Category Archives: Cities

Vienna’s changing LGBT spaces – a cartoon

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As the city prepares to host EuroPride, Lars van Roosendaal paints the places at the heart of its storied queer scene

Gay pick-up behaviour has changed a lot in recent decades. The increasing social recognition of LGBT people and the arrival of new internet dating platforms mean you do not have to go to hidden places, often known only to initiates, to find a potential partner. This has led to changes in how queer spaces manifest themselves, and nowhere more so than in Vienna, with its rich LGBT history.

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‘It wasn’t crying wolf’: sale of whole Italian village revealed as PR hoax

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Tiny Esino Lario claimed all its assets were up for grabs – but it was actually working with a tech firm to raise awareness of issues facing villages

Last month a mountain village in northern Italy put all its assets up for sale. A website advertised that everything must go.

Street signs started at €1,250. A pilgrimage site cost around €600,000, with a 15% discount applied. The town hall was a bit cheaper – €200,000. Benches came at €280 each, but with an enticing three-for-two promotion.

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‘People aren’t disabled, their city is’: inside Europe’s most accessible city

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From flattened cobbles to threshold ramps, the Dutch city of Breda has much to teach its neighbours

When I arrived at Breda station last month to find out why this Dutch city was recently named the winner of the 2019 Access City award, I did something I have not done while travelling in a long time. Instead of taking a taxi, I independently pushed the two kilometres to the hotel, to see whether lack of access for wheelchair users like me is as big a problem here as it is in most other cities.

Usually, a journey like that would be a nightmare, particularly in older European towns like Breda, a city of just under 200,000 people that was an important centre during the Holy Roman Empire. Medieval city centres and cobble-stoned markets are a recipe for broken castor wheels and painful pressure sores for wheelchair users.

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Why London’s not such a capital place to live | Letter

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Figures that appear to show Londoners are significantly better off than people in other parts of Britain don’t tell the whole story, says Maggie Kemmner

The article (Big regional gaps revealed in disposable incomes across UK, 23 May) is very misleading. It makes no allowances for the increased housing costs most Londoners face.

In February 2019, Londoners spent the biggest proportion of their income on rent as compared to other areas of the UK; more than one third of a household’s income. The average monthly rental was £1,599 as compared to a £940 UK average. Over a year, this amounts to £7,908 extra housing costs: which pretty much wipes out the “extra money” that Londoners have to spend post-tax as compared to the UK average. This data is from statistica.com.

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From no recycling to zero waste: how Ljubljana rethought its rubbish

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Fifteen years ago, all the Slovenian capital’s waste went to landfill, but by 2025, at least 75% of its rubbish will be recycled. How did the city turn itself around?

Words and photographs by Luka Dakskobler

From the lush green hill you can see Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in the distance. Populations of deer, rabbits and turtles live here. The air is clean and the only signs that we are standing above a 24-metre (79 feet) deep landfill are the methane gas pipes rising from the grass.

Ljubljana is the first European capital to commit to going zero-waste. But fifteen years ago, all of its refuse went straight to landfill. “And that is expensive,” says Nina Sankovič of Voka Snaga, the city’s waste management company. “It takes up space and you’re throwing away resources.”

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How Stockholm became the city of work-life balance

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With flexible hours the norm, and almost two years’ parental leave for every child, Sweden’s capital boasts a happy and efficient workforce. What can other cities learn?

It is 3.30pm, and the first workers begin to trickle out of the curved glass headquarters of the Stockholm IT giant Ericsson.

John Langared, a 30-year-old programmer, is hurrying to pick up his daughter from school. He has her at home every other week, so tends to alternate short hours one week with long hours the next.

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From bleak to bustling: how one French town beat the high street blues

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Mulhouse has turned around its image and now boasts more shops opening than closing, thanks to smart planning, investment and community efforts

On a lane in what was once considered eastern France’s grimmest town, a street artist is up a ladder finishing a mural, the independent bookshop has a queue at the till, the organic cooperative is full of customers and Séverine Liebold’s arty independent tea shop is doing a brisk trade.

When Liebold opened Tilvist in Mulhouse three years ago, in a space that had been vacant for years, friends tried to persuade her against it. “They said: ‘Not Mulhouse, look elsewhere,’” she recalls. “But I stuck with my instinct, and I was right.”

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Goodbye to Gomorrah: the end of Italy’s most notorious housing estate

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Famous as the setting for the hit film and TV series Gomorrah, the towers of Le Vele became synonymous with poverty and organised crime – until residents took charge

“When I think of my life in Le Vele, my skin crawls with rage,” says Omero Benfenati.

He looks out from a dark, narrow passageway framed by suspended steel stairways that block the natural light and lead up to abandoned apartments. Most of the windows are bricked up, and liquid leaks from split pipes on to the sewage and refuse-strewn asphalt several storeys below.

