Category Archives: Cities

The controversial plan to redevelop Checkpoint Charlie

Posted on by

Three decades after the Berlin Wall fell, the crossing is a mess of souvenir shops and fast-food restaurants – and time is running out to change things

It was the most famous border crossing in the Berlin Wall, the official gateway for allied diplomats, military personnel and foreigners to enter communist East Berlin by road.

And in 1961, Checkpoint Charlie seized the world’s attention when a diplomatic spat about allied forces’ freedom to travel in East Berlin quickly escalated and saw Soviet and American tanks squaring up to one another. The world watched aghast, fearful of a third world war, as a formidable flock of superpower tanks rolled towards the border, standing just 100 yards apart.

Continue reading...

No more two-hour lunch breaks: the slow death of Spain’s menú del día

Posted on by

Restaurants offering fixed-price three-course menús have been a cornerstone of the country’s urban life for decades, but tourism, shorter lunch breaks and gentrification have put them under threat. What will it take to fight back?

Food is at the heart of Spanish culture. From social life to business deals, everything revolves around food – above all, lunch. How did Mariano Rajoy, then prime minister, react last year when faced with an unprecedented vote of no confidence? He went to lunch. For eight hours.

The three-course menú del día has been the cornerstone of Spanish cuisine and social life for generations. Consequently, the restaurants serving these menús – generally low on aesthetics and high on value for money – have been a feature of the urban landscape. Now, though, their existence is threatened by a combination of rising rents, changing tastes and working hours, tourism and gentrification.

Continue reading...

Jerusalem’s ‘love neighbourhood’: a refuge for star-crossed Palestinians

Posted on by

A bureaucratic loophole has left Kafr Aqab as a district where Palestinians can keep a foot in both Jerusalem and the West Bank – and be with their loved ones

For some Palestinian sweethearts, there’s only one place to live.

It’s an unremarkable suburb, crisscrossed by thin muddy streets and dotted with high-rise apartment blocks that cling to the steep hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Continue reading...

How the megacities of Europe stole a continent’s wealth

Posted on by

While hi-tech cosmopolitan centres like Milan flourish financially and culturally, former industrial towns continue to decline

Night-time haunts go in and out of fashion, but the Bar Basso in Milan, which opened in 1967, remains one of the city’s most venerable social institutions. Embodying a very Milanese combination of stylish prosperity and tasteful design, it is a favourite destination for the area’s creative elite and the discreetly wealthy.

Tucked away in a corner, Pierluigi Dialuce is explaining why, if a political nightmare unfolds in the rest of Italy, the city he has made his home will be able to cope.

Continue reading...

Divided Cities: inside the new documentary series from Guardian Cities

Posted on by

Thirty years from the fall of the Berlin Wall, new global tensions are polarising our world – and our cities feel more divided than ever. From today and for the next four weeks, our international film series will tell the stories of five cities that reflect these divisions in surprising and troubling ways

Thirty years ago, a rapt world watched the unfolding of one of the great city stories of all time. Every hammer blow chipping away the imposing grey blocks of the Berlin Wall, which had come to embody global geopolitical divisions, seemed to herald a more united future.

Since then, however, our world has fractured anew and our cities feel more divided than ever. When the Berlin Wall fell, there were two border walls in Europe; now there are 15. Nor is this fracture merely physical: many cities are havens of wealth and privilege for those who hold the access codes, hives of struggle and poverty for those who do not. Wherever I travel to report I have always been struck by how different people can have such contrasting experiences of the same city – and it’s no different at home, in my neighbourhood of Camberwell, south London, where upscale coffee shops and gang violence occupy the same stretches of road.

Continue reading...

‘Make Spain great again’: does Melilla really need a Trump-style wall? – video

Posted on by

Everyone in Melilla has some connection to the city’s most visible and controversial feature: a huge barbed-wire fence, which separates this Spanish port city from the rest of north Africa. Asylum seekers like Aboubacar wait for months in hidden forest camps to scale the fence, populist politicians like Jesús want to strengthen it, and both the Moroccan and Melillan economy depend on the 30,000 Moroccans like Youssra who cross through it every day to work. Will Melilla embrace its fate as a city embedded in Africa – or will it succumb to populist Trump-style demands to build a wall?

Continue reading...

Moving stories: inside the book buses changing children’s lives

Posted on by

Around the world, mobile library programmes are taking books, educational support and even counselling to communities in serious and urgent need

Every week, two converted blue buses stocked with children’s books carefully navigate the streets of Kabul, avoiding areas where deadly explosions are common. These travelling libraries stop off at schools in different parts of the city, delivering a wealth of reading material directly to youngsters who have limited access to books.

