Hong Kong-based photographer Michael Wolf is best known for Architecture of Density, which shows the city’s tower blocks as dramatic geometric abstractions, and Tokyo Compression, which captures rush hour on the Japanese capital’s subway. He died this week aged 64
Continue reading...Category Archives: Cities
Hong Kong real estate now more expensive for the dead than the living
A tiny nook for an urn can cost up to £180,000. With 200,000 sets of ashes waiting for a resting place, the city is running out of options
“Per square foot, it has become more expensive to house the dead than the living,” says Kwok Hoi Pong, chairman of the Hong Kong Funeral Business Association. “A niche for an urn in a private columbarium in the best position can cost up to HK$1.8m. This is the phenomenon in Hong Kong.”
A ground burial plot can cost anywhere between HK$3m (£300,000) and HK$5m, but in the city’s congested cemeteries, vacancies rarely become available. Land is so scarce that 90% of the 48,000 people a year who die in Hong Kong are cremated. But increasingly finding the space even to store ashes is becoming nigh on impossible.
Continue reading...Quiz: Can you guess the city from the vintage travel poster?
Think you know Chicago from San Tropez? It’s harder than it looks
Which city is this?
Chicago
San Tropez
Malaga
Gold Coast
Which city is this?
Milan
Barcelona
Coventry
Cologne
Which city is this?
Istanbul
Cairo
Manchester
Marrakech
Which city is this?
Genoa
Athens
Hong Kong
Palermo
Which city is this?
Venice
Atlantic City
Blackpool
Nice
Which city is this?
Turin
Tallinn
Tehran
Toledo
Which city is this?
Brussels
Kolkata
Birmingham
Detroit
Which city is this?
Turin
Trieste
Berlin
St Petersburg
Which city is this?
Copenhagen
Amsterdam
Stockholm
Hamburg
Which city is this?
Antwerp
Liverpool
Lille
Belfast
Which city is this?
Budapest
Dubrovnik
Vienna
Barcelona
Which city is this?
Bratislava
Bonn
Baku
Boston
Which city is this?
Tripoli
Gibraltar
Marseille
Singapore
13 and above.
Well done! You deserve a trip
12 and above.
Well done
11 and above.
Well done
10 and above.
Well done
9 and above.
Pretty good
8 and above.
Pretty good
7 and above.
Pretty good
6 and above.
Not bad
2 and above.
Oh dear, you need a holiday
5 and above.
Not bad
3 and above.
Oh dear, you need a holiday
1 and above.
Oh dear, you need a holiday
4 and above.
Not bad
0 and above.
Oh dear, you need a holiday
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Continue reading...‘It’s not just a wolf whistle’: how catcalls became anti-harassment street art
With teenage girls a particular target of street harassment, Farah Benis is on a mission to document incidents and raise awareness
CatcallsofLdn is an Instagram account that raises awareness about street harassment using chalk art. Inspired by and working with @catcallsofnyc, founder Farah Benis collects submissions from the public then chalks them onto the pavement in the place where they happened. The hope is that chalking, documenting and sharing images of the words will help to raise awareness of street harassment and ultimately prevent it.
72% of submissions are from under 17-year-olds, 60% of those were wearing school uniforms and 100% of the perpetrators were adult men
Continue reading...The scale of ambition: China’s changing landscape – in pictures
Photographer Zhang Kechun travelled across China to document how urbanisation is reshaping the country’s natural landscapes. The often dreamlike images of his series Between the Mountains and Water depict tiny figures dwarfed by the immense scale of China’s economic development
Continue reading...Demolition derby: the human cost of Addis Ababa’s rapid growth
Residents of the Ethiopian capital’s historic Piassa neighbourhood have just had their homes bulldozed a second time
“I used to have a small grocery shop right here,” said Selhadin Sulman, spreading his arms wide as he remembered the 25 sq m kebele building that was his home until the police arrived in 2014 and started dismantling it as he slept. He was woken by his neighbours screaming and pleading with them to stop.
Sulman had lived in Wube Berha, part of Addis Ababa’s Piassa historic district, for more than 50 years. Kebele houses were a form of public rental housing built in the 1970s from cheap materials for the Ethiopian capital’s growing number of urban poor.
