Category Archives: Cities

Concrete chokes our landfill sites – but where else can it go?

Posted on by

Most concrete from demolished buildings is simply dumped, much of it illegally. But there’s a better way – and it involves lightning

At the Shenzhen dump, huge shards of dusty concrete lie in imposing piles. Once the very foundation of this Chinese city, these blocks now seem grotesque in their magnitude, and unsettling in their utter uselessness. Jumbled up with the other relics of modern construction – bricks, wood and steel – and dotted with plastic bags and bottles, it could take centuries, even millennia, for Shenzhen’s discarded concrete to disintegrate back into sand.

China produces more construction waste than any other country - around 2 billion tonnes per year (pdf), or around 4kg per person per day. Two million tonnes of this is concrete. In Shenzhen, which has grown from a town with 30,000 residents to a megacity with 11 million in just 35 years, a full 84% of that construction waste is unceremoniously dumped. It doesn’t even all make its way to official landfills, which don’t have the capacity to handle it, so almost half is disposed in unlicensed sites, or illegally tipped.

Continue reading...

A brief history of concrete: from 10,000BC to 3D printed houses

Posted on by

The Romans used concrete in everything from bath houses to the Colosseum. Our modern concrete structures will never last as long

“Unlike the Pantheon … virtually all the concrete structures one sees today will eventually need to be replaced,” writes Robert Courland is his weighty tome Concrete Planet, “costing us trillions of dollars in the process.”

While there is some debate over when and where the first concrete was used – the Göbekli Tepe temple in modern-day Turkey was built using T-shaped pillars of carved limestone approximately 12,000 years ago, desert traders used early concrete to make underground water cisterns 8,000 years ago, and the ancient Egyptians used gypsum and lime to make mortars – there is little dispute that the first people to use concrete in the way we do today were the Romans.

Continue reading...

Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth

Posted on by

After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on the planet. But its benefits mask enormous dangers to the planet, to human health – and to culture itself

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, the global building industry will have poured more than 19,000 bathtubs of concrete. By the time you are halfway through this article, the volume would fill the Albert Hall and spill out into Hyde Park. In a day it would be almost the size of China’s Three Gorges Dam. In a single year, there is enough to patio over every hill, dale, nook and cranny in England.

After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on Earth. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world with up to 2.8bn tonnes, surpassed only by China and the US.

Continue reading...

Frank Gehry at 90: ‘I love working. I love working things out’

Posted on by

He didn’t hit his stride till he was 50, and now the architect, as inventive and bold as ever, hangs out with everyone from Harrison Ford to Jay-Z

I’ve taken up flying,” says Frank Gehry, aged 89 years and 11 months, as he sits opposite me in his Los Angeles office, “a little bit.” Then he tells a story. How in his youth he had a job washing aeroplanes, and how his cousin had a Waco biplane and would take him up in it. How he wanted to do this again. How the subject came up when Sydney Pollack was making the 2005 film Sketches of Frank Gehry. How the architect asked the film director, did he know someone who had a Waco?

“Yes, he did – Harrison Ford. And I knew Harrison way, way back, when he was a cabinet maker. He bid for some of our projects.” But Gehry never got to fly with the man who played Han Solo. Then, one evening, he was at a dinner party complaining to Ford on the subject when the host chipped in. He had another make of biplane, a Stearman, and was happy to take Gehry into the sky. He shows a photo as proof. “I can’t land it or anything, but he lets me steer it.”

Continue reading...

The hair-raising hipsters of Baghdad – in pictures

Posted on by

You see these gravity-defying quiffs everywhere in Iraq’s capital: on reception staff in the secure hotels, on waiters in cafes and on the youths who gather in Zawra amusement park on Friday afternoons. Often teamed with drainpipe trousers and a fitted jacket, the flashy, ostentatious haircut requires care. It says something of the city’s new confidence: a rejection of the long years of sanctions and war

Continue reading...

Glass houses: how much privacy can city-dwellers expect?