“A lot of schools in our city don’t have access to something as basic as a library,” says Freshta Karim, a 27-year-old Oxford University graduate who was inspired to start Charmaghz, a non-profit, in her home city having grown up without many books herself. “We were trying to understand what we could do to promote critical thinking in our country.”

Continue reading...

Can ‘nests’ and eco bikes reduce the environmental impact of parcel delivery in cities?

Posted on by

Cities are testing new systems to reduce the pollution and congestion caused by of the final leg of a package’s journey from warehouse to doorstep

The cube truck sidled up to a row of parked cars on a busy Montreal street and threw on its hazard lights, blocking a lane of traffic. The driver hopped out with a package in hand and disappeared into a building, leaving a bottleneck of frustrated drivers in his wake.

“This is exactly what we’re trying to change,” said Agathe Besse-Bergier, a project coordinator with the city, as she watched the scene unfold.

Continue reading...

In Jakarta’s cemeteries they’re stacking the dead six-deep

Posted on by

What was meant to be a stopgap solution to a shortage of land for burial in the Indonesian capital has sparked family rifts and hit the poor the hardest

At Karet Bivak cemetery in Jakarta, the neat rows of headstones extend as far as the eye can see, seeming to sprout into skyscrapers at the horizon.

Driving his scooter through after Friday prayers, a friendly Muslim man wearing white robes and a taqiyah cap seems at peace with his fate. “This is my future home,” he says, leaning on the handlebars and indicating the graves. “Your home, my home – everybody’s home.”

Continue reading...

Google sister company agrees to scale back controversial Toronto project

Posted on by

Sidewalk Labs agreed to 12 acres for a hi-tech waterfront neighbourhood rather than the 190 announced in June

The Google sister company Sidewalk Labs has agreed to scale back and refine its approach to a controversial hi-tech neighbourhood it has proposed for a swath of Toronto’s prime waterfront land.

Instead of developing 190 acres of property, as it pitched in June, Sidewalk agreed on Thursday to scale back its plan to the 12 acres it first envisioned in its response to a request for proposals two years ago.

Continue reading...

The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism

Posted on by

From a festival that helps artists trade work for healthcare to a regional micro-currency, Kingston is trying to build an inclusive and self-sufficient local ecosystem

Kingston, New York is a diverse city of 23,000, flanked to the east by Rondout Creek and the Hudson River and to the west by the Catskill mountains. It boasts a rustic industrial waterfront, a colorful historic district and Revolutionary War-era stone buildings. A stranger might call it bucolic. The streets of uptown are bustling with eateries and, of late, places to buy velvet halter dresses, vintage boleros, CBD tinctures, and LCD tea kettles with precision-pour spouts. But strolling by 10-year-old Half Moon Books, passersby might glimpse a different side of this city. The bookshop’s windows exclusively feature nonfiction on the end of the world as we know it. “I started out putting together a window of utopias,” says bookseller Jessica DuPont, “but somehow I ended up with the death throes of capitalism.”

I moved to Kingston from New York City just over a decade ago, on the heels of the 2008 recession. I was three years out of university, but my fledgling career in media stalled with the economic downturn. Friends of mine – two painters, one in her 30s, the other in his 40s – owned a building with an available apartment on the second floor where I could afford to live and work.

Continue reading...

Could cities profit from protecting themselves against rising seas?

Posted on by

Some coastal cities are reclaiming land as a barrier against rising water – then selling it off. But critics argue that climate change defence should not be a business model

“The island is going to be placed where the British empire’s fleet once was,” says Anne Skovbro, looking out from her office in a 19th-century customs house over Copenhagen’s harbour.

She points out the mooring posts where tall ships once docked, the old masting crane that marked the harbour’s outer edge, and the patch of sea where Horatio Nelson is supposed to have held a telescope to his blind eye as his ships set the city’s medieval centre ablaze.

Continue reading...

Springing the ‘rat’ trap: how Baltimore fought back against Trump’s insults

Posted on by

In July the president called the Maryland city a ‘rat and rodent-infested mess’ and moved on. But for residents striving to build a brighter future, the hard work continues

A visitor was heading to the exit of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. “Thank you for coming to Baltimore,” said Shauntee Daniels, a local heritage official, “with our rats and all.”

Turning in the doorway, the visitor, a middle-aged woman, replied: “I know better than that. I know too many good people here.”

Continue reading...