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Eco wonder or safety nightmare? Germany to vote on e-scooters

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Electric scooters could be on roads by June, leaving UK last major European country not to have approved use

Germany’s upper house of parliament is due to vote on Friday on whether to allow electric scooters on to the country’s roads, following a feverish debate spanning everything from road safety to air quality.

The transport minister is behind the plan, but he has faced a barrage of protests from lobby groups, representing both car drivers and bike riders, who have warned of chaos and accidents if the so-called e-scooters – known locally as e-rollers – are allowed.

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‘It would destroy it’: new international airport for Machu Picchu sparks outrage

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Peruvian archaeologists decry new airport that would carry tourists directly to already fragile Inca citadel

Among the Inca archeological sites that abound in Peru, none draw nearly as many tourists as the famed citadel of Machu Picchu. There were more than 1.5 million visitors in 2017, almost double the limit recommended by Unesco, putting a huge strain on the fragile ruins and local ecology.

Now, in a move that has drawn a mixture of horror and outrage from archaeologists, historians and locals, work has begun on clearing ground for a multibillion-dollar international airport, intended to jet tourists much closer to Machu Picchu .

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‘There is less fear’: restoration of Kabul repairs the ravages of war

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Afghanistan rebuilds the old town and creates register of dwellings to promote peace and help residents feel safer

Amir Gol first arrived in Kabul after fleeing his home – a Taliban stronghold – in Nangahar. He had no idea where to settle, so he rented a small mud house and started collecting and selling used plastic to make a living. Almost a decade later, little has changed for the 60-year old father of eleven. He sits cross-legged on a cushion outside the house he rents for 600 Afghani (£5) a month. Occasionally, he says, members of insurgent groups come to his neighbourhood, a settlement specked with poorly constructed mud houses and plastic tents in the city’s outskirts.

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How the ‘Las Vegas of Italy’ is kicking its slot machine addiction

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Once compared to Oxford, the university city of Pavia is now better known for gambling. These activists are fighting to change that

At the start of this year, Massimo was standing on a bridge “determined to jump off”. The 45-year-old had been struggling with gambling addiction since 2001.

“I started to play slot machines and video poker after the death of my father and ended up spending €5,000 a day,” says the artisan fence-maker, from the city of Pavia in northern Italy. He was soon in debt to loan sharks and ended up stealing to fund his habit, including from his own mother, before considering suicide.

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Why cities could hold the key to many of the world’s problems

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From bike sharing to green energy, cities are often better at driving change than national governments

Who has the answers? The UN? Scientists? Entrepreneurs? Nation states? “Ordinary” people?

There is another subset of power, agency, ideas and progress that often gets overlooked in the search for solutions to the world’s problems.

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‘We stood in shock’: what happens to a city after a hurricane? A cartoon

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After Maria is a graphic novella by Dr Gemma Sou and John Cei Douglas about a family’s recovery from Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017

On 20 September 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, a US territory that is home to 3.3 million people. Maria devastated the Caribbean island, causing more than $30bn in damage, and an initial death toll of 64 grew to an estimated figure of between 2,975 and 4,645. Many of the deaths happened during the aftermath from treatable chronic illnesses, because power outages prevented people from receiving routine medical care – but most of the media had left by November.

Dr Gemma Sou of the University of Manchester visited Puerto Rico five times during the first year after Maria to talk to families about their recovery. One of the results is After Maria, extracted here, a graphic novella about a fictional family in the neighbourhood of Ingenio that is based on common experiences Sou heard from Puerto Ricans across the island.

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Goodbye, Jakarta? Indonesia’s president suggests new capital

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Idea of unhitching country’s administrative centre from its megacity has a long history – but experts are sceptical

Not only is the megacity of Jakarta besieged by a confluence of modern ills – including pollution, overpopulation and soul-destroying traffic – it is also one of the fastest-sinking capitals in the world.

So when Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, this week suggested making somewhere else the capital, it did not come as a shock. Indeed, the idea of relocating the country’s administrative centre is almost as old as the republic itself – it was floated by Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, in 1957 and has been brought up again by several presidents since.

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Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail?

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One shop sells nothing but buttons, another sells only liquorice, and another is ‘the world’s first textile butcher shop’. In the age of Amazon, it seems the way to thrive is to specialise

On the first floor of a nondescript 1,000 sq metre industrial unit in Berlin’s Steglitz district, four workers are cautiously placing pregnant queen ants into test tubes in order to dispatch them across Europe. This is Antstore, the world’s first specialist ant shop, a business with around two dozen employees, a glass-cutting workshop, plastic and plaster modelling studios and a full-time social media manager.

It is just one of the surprisingly large number of shops in Berlin that sell only one thing, be it crawly insects, salty sweets, sticky tape or miniature string instruments. With online retail sales changing the face of high streets in cities around the world, many wonder if this hyper-specialisation could be more than an accidental side effect of the German capital’s tumultuous history, and also a blueprint for the high street of the future.

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