Category Archives: Cities

Inside Copenhagen’s race to be the first carbon-neutral city

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Green growth and ‘hedonistic sustainability’ have helped keep the public on board as the Danish capital seeks to reach its goal by 2025 – and so far it’s all going according to plan

“We call it hedonistic sustainability,” says Jacob Simonsen of the decision to put an artificial ski slope on the roof of the £485m Amager Resource Centre (Arc), Copenhagen’s cutting-edge new waste-to-energy power plant. “It’s not just good for the environment, it’s good for life.”

Skiing is just one of the activities that Simonsen, Arc’s chief executive, and Bjarke Ingels, its lead architect, hope will enhance the latest jewel in Copenhagen’s sustainability crown. The incinerator building also incorporates hiking and running trails, a street fitness gym and the world’s highest outdoor climbing wall, an 85-metre “natural mountain” complete with overhangs that rises the full height of the main structure.

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US mayors seek to bypass Trump with direct role at UN climate talks

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‘If cities are invited to be at the table, I believe they will help accelerate the work that needs to be done’ said LA mayor Eric Garcetti

US mayors are seeking to go over President Trump’s head and negotiate directly at next month’s UN climate change conference in Santiago, they said as they met in Copenhagen for the C40 World Mayors Summit.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, who rallied US mayors to commit to the Paris climate agreement after Trump announced his intention to withdraw the country in 2017, said he would ask the UN secretary general, António Guterres, on Thursday to give American cities a new role in UN climate talks.

“I’m going to bring it up with the UN secretary general,” Garcetti said. “If cities are invited to be at the table, I believe they will help accelerate the work that needs to be done. Hopefully, we can do it in concert with our national governments, but [we can do it] even where there is conflict.”

Garcetti, who was announced on Wednesday as the next chair of the C40 group of global cities, said he would use his position to seek “a more formal role in the deliberations” at the conference.

“The United Nations works directly with cities all the time ... so they shouldn’t feel feel scared about jumping down to that local level,” he said.

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The climate crisis in 2050: what happens if cities act but nations don’t?

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It is cities, not national governments, that are most aggressively fighting the climate crisis – and in 30 years they could look radically different

She has barely ever been in a car, and never eaten meat or flown. Now 31, she lives on the 15th floor of a city centre tower from where she can just see the ocean 500 yards away on one side and the suburbs and informal settlements sprawling as far as the eye can see on the other.

Life is OK in this megacity. She earns the exact median income and is as green as she feels she can be: she has no children yet, her carbon footprint is negligible, and her apartment, built in the early 2000s, has been retrofitted for climate change with deep insulation, its own solar air-con and heating systems.

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‘A serious urban mistake’: why Paris went sour on the new Gare du Nord

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As developers aim to turn France’s busiest train station into a gargantuan airport-style mall, Parisians fear for the local neighbourhood – and the station’s soul

“When you tell people in Paris you live near the Gare du Nord, they usually grimace,” sighed Sarah, a French academic in her 50s who has lived on a narrow, traffic-choked street next to Europe’s busiest station for 30 years.

“Architecturally, the station building is superb. But neighbourhoods around stations are never easy, wherever they are in the world.”

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‘Future relics’: the painter capturing the beauty of council houses

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Frank Laws’s Hopperesque watercolours depict the individual character of east London’s most impressive – and everyday – buildings, as gentrification threatens their very existence

From Mike Leigh’s film Meantime to the TV show Top Boy, the social housing estates of east London have provided rich subject matter for writers and artists exploring the human stories intertwining in their communities. In the paintings of east Londoner Frank Laws, however, there isn’t a person in sight. The only signs of life are curtains flapping at open windows and the luminescent glow emanating from inside a home. Blocks of flats that teem with life in, say, Plan B’s film and album Ill Manors, stand eerily quiet and vacant in Laws’s images.

Laws was born in a village in Norfolk but hated the rural quiet. “I was always scared of the dark in the countryside,” says the 37-year-old. “I’m still scared of it.” It’s this fear, and Laws’ love of film noir, that informs the dramatic, Edward Hopperesque lighting in Laws’ meticulously detailed watercolour and acrylic paintings.

