Category Archives: Cities

‘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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High-density megacities: the photographs of Michael Wolf

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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

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Hong Kong real estate now more expensive for the dead than the living

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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.

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Quiz: Can you guess the city from the vintage travel poster?

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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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‘It’s not just a wolf whistle’: how catcalls became anti-harassment street art

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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

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Demolition derby: the human cost of Addis Ababa’s rapid growth

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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.

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The upside down: inside Manhattan’s Lowline subterranean park

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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.

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Turkish Airlines is switching to a new Istanbul airport – all in 45 hours

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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.

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Free short story vending machines delight commuters

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‘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?

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The $500m Shed: inside New York’s quilted handbag on wheels

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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.”

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‘Like the Eye of Sauron’: western Europe’s tallest building planned for tiny Danish town

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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.

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Kumbh Mela: cleaning up after the world’s largest human gathering

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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.

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