Category Archives: Urbanisation

How the megacities of Europe stole a continent’s wealth

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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.

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‘Bulging at the seams’: Auckland, a super city struggling with its own success

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The government dreamed of a metropolis that is a beacon to all but the pace of change has left some behind and others disillusioned

Tāmaki Makaurau, the Māori name for Auckland which can be translated as “the place desired by many”, is living up to its billing. The city’s population has swelled rapidly to 1.7 million and is estimated to be adding 40,000 people a year. By 2048 it could host nearly half of New Zealand’s current population.

In the 1980s only a couple of thousand people lived in the central city. Now some 57,000 people call it home, a figure that was not expected to be reached until 2032.

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Should a notorious Buenos Aires slum become an official neighbourhood?

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Turning Villa 31 into a barrio will bring greater stability and prosperity, say city authorities, but the plan is stirring deep resentments about ownership and identity

For many Argentinians, especially those from Buenos Aires, Villa 31 is a household name. It is the most famous – and notorious – slum in Buenos Aires, synonymous with poverty and violence (it has the second-highest murder rate in the city), and with the narcotráficantes (organised drug gangs) and paco, a cocaine paste that destroys communities in Argentina.

As inflation climbed to 55% last year and the national poverty rate crept to 32%, the neighbourhood lurched further into the grip of gangs, such as the Sampedranos. Murder stories from the villa dominate headlines, the most recent one being the discovery of a woman’s dismembered corpse in March.

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The canal revolution: how waterways reveal the truth about modern Britain

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The remarkable transformation of canals is a global phenomenon and the ultimate symbol of how our cities have changed – for good and ill

Every second Monday of the month, a small group of volunteers meets in the training room of a Birmingham supermarket. They discuss what has long seemed to many of their friends a crazy and probably doomed idea: how to excavate a contaminated 40-year-old waste dump, create an urban marina, restore three miles of derelict canal and build several new bridges and locks.

Last month, however, the meeting of the 18-strong Lapal Canal Trust committee was joyous. After 20 years of trying to restore this short stretch of the 200-year-old Dudley No 2 canal, permission had finally been granted, they were told.

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The jungle metropolis: how sprawling Manaus is eating into the Amazon

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Informal settlements are expanding, with a new occupation attempt every 11 days, and the threat to the rainforest is severe

Antonio Pinto’s makeshift home on the outskirts of Manaus is an open-air shack, one of dozens of similar dwellings of timber and tarpaulin scattered around the hills.

Around them is the evidence of the use of flame and iron: the hills are scorched and brown, littered with fallen logs and toppled, twisted trees.

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Ministry of cities RIP: the sad story of Brazil’s great urban experiment

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How an urbanist dream of fixing Brazil’s chaotic metropolises became a nightmare

Inside Maria Cleudimar da Silva’s flat, gospel music plays softly on the stereo, family photos and religious posters decorate the walls, and a wicker rocking chair and computer furnish the living room. The only evidence of her past life is a faded photo of the home she lived in for 11 years, a shack she called Noah’s Ark for its frequent floods.

She moved in in 1996, pursuing the promise of a better life from Brazil’s rural north-east to São Paulo, its largest city, where she settled in Paraisópolis, the city’s largest favela.

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Which is the world’s most vertical city?

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You might think of Hong Kong, given its famous skyscraper skyline, but by different measures of verticality other cities come out on top

Looking out from sky100, Hong Kong’s highest observation deck on the 100th floor of the city’s tallest building, the 494-metre-high International Commerce Centre, you get a 360-degree view of one of the world’s most famous skylines – an urban jungle framed by mountains and the gleaming Victoria harbour, with endless clusters of high-rise buildings packed so closely together they resemble a game of Tetris.

It’s little wonder a city of such visible density has more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), Hong Kong has 355 buildings over 150m in height.

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Yesterday’s tomorrow today: what we can learn from past urban visions

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From modernist machine-built perfection to a nuclear-proof metropolis buried far underground, our predictions for future cities tell us much about the past

Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination by Paul Dobraszczyk is published by Reaktion Books

Ever since the world’s first recognised skyscrapers were built in Chicago and New York in the 1880s, cities have been in thrall to visions of extraordinary height. Early intimations of the ways in which skyscrapers would transform cities came in the 1910s, with images such as Richard Rummell’s below suggesting a future not only of immensely tall buildings but also of multilayered streets, railways and flying machines.

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Dutch council forces playground to close over noise complaints

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More than 4,000 sign petition to overturn decision, which aimed to appease neighbours

A national debate has been sparked in the Netherlands after a council ordered a primary school playground to be shut for being too noisy.

Questions have been raised in the Dutch parliament and a campaign has been launched to save the playground in the wake of the decision by Nijmegen council.

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Humans v the city: the staggering scale of Chongqing – in pictures

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Chongqing’s population is estimated at just below 10 million but that rises to more than 31 million if the built-up surroundings are included. Belgian photographer Kris Provoost finds that in a city so large, individuals can get lost

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Has Tokyo reached ‘peak city’?

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You could argue that the world’s biggest city has hit a sweet spot: a flatlining population, pervasive transit and little gentrification. But is ‘peak city’ even possible – and where does Tokyo go from here?

Tokyo is often described as crowded, mushrooming, figuratively bursting at the seams. Except, in many ways, it’s not.

Unlike many megacities, the world’s largest metropolitan area has largely stopped growing, either in land or population. Where Mumbai, Lagos or São Paulo continually sprout new informal neighbourhoods that are constantly outstripping the ability of the city to catch up, Tokyo’s urban planning and services more or less seamlessly encompass the central wards and the neighbouring cities of Kawasaki, Yokohama, Chiba and Saitama that form its unbroken metropolitan area.

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A city built on water: the hidden rivers under Tokyo’s concrete and neon

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More than 100 rivers and canals flow beneath Tokyo, but from the ground it’s hard to notice them. Why has the city turned its back on water?

Of the near-endless flow of people over the busy Shibuya scramble crossing every day, few realise that beneath their feet is something else flowing, unseen and unnoticed: the crossing of two ancient rivers, the Uda and the Onden.

Beneath all the concrete and neon, Tokyo is a city built on water. It is the reason the Japanese capital’s 37 million citizens are here at all. From fishing village to seat of political power, canny water management was a key driver of the city’s extraordinary growth.

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Spite buildings and 50C cities: the most-read urban stories of 2018

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From overstretched and overheating cities to an urban paradise that banned cars, here are the best-read cities stories of this year

In a year of unrelenting political and climactic extremes, some of the best-read Guardian Cities stories looked at overpopulation and its impact on the environment and communities; others explored the reality of living in acute, road-melting heat.

We have also heard from underrepresented voices from urban areas ranging from Stoke-on-Trent to Atlanta, and found a truly walkable city. Here are the most-read Cities stories of 2018.

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