Posted on by

The recent court decision against the neighbours of Tate Modern in London belies a much wider problem – everyone is constantly being watched

Alexander McFadyen says that he and his family were “more or less constantly watched” while they were at home. They had to be “properly dressed” at all times, and even then they were often photographed or filmed, and sometimes spied on with binoculars. McFadyen set out to measure the problem. While working at the dining table, he counted 84 people taking photographs in 90 minutes. This is the reality of living in a glass-walled flat in Block C of Neo Bankside, just 34 metres from the viewing gallery at Tate Modern, which receives up to 600,000 visitors a year.

A neighbour, Claire Fearn, said being watched like that made her “sick to her stomach”. People waved and made obscene gestures at her and her family. Her husband, Giles Fearn, found pictures of their home posted online by strangers. Many of the images are still on Twitter, often with amused remarks about the misfortune of their wealthy owners. (The flats are worth an average of £4.35m each.) Another neighbour, Lindsay Urquhart, visited the viewing gallery and heard someone remark that she and the other residents of Block C deserved to lose their privacy because they were “rich bastards”.

Continue reading...

End of an era: Seoul prepares to rip out its manufacturing heart

Posted on by

The next 15 megacities #15: The fast-growing South Korean capital is about to wipe out Euljiro, a neighbourhood home to 10,000 shops and 50,000 tradespeople that was integral to the country’s postwar boom

From the main street, the Euljiro neighbourhood doesn’t look like much: some shabby retail stores, cold-noodle restaurants, a Starbucks.

Enter one of the small alleys, however, and you’ll find yourself in a kind of manufacturing anthill: thousands upon thousands of shops, each crammed to the rafters with bolts, circuit boards, iron castings, gauges, wires, lights, switches, tools and innumerable tiny objects that defy description.

Continue reading...

City of stairs: the interconnecting walkways of Hong Kong

Posted on by

Hans Leo Maes captures the bridges and stairways that link up the hilly, population-dense city

Hong Kong is known for its flashing lights, neon signs and high-rise skylines. But the architect and photographer Hans Leo Maes documents an alternative side – the city’s interconnecting staircases and bridges.

“The extreme population density in Hong Kong means [structures] are stacked and linked by stairs, often external and very visible,” Maes says.

Continue reading...

On board Zimbabwe’s only commuter train – a photo essay

Posted on by

Chugging through townships, maize fields and scrubland as the sun rises, Zimbabwe’s only commuter train is cheap and reliable – two qualities its passengers cherish in a downwards-spiralling economy

Each morning sleepy travellers walk to the tracks and clamber aboard Zimbabwe’s only commuter train as it prepares to leave the Cowdray Park settlement at 6am and embark on its 12-mile (20km) journey into Bulawayo, the country’s second city.

Continue reading...

Where did all those 90s rollerblades end up? Nairobi

Posted on by

There’s a whole new craze in east Africa, fuelled by secondhand inline skates – and a desire to unite

Photos and story by Duncan Moore

Nairobi’s traffic congestion is notorious. Minibuses known as matatus battle for space with cars, motorbikes and hand-drawn carts, causing excruciating gridlock.

Through this automotive battleground dart the daring members of the Kenyan city’s inline skating community, deftly weaving between moving vehicles, holding on to buses for speed and jumping over potholes.

Continue reading...

How to make an incinerator popular? Put a ski slope on it

Posted on by

Idea of topping municipal plant in Copenhagen with urban ski resort won accolades for Danish architecture firm

It might be the first waste incinerator the neighbours actually want next door. The shop at the foot of the Amager Bakke waste-to-energy project in Copenhagen is packed with families desperate to be among the first to try its unique selling point: the ski slope on the roof.

“I live so close by that I could follow the development,” says Ole Fredslund, who lives in neighbouring Amager, as he helped his sons Felix and Victor strap on their boots as the slope opened its lifts for the first time on Tuesday. “I guess 90% of the focus is on the fact that there’s a skiing hill coming, so in a way it’s very clever. Everybody talks about the ski hill to be, not the waste plant to be.”

Continue reading...

Joy of six: the buildings transformed by 3D hexagon murals

Posted on by

Street artist Mr June brings facades to life with his abstract, colourful designs

The Dutch artist David Louf, who goes by Mr June, is the person behind these striking 3D hexagon murals, which have appeared on walls from Berlin to the Bronx.