Continue reading...The upside down: inside Manhattan’s Lowline subterranean park
In two years’ time, the Lower East Side will be home to the world’s first underground ‘green’ space – the Lowline
To get a glimpse of what will eventually become the Lowline, a subterranean Eden being billed as the world’s first underground park, you have to swipe your MetroCard at the Lower East Side’s Delancey Street station, go down one flight of stairs, go down another, slither through a few characteristically congested subway corridors, and then up another flight, to the J train platform.
Here, in the crucible of Manhattan’s public transportation system, with its slow, industrial wheeze, is an abandoned space the size of a football field. Seventy years ago it was the Williamsburg Bridge trolley terminal, transporting city folk between boroughs. But since 1948 it’s existed in a state of dark, musty desertion, save for tall metal columns, a few men in hazmat suits and the outlines of the balloon loops in which the trolleys once turned, which will be integrated into the park’s walkways.
Continue reading...Turkish Airlines is switching to a new Istanbul airport – all in 45 hours
In Erdoğan’s latest high-stakes megaproject, 10,000 pieces of equipment will be relocated in a single weekend
“This is not just an airport. It’s a monument to victory,” is how posters around the terminal describe Istanbul’s colossal new airport.
That remains to be seen. After starting on Friday, Turkish Airlines will have a 45-hour window to complete one of the most complex logistical projects in history, as it switches its entire operation to the new Istanbul airport from its existing hub at Atatürk international airport.
Continue reading...Free short story vending machines delight commuters
‘Short story stations’ in Canary Wharf print one- three- and five-minute reads on demand
“Every single day,” says Paresh Raichura, “I’m on the lookout for something new to read.” On his hour-long commute to Canary Wharf, where he works for the Financial Ombudsman, he picks up Time Out or a local paper or the freesheet Metro, but says: “I’ve stopped reading all the long novels I used to read.”
Why?
Continue reading...The $500m Shed: inside New York’s quilted handbag on wheels
This puffed-up cultural citadel was meant to be an endlessly evolving, telescopic arts complex. But the glistening billionaires’ playground rising up beside it had other plans
It seems fitting that the cultural centre of New York’s latest luxury private development should look like a quilted Chanel handbag. Rearing up at the northern end of the High Line on Manhattan’s reborn West Side, the Shed presents a 10-storey wrapping of puffed-up diamond cushions to passersby, standing as the gaudy gateway to Hudson Yards – the most expensive real estate project in US history.
While it might fit in with the gilt-edged world of Swiss watch boutiques and Michelin-starred chefs that awaits in this $25bn private enclave, it is an unlikely costume for what the project’s architect and originator, Liz Diller, insists is “simply a piece of infrastructure” to support whatever artists want to do. “It’s not precious,” she says of the $500m building. “It’s muscular and industrial, just meat and bones.”
Continue reading...Mapped: historic public transit systems v their modern equivalents
Artist Jake Berman plots old public transport systems in period style. From LA to Toronto, San Francisco to Buffalo, he has created maps of cities’ modern transit too, so you can click and compare
Continue reading...‘Like the Eye of Sauron’: western Europe’s tallest building planned for tiny Danish town
Fast-fashion giant Bestseller set to build skyscraper headquarters in Brande, a 7,000-person rural town
Until a local company announced plans to send a 320-metre skyscraper soaring over the surrounding countryside, most people in Denmark had only the haziest idea where Brande, a town of 7,000 people in rural Jutland, even was.
The Bestseller Tower, designed by star architectural studio Dorte Mandrup, will not only be the tallest building in Denmark, but the tallest in western Europe, besting the Shard in London by a crucial 10.4 metres.
Continue reading...Kumbh Mela: cleaning up after the world’s largest human gathering
Around 220 million people descended on sleepy Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) for the 50-day Hindu festival. The cleanup could take months
As the sun sets over the Ganges, Vikas Kumar drives his garbage truck through the streets of Prayagraj, a historic Indian city of 1.1 million that was until last year known as Allahabad. “All this stuff people have been eating, drinking and throwing away,” he says, gesturing at piles of food waste, discarded water bottles and mud-spattered flowers. “It will take three or four months to clear.”
Over a 50-day period this normally sleepy city has been visited by around 220 million people for the Kumbh Mela – a Hindu pilgrimage dubbed the world’s largest human gathering.