‘Women were being killed on the street’: the township struggling with domestic abuse

Posted on by

In a 2016 study of Diepsloot, 56% of men surveyed admitted to raping or beating a women in the previous 12 months – a lack of policing is just the start of the problem

The violence usually starts on a Thursday night, worsens on a Friday and reaches a peak over Saturday into the early hours of the morning. At the start of spring in September, temperatures rise and tempers flare. By the hot, heady weeks of the festive season in December, domestic abuse reaches its worst, outdoing the incidents of violence that have become common over long weekends throughout the year. In Diepsloot, an impoverished community north west of Johannesburg, gender-based violence has become so common that it follows a recognisable pattern.

Some would survive if a car comes by while they are raping her or before she was killed

Continue reading...

‘They didn’t allow me inside’: Daleside revisited – a photo essay

Posted on by

When Magnum nominee Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s mother worked as a live-in help in this one-time white-dominated community, the family wouldn’t let him inside. He returned as a photographer to document the town’s transformation

“I first went because my mother used to be employed there as a domestic worker,” says photojournalist Lindokuhle Sobekwa. “When I first visited Daleside, to me it seemed an isolated place, a ghost town.”

Daleside used to be a white-dominated area, but now it is mixed. In the early 2000s Sobekwa’s mother took a job as live-in help with a white family in this town south of Johannesburg. As she struggled alone to support her four children he only saw her on weekends and during school holidays.

Continue reading...

‘An indictment of South Africa’: whites-only town Orania is booming

Posted on by

Twenty-five years after apartheid, black people cannot live and work in this small South African city

Photographs by Madelene Cronjé

October in Orania can be charming. When the sun sets, long ribbons of burnt orange settle on the horizon. The flies and mosquitoes that come with the summer’s oppressive heat haven’t arrived yet. It is Magdalene Kleynhans’ favourite time of year. “You can sit outside until late into the night,” says the businesswoman, whose family spends much of their time outdoors. Her children fish from the banks of the Orange River whenever they choose. Kleynhans leaves the house unlocked. “It’s a good life. It’s a big privilege.”

But there is much more to small Northern Cape town than the bucolic ideal painted by Kleynhans. Incredibly, 25 years after the fall of apartheid, Orania is a place for white people only.

Continue reading...

The quiet failure of a Chinese developer’s ‘Manhattan in Africa’

Posted on by

A refusal to include affordable housing led Johannesburg to reject glossy plans for high-end housing, offices, a rail station and entertainment district. It seems the city will get disconnected car-centric gated communities instead

The Gautrain rushes through the green rolling hills and grasslands of Modderfontein, the commuter rail’s gold livery recalling Johannesburg’s reason for existence as a mining town, and speeds past the platforms of the commuter station that never got finished.

Four lanes of smooth tarmac lead over the horizon. Streetlights evenly spaced and dropdowns from the kerbs make it easier for pedestrians to cross than in much of South Africa’s biggest city – except there are no pedestrians. The paint still looks fresh and the markings clear, but these roads to nowhere end in concrete and steel barriers.

Continue reading...

‘There’s a lot of money down there’: the deadly cities of gold beneath Johannesburg

Posted on by

Millions of ounces of unmined gold are still believed to lie below the surface, fuelling a booming – but frequently deadly – illicit industry

As he prepares to descend an abandoned mineshaft in the Johannesburg suburb of Roodepoort, Fix, a sinewy informal goldminer from Lesotho, recounts stories of subterranean gun battles and unearthing the scattered bones of those who came before him.

“This is very dangerous work,” he says, draining a quart of beer for courage. “But there’s a lot of money down there.”

Continue reading...

The future of Durban: is this South Africa’s most inclusive public space?

Posted on by

The Indian Ocean beachfront, the restaurant strip of Florida Road and the market at Warwick offer three very different models for the future of South Africa’s third largest city

Tell us: how have South African cities changed in the 25 years after apartheid?

It’s an early start on Durban’s beachfront Golden Mile. By 6am the surfers have arrived, followed by the runners and their dogs, then executives-cum-cyclists, speed walkers and yoga instructors. By 7am the cafes are open for breakfast and children, on holiday from inland schools, are already in the water.

Where fellow oceanside metropolis Cape Town has marketed itself to the world, Durban has positioned itself as South Africa’s playground. Beachfront theme parks and twirling public waterslides attract families from around the country, and all walks of life. This accessibility and affordability have made this eight-kilometre strip arguably one of South Africa’s most inclusive public spaces.

Continue reading...