes very noisy. After spending some time in the sauna, it is time for the ‘rubbing man’. He uses a rough loofah to rub my body mercilessly and I pray it will end without any damage.”
But that was before the outbreak of war in Syria. “Today, the bath is cold and has no soul,” the sports teacher wrote in February 2017, shortly after the worst of the fighting in Aleppo had ended. “Cruel are our days, exactly like our bath today.”
Continue reading...This week Guardian Cities has been exploring cities built from scratch around the world. Here’s a roundup of readers’ experiences – from Harlow to Perth, Shannon to Islamabad
Perth really is about as bland a built environment as you could imagine, luckily set on amazing natural beauty. But its planning is still rooted firmly in 1950s style suburbia and auto dependence. Car ownership is one of the highest in Australia, which nationally is one of the highest in the world. Vibrancy is lacking, community occurs despite, not encouraged by, the built environment. Walking is hardly done, and the streets of suburbia are deserted as everyone drives.
Continue reading...Will a $60bn development to house 1.1 million people help to ease the world’s most unaffordable property market or is it simply ‘pouring money into the sea’?
“Reclamation is unavoidable,” Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, told journalists in a Q&A session on land supply last year. “In the long term, many developing cities have to adopt this choice.”
Hong Kong suffers from chronic overcrowding and housing shortages – a situation made worse by the 150 residence permits a day that have been issued to mainland Chinese citizens since 1997. Additionally, 62% of land is “locked up” or “semi-locked up” by law or regulatory constraints due to environmental reasons in terms of land development, according to the thinktank Our Hong Kong Foundation.
Continue reading...From modernist machine-built perfection to a nuclear-proof metropolis buried far underground, our predictions for future cities tell us much about the past
Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination by Paul Dobraszczyk is published by Reaktion Books
Ever since the world’s first recognised skyscrapers were built in Chicago and New York in the 1880s, cities have been in thrall to visions of extraordinary height. Early intimations of the ways in which skyscrapers would transform cities came in the 1910s, with images such as Richard Rummell’s below suggesting a future not only of immensely tall buildings but also of multilayered streets, railways and flying machines.
Continue reading...During the 2022 World Cup, all eyes will be on the coastal metropolis located 16km from Doha
Text and photography by Stéphanie Buret
From the sands of the Qatari coast rise the towering glass, steel and concrete forms of Lusail, a city being built almost entirely from scratch. Pharaonic in its scale and ambition, the under-construction metropolis is the vision of the country’s former emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, born in part from the desire to diversify the Qatari economy and distance it from oil dependence.
Financed by the government via the Qatari Diar real estate company, the city was initially conceived in 2005 but development truly took off when Qatar was announced as the host of the 2022 World Cup.
Continue reading...Four decades ago Egypt embarked on the most ambitious new cities building programme in the world. Their boom shows no sign of stopping
Seen from space, Egypt is a vast dusty land with a green Y opening into the Mediterranean Sea – a fertile valley that makes up 5% of the country yet is home to 95% of the population.
This pattern of human occupation had characterised the country for thousands of years, but in the 1970s, as ever more precious green land was eaten up by urban growth, an idea that had been taking shape in the national consciousness for decades was finally put into policy. Egypt would “conquer the desert” and redistribute its burgeoning population across the white sands of the Sahara – an Egyptian version of the 19th-century US “manifest destiny” to move west, no matter how punishing the consequences.
Continue reading...With another 2.5 billion urban dwellers predicted within the next 30 years, should we expand existing cities? Or is there a case for starting afresh?
People have been building new cities from scratch for millennia. From the foundation myths surrounding Athens and Rome, to the clearance of virgin forests in western New York state to create the “garden city” of Buffalo, to scores of purpose-built capitals – Brasília, Canberra, Astana, Washington DC – building new cities is just something that humans do.
When countries rise up, when markets emerge, people build new cities. Today, though, we are taking it to unheard-of levels. We have never before built so many new cities in so many places at such great expense as we are right now.
Continue reading...More than 4,000 sign petition to overturn decision, which aimed to appease neighbours
A national debate has been sparked in the Netherlands after a council ordered a primary school playground to be shut for being too noisy.
Questions have been raised in the Dutch parliament and a campaign has been launched to save the playground in the wake of the decision by Nijmegen council.
Continue reading...Mayor of German capital considering €365 annual ticket to reduce traffic and pollution
Berliners could pay as little as €1 a day to use public transport for a year under plans to wean the German capital off its cars and reduce air pollution, its mayor has announced.
“Step by step I want to follow the goal of introducing an annual public transport ticket for €365,” Michael Müller told Neue Zürcher Zeitung. An annual ticket normally costs €761.
Continue reading...In 1947, 50,000 volunteers helped create Dimitrovgrad, a new city that symbolised the brave new world of communist Bulgaria. Many still live there
In her flat overlooking the main square of Dimitrovgrad, 90-year-old Maria Oteva casts her mind back more than seven decades to the foundation of the town in the early years of Bulgaria’s communist era.
“Back then, 50,000 volunteers built this city because they believed in something,” she says. “Nowadays, you wouldn’t find 50 people to come and clean up the dirty streets.”
Continue reading...Bahria Town promises Pakistan’s middle classes respite from traffic, terror attacks and blackouts – local villagers are fighting to be heard by developers
Fronted by a dramatic gated arch, its roads fringed with neatly trimmed hedges, palm trees and lush grass, Bahria Town bears little resemblance to the urban chaos of nearby Karachi.
The economic heart of Pakistan is an overcrowded and often violent megacity with an official population of 15 million (closer to 20 million if the urban sprawl beyond the city perimeter is included). Infrastructure has not kept pace with its rapid expansion, and basic amenities such as water have become a commodity for criminal gangs. The city is also an organisational centre for the Pakistani Taliban, who attacked the airport in 2014.
Continue reading...The urge to build cities from scratch is not new – but this time they are being conceived by private multinational corporations as gilt-edged tax-exempt gated communities
At 8.30 every morning, an announcement is piped though a speaker in the ceiling of Kim Jong-won’s apartment, barking the daily bulletin in a high-pitched voice. The disembodied broadcaster details new parking measures, issues with the pneumatic waste disposal chute and various building maintenance jobs to be carried out that day.
“There’s no way of turning it off,” sighs Kim’s wife, Jung-sim, as she prepares breakfast. “I hate technology but my husband is an early adopter. He has to have everything first.”
Continue reading...Ada Colau will also oppose airport expansion to curb tourism and pollution
Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau, has pledged to restrict the number of cruise ships allowed to dock in the city and to oppose the expansion of the city’s airport, saying: “We don’t have infinite capacity.”
Colau said the limits would reduce pollution in the city, where air quality regularly exceeds World Health Organization limits for nitrogen oxide and PM10 particulates.
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