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‘Inspirational’: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez applauds mayors’ Global Green New Deal

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Mayors of more than 90 of the world’s biggest cities voice support for bold proposal to fight climate change as they lambast ‘failed’ UN climate summit

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she was ‘inspired’ by the Global Green New Deal, a bold proposal to fight climate change announced today by the C40 group of global mayors.

To kick off their major summit this week the group, which represents more than 90 of the world’s biggest cities, voiced their backing for the plan and said it reaffirmed their “commitment to protecting the environment, strengthening our economy, and building a more equitable future by cutting emissions”.

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Which city is the worst for sexual harassment on public transport?

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As reports of sexual harassment on the London underground soar, studies say the issue is the number-one safety risk facing girls and women worldwide

It’s 8am at Oxford Circus tube station and the Central line platforms are teeming with people. Stony-faced business types, rucksack-touting tourists and yawning schoolchildren jostle for space in the rush-hour crush.

But among the crowds of commuters is another group waiting to board the train – a covert patrol of plainclothed officers looking to catch sexual predators in the act.

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‘Manhattan of the desert’: civil war puts Yemen’s ancient skyscrapers at risk

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In addition to the conflict’s huge human cost, Yemen’s rich cultural heritage has been ravaged, from the Queen of Sheba’s reputed throne room to the mudbrick high-rises of Shibam

On the edge of the vast Empty Quarter desert that dominates the Arabian peninsula, white and brown towers rise together out of the valley floor like tall sandcastles. Once they welcomed weary caravans traversing the Silk Roads: now they stand as testimony to the ingenuity of a lost civilisation.

This is the ancient walled city of Shibam, nicknamed the “Manhattan of the desert” by the British explorer Freya Stark in the 1930s, in modern-day Yemen, a country also home to an untold number of other archeological treasures. The kingdom of Saba, ruled by the legendary Queen of Sheba, and many other dynasties of the ancient world rose and fell here, their fortunes linked to Yemen’s position at the crossroads of early frankincense and spice trades between Africa and Asia.

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Pissoirs and public votes: how Paris embraced the participatory budget

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Residents of France’s capital can propose ideas for and vote on what 5% of the city’s budget will be spent on every year – and their suggestions range from the quixotic to the ambitious

Arnaud Carnet was crossing Paris on his bicycle one day when something strange caught his eye: a dilapidated old urinal stationed at the foot of the high walls of the last operational prison in the city.

This graffitied, ripe-smelling structure was far from a standard street pissoir. Carnet discovered that it was in fact the last remaining 19th-century vespasienne urinal in the city. He decided he needed to save it.

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Will the drive to ‘beautify’ Beijing’s historic areas leave older residents behind?

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For longtime residents of the Chinese city’s hutong neighbourhoods, a housing renovation project mean tough choices over whether to stay or leave

On sunny afternoons, Yang takes his wheelchair-bound 90-year-old mother out along the Yu River, a canal near their home in Beijing’s historic Gulou neighbourhood. In the autumn, willow trees sweep their branches in the water, and the place gives the impression of a lazy, golden city from the last imperial days.

Gulou, often called the heart of old Beijing, is one of the only areas left that still have the city’s ancient winding alleyways, or hutongs. Yang and his mother live in Yu’er hutong, which lies just off the well-known and tourist-packed Nanluogu Xiang pedestrian street and is a short stroll from the ancient Drum and Bell Towers once used to tell the time across the city.

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Faces for fallen trees: the man behind Rome’s tree stump sculptures

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Cities on Instagram: Andrea Gandini is breathing new life into the ancient city’s many decapitated tree trunks

You may not know his face or name, but if you’ve visited Rome recently, chances are you may have seen his work.

Sculptor Andrea Gandini, 22, is transforming tree stumps around the city by carving faces into them. In the last four years he has made 65 such sculptures in the capital as part of his Troncomorto (“dead trunk”) project, documenting his creations on his Instagram account.

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‘We live for gravity biking’: deadly sport is way of life in Medellín

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The risky hillside pastime – which sees people hurtle down steep inclines on weighted bikes at up to 77 mph – is providing kids in downtrodden areas of Colombia’s second city with an escape from their troubles

As the cable cars that connect downtown Medellín – Colombia’s second city – to the hillside slums pass overhead, a band of teenage cyclists have gathered at the side of the road. Vallejuelos is a downtrodden neighbourhood, rife with crime and unemployment, but “gravity biking” is helping some kids escape their troubles.