Louf grew up in Amsterdam immersed in hip-hop and graffiti, and turned to graphic design as an adult. Eight years ago he moved back to street art and now combines his skills to create vibrant, abstract murals on buildings across the world.

Continue reading...

‘We need more people to go by bike’: meet Amsterdam’s nine-year-old junior cycle mayor

Posted on by

As the world’s first junior cycle mayor, Lotta Crok wants to draw attention to the obstacles kids on bikes face – and inspire other children to cycle

During Amsterdam’s chaotic rush hour, nine-year-old Lotta Crok cycles to a very busy junction. “Look,” she says. “There’s traffic coming from everywhere. Four trams from four different directions. For a child on a bike that’s really confusing!”

Lotta is the first junior cycle mayor in the world and her working area is the Dutch capital. It is her mission to inspire children to cycle every day and draw attention to the obstacles that kids on bikes are facing.

Continue reading...

‘Each one has a story’: the mundane beauty of NYC’s doors

Posted on by

Instagrammer Jonathan shares his obsession with the city’s doors, from the grand to the graffiti-ridden

It is only natural to feel curious about what goes on behind the imposing, archaic or graffiti-ridden doors of our cities.

Instagrammer Jonathan knows this feeling all too well. For the past year and a half he has been photographing the doors of New York from the grand to the scruffy, presenting a unique view of this well-documented city.

Continue reading...

Almaty spills its secrets: lost Soviet art discovered behind wall

Posted on by

Thanks to the Kazakhstan city’s loss of capital status in the 90s, rare mosaics, sgraffiti and other artworks escaped destruction

When Jama Nurkalieva and a small group of colleagues conducted a site survey of a disused Soviet-era panoramic cinema in Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, they had no idea what lay behind the internal plasterboard wall that faces out towards the street – until someone spotted a narrow gap.

As the caretaker shined a light into the darkness behind, the group caught a glimpse of a man’s head. Out came the toolbox and the rest of the artwork was slowly revealed: a Soviet-era sgraffito by the graphic artist Eugeny Sidorkin that had been lost and forgotten for decades.

Continue reading...

‘We have to learn to live with floods’: waterlogged Surat to become latest megacity

Posted on by

The next 15 megacities #14: Surat’s battle to hold back water has raged since its first flood wall in 1664. As its population soars, India’s ‘diamond city’ needs new solutions

Look up as you walk around Surat and you might spot “HFL 8.8.2006” daubed in red paint on a wall above your head. HFL stands for “high flood level”, and the inscriptions are 15 feet above the ground in places – a fading memory of the devastating floods of August 2006, which killed 150 people, according to official estimates (unofficial counts put the death toll at over 500). More than 60% of the city was underwater and damage was estimated at $2bn.

Surat’s geography – it lies at the mouth of the Tapi river, near the Arabian Sea – makes it prone to flooding, and it experiences a major inundation every four years on average.

Continue reading...

Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the ‘pencil towers’ of New York’s super-rich

Posted on by

An extreme concentration of wealth in a city where even the air is for sale has produced a new breed of needle-like tower. By Oliver Wainwright

It is rare in the history of architecture for a new type of building to emerge. The Romans’ discovery of concrete birthed the great domes and fortifications of its empire. The Victorians’ development of steel led to an era of majestic bridges and vaulted train sheds. The American invention of the elevator created the first skyscrapers in Chicago. Now, we are seeing a new type of structure that perfectly embodies the 21st-century age of technical ingenuity and extreme inequality. A heady confluence of engineering prowess, zoning loopholes and an unparalleled concentration of personal wealth have together spawned a new species of super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive spire.

Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds.

Continue reading...

Inside Chengdu: can China’s megacity version of the garden city work?

Posted on by

The next 15 megacities #13: It may be China’s most liveable burgeoning megacity, but Chengdu’s park city plans bear a price tag of forced evictions and relocations

Read the rest of our megacities series here

“The goal is that every 300 metres you see green,” says Chen Lan, an expert in urban design and planning at Sichuan University in the emerging Chinese megacity of Chengdu. “You open a window, you see green, you see a park …”

With its mild weather, teahouses, quiet leafy streets and internationally known food, Chengdu in south-west China has long been rated one of the country’s most liveable cities.

Continue reading...