Continue reading...‘A double-edged sword’: Mumbai pollution ‘perfect’ for flamingos
The flamingo population of India’s largest city has tripled. Is it thanks to sewage boosting the blue-green algae they feed on?
There is an air of anxious excitement among the urban professionals and tourists on board our 24-seater motorboat as we enter Thane Creek.
A chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” breaks out as we spot the visions in pink we came to see – hundreds of flamingos listlessly bobbing in the murky green water – followed by the furious clicking of cameras.
Continue reading...‘They don’t think we’re human’: Buenos Aires market traders fight eviction
A recent protest by street vendors was met with a violent crackdown – but was their eviction necessary to ‘order’ the city’s public space?
An unsettling quiet has fallen over a stretch of the usually noisy Feria de San Telmo Sunday market. Artisans should be lining these cobbled streets selling intricate macrame jewellery and Argentinian leather purses to crowds of tourists from all over the world. Deafening percussion bands, accompanied by dancers, and street vendors selling empanadas and arepas should be making their way up the road.
The market is one of the largest handicrafts and antiques fairs in Buenos Aires, popular with tourists and locals alike, and runs the length of Defensa, the main thoroughfare in the barrio of San Telmo.
Continue reading...La Pampa: the illegal mining city Peru wants wiped out
Government invades modern-day gold-rush town in Amazon in its biggest ever raid on illegal gold mining
Located along a jungle highway in the Amazon around 60 miles from the nearest city, La Pampa was a place you entered at your own risk. At night it was a riot of neon lights and pulsating cumbía music from “prostibar” brothels, frequented by roaming groups of men flush with cash. Neither authorities nor outsiders – and particularly not journalists – were welcome.
This modern-day gold-rush town, home to about 25,000 people, was both a hub for organised crime and people trafficking and a gateway into a treeless, lunar landscape pocked with toxic pools created by illegal gold mining, stretching far into one of the Amazon’s most treasured reserves.
Continue reading...500 years in 59 seconds: the race to be the world’s largest city
Fascinating interactive graphic shows changes in the globe’s 10 most populous cities from 1500 to 2018
This compelling interactive “bar chart race” shows the top 10 most populous cities in the world from 1500 to 2018.
“In the early 1500s most people lived in the east, either the east of Europe and north Africa or the east of the world itself in India and China,” says John Burn-Murdoch, who created the interactive for the Financial Times.
Continue reading...Quiz: can you identify these world cities from their density maps alone?
The LSE Cities Urban Age Programme has created density diagrams showing the number of people living in each square kilometre of a 100km by 100km area for cities around the world. Can you identify them?
Which city is this?
Dhaka
Chicago
Shanghai
Lagos
Which city is this?
London
Paris
Rome
Madrid
Which city is this?
Buffalo
Accra
Marseilles
Brisbane
Which city is this?
Islamabad
Kabul
Karachi
New Delhi
Which city is this?
Mumbai
Cairo
Jakarta
Hong Kong
Which city is this?
Los Angeles
Vancouver
Cape Town
Taipei
Which city is this?
Recife
Newcastle
Havana
Dar es Salaam
Which city is this?
New Orleans
Malaga
Melbourne
Rio de Janeiro
Which city is this?
Toronto
New York
Sao Paulo
Barcelona
Which city is this?
Buenos Aires
Mexico City
Nairobi
Beijing
10 and above.
Well done!
3 and above.
Oh dear
4 and above.
Not bad
2 and above.
Oh dear
0 and above.
Oh dear
1 and above.
Oh dear
LSE Cities says: “Residential density measures how closely people live together. More compact cities have higher densities, while cities that sprawl and have wide open spaces between buildings have lower densities. The pattern of streets, squares and urban blocks – as well as how many people live in residential units – determines the density of a city alongside the height of individual buildings.
Continue reading...How public transport actually turns a profit in Hong Kong
The Hong Kong MTR’s ‘rail plus property’ model keep fares cheap and makes the company completely self-sustaining. Could loss-making metro systems in other cities learn lessons?
“Once we build the railway, the value of land rises and we capture the increase in value,” says Jacob Kam, managing director and soon-to-be chief executive, of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation.
Related: Hong Kong faces commuter chaos after rare train collision
Continue reading...The bridges that never were – in pictures
Bridges are often defining urban features – but what if your city had chosen one of these designs instead?
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