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Safe space: the new cinema welcoming women in male-dominated Kabul

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Cinema once thrived in Afghanistan until Taliban censorship. Now, new ventures are slowly reviving it

The majority of Kabul’s cinemas cater largely to audiences of young men, and tend to show Bollywood films produced in Pakistan and India. For some young Afghan men, the cinema is a rare occasion for public expressions of joy: audience members cheer on the films’ heroes and sometimes dance along.

For most women, however, fears of harassment in a male-dominated space have made cinemas feel unwelcoming.

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Is a huge Montreal building project pushing out Trudeau’s poorest constituents?

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Residents of city’s Parc-Ex district, one of Canada’s poorest areas, and part of Justin Trudeau’s own electoral district, say a new university campus is driving them out

Parc-Extension in Papineau, Quebec, is one of Canada’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Of the approximately 30,000 people who live in Parc-Ex, 61% were born outside Canada. The area is one of the country’s poorest: 43% of households live below the poverty line, perhaps a somewhat surprising fact given that it is also part of the riding (electoral district) represented by the Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau .

Despite being located in the centre of bustling Montreal, Parc-Ex feels isolated and is physically closed off from the rest of the city by borders on all sides. There’s a highway to the north, a large park to the east, train tracks to the south and a fence to the west, built by a posher neighbouring borough.

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Try before you buy: German city offers workers a free one-month stay

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Picturesque Görlitz is offering free lodging and studio space in exchange for feedback on what potential residents want from a city

Last year Eva Bodenmüller read about a city in eastern Germany inviting people to live there for a month for free. She and her partner Carsten Borck, an artist, knew they had to leave their residence in Italy soon and weren’t looking forward to moving back to their native Berlin.

“I thought: ‘Why not Görlitz?’” said Bodenmüller, a freelance journalist .

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‘It’s a beacon for the city’: inside the new New York library that cost $40m to build

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The project earned criticism for its price tag, but it is being seen as a positive sign for the health of New York libraries

Strategically positioned on the bank of the East River, across the water from the United Nations headquarters, New York city has a shimmering new addition to its skylines.

Unusually for such prime real estate set among parkland, panoramic views of Manhattan and convenient transport links, this $40m development in Queens is neither an upscale apartment block, exclusive members club or the offices of a huge corporation.

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Ancient Turkish town begins to disappear underwater – in pictures

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The small town of Hasankeyf, in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority south-east, is doomed to disappear in the coming months after being inhabited for 12,000 years. An artificial lake, part of the Ilısu hydroelectric dam project, will swallow it up. The huge dam, Turkey’s second largest, is being filled further down the Tigris River, despite protests that it will displace thousands of people and risks creating water shortages downstream, namely in Iraq. Residents are being moved from the ancient town to New Hasankeyf nearby, while historic artefacts have also been transported out of the area

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Which is the world’s hardest-working city?

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Tokyo may be the most ‘overworked’ city – but there are ways to measure how hard a city works other than simply totting up the overtime

In July 2013, 31-year-old Miwa Sado, a reporter for Japan’s national broadcaster NHK, was found dead in her Tokyo apartment. She had died from heart failure. It was later revealed that Sado had logged 159 hours and 37 minutes of overtime at work in the month before her death. Sado’s death was officially designated as a “death from overwork”.

So common are cases of people dying from overwork in Japan that the country has a special term for it, karoshi. The first case of karoshi was recorded in 1969; according to government data, Japan had 190 deaths from overwork in 2017.

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Hot properties: how Oslo went wild for floating saunas

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When the city’s first floating sauna was banned by port authorities, its owners took it on the run, sparking a public craze

It all began in September 2011, when Martin Lundberg sailed his boat into the marina in the fashionable Aker Brygge district in central Oslo, Norway.

A native of Malmö, Sweden, Lundberg had spent the summer on his boat moored off one of Oslo’s islands. He didn’t have a job, or a home other than the boat.

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