Big Trouble In Big China: Ghost Cities Of China Reviewed, by Stephen Lee Naish

The rapid rise of China as one of the world's economic powerhouses has been astonishing to witness: Due to the sheer volume of exportable goods produced within the country, and the largest labor force in the world, China has been given the unofficial status of the world's factory. However this slightly derogatory and naive term is becoming more and more redundant as China is hastily being transformed beyond recognition from a production-based society to a consumerist one. The World Bank states that:

Since initiating market reforms in 1978, China has shifted from a centrally planned to a market based economy and experienced rapid economic and social development. GDP growth averaging about 10 percent a year has lifted more than 500 million people out of poverty

This is a truly a remarkable accomplishment in economic reform, yet has not been without its shortcomings to the general populace. High inequality is widespread, environmental concerns and sustainability is a major concern. One of the other aspects of China's growth has been the mounting need/desire to increase its urban spaces as more and more rural communities up sticks and move to the cities to partake in the economic boom. China has put into practice a colossal programme of urban renewal and expansion as well as creating brand new cities from the ground up.

When the Communist Party came to power in 1949 there were 69 cities, today that number has leapt to 658 cities of various population densities. No civilisation in history has built so much in such a short space of time. Yet the majority of these new constructions remain virtually empty. Towers of apartment buildings with no tenants. Shopping malls, and offices without shoppers or workers, sports stadiums with no home teams. China is building pristine virgin cities that no one has yet to touch. Why is this happening? Could China be building these metropolises in preparation for a mass external migration as it surpasses the West as the world's economic power?

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Infiltrating London: subterranean exploration in the british capital, by Darmon Richter

London is a complicated place. It is a melting pot of cultures and races, a nexus for trade and travel, which archaeologists believe to have been occupied for more than 6,000 years. With every passing age, with each new society that has laid a claim to this settlement on the Thames Estuary, London’s roots have grown deeper and deeper into the soil of England.

The result today is a multifaceted and wholly organic entity, one in which Roman ruins rub shoulders with Victorian ice wells, between historic catacombs and contemporary rail tracks. London's layers spread out deep, far, and wide beneath the limited surface space. Beneath the paved streets is a tangled labyrinth of storm drains and sewers, subterranean rivers, the booming network of underground train tunnels, a warren of wartime bunkers, and deep level shelter facilities. Then, beneath that, there are areas of new bore. Even now London’s roots are searching deeper still, pushing further into the Earth’s crust to make room for high-speed rail connections and advanced data delivery conduits.

It should be no surprise then that London is something of a mecca for urban explorers. However, London is not Eastern Europe, where regime changes have left many underground facilities obsolete, their bulkhead doors hanging open and inviting to those who would dare to peek beneath the surface. This is not Australia, where explorers are discouraged from entering the extensive storm drain networks largely for their own benefit, on account of the many deadly creatures which thrive in these dank and disconnected places.

In a city of 8.3 million people, there is limited room for abandonment. London moves quickly, and there is little time to forget. Almost every inch of London’s subterranean realm still serves a purpose — from cable runs to data storage vaults — and those that don’t are simply waiting to be allotted new roles in the substructure of the capital.

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Derelict Utopias, by Mark Sanderson

Along the coastline of northern Italy lie a number of distinctive buildings, constructed during the 1930s to function as holiday hostels for the children of industrial workers who were members of the Fascist Party. This kind of building was called a colonia, which translates literally as “colony,” and its purpose was to promote health and fitness in an atmosphere of sun, sea, and regular exercise. The holidaymakers pledged love and allegiance to Mussolini at daily flag-raising ceremonies. For the purposes of propaganda, there was no higher cause than the nurture of Italy’s children and no better vision than boys and girls at orderly play in spectacular settings of modern architecture amid panoramic views. Two futures were on display here: the modernization of a nation together with its future citizens.


THE FASCIST PROJECT

Despite the lack of consensus about the root causes of Fascism, it articulated itself through a largely coherent corporate identity that ranged from logos to the design of new towns. While most of its slogans and symbols have long since been erased, its remaining architecture—varying in style from theatrical classicism to rationalism to futurism—is still recognizable as Fascist. Most common 
is a stripped-down classicism that recalls De Chirico’s “Piazze d’Italia” paintings, where all architectural form is simplified into disconcerting and faintly menacing scenography.


The ideology was intended to manage the population through the production of belief, a technique most effective in the young—Mussolini’s most famous slogan, “Credere, Ubbidire, Combattere,”(”Believe, Obey, Fight”) was posted 
in every classroom. The Opera Nazionale Balilla (founded 
in 1926) absorbed and unified all various youth groups into 
a single cohesive entity and offered Balilla Youth between 
the ages of eight and fourteen after-school activities 
including sports, gymnastics, military drills with dummy rifles, and excursions to holiday colonies by the sea or 
in the mountains. 

Idyllic spaces and panoramic views coincided with obedience, effort, and militarism. Comradeship was instilled in the Balilla Youth—who played, ate, slept, and marched together—in an attempt to dislodge older allegiances to place, church, and family.¹ Leisure time was being colonized with a view to regulating both consciousness and space.² Everyone was to be trained in the ways of Fascism, preparing them for a world of work, war, and mass culture.

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Derelict London

This website has now been around for 11 years. In that time my random wanderings around London have often been described as psychogeography and that little known penchant for walking around derelict buildings with a camera has been branded urban exploration (aka urbex).  This site  doesn't fit into any category or belong to any forum. There are no rules. 

This is not a compilation of familiar tourist sights, as another of those is hardly needed, but a depiction of an (often un-picturesque) view of everyday life in London

The site is obviously not taken to illustrate London at its most beautiful or most successful, the name derelict London is a memorable name for a website though not everything within this site is of derelict areas and everyone has their own definition of derelict......99% of these pictures were taken by myself during many miles of walkabouts around the great capital. After years of travelling via car or public transport I realised just how little I had seen of London. (ie just stepping back and looking at buildings and people). I've enjoyed putting this site together and will continue to add more pics. Try not to be too critical because I'm no professional photographer. Neither is this some trendy art student project..............Any places you think should be on this site? Let me know! Also info (however trivial) or stories/personal memories on any of the buildings would be appreciated.

Apart from the odd tip off most of the locations on this site are on here because I randomly stumbled upon them when walking down the street.

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Ancient Man Used “Super-Acoustics” to Alter Consciousness, (and Speak with the Dead?)

Researchers at a recent conference on “Archaeoacoustics: The Archaeology of Sound” studied the acoustic properties of a 5,000-years-old mortuary temple on the Mediterranean island of Malta. The Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum is an underground complex created in the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period as a depository for bones and a shrine for ritual use. In a chamber known as the “Oracle Room”, fabled for its eerie sound effects, scientists detected the presence of a strong double resonance frequency at 70Hz and 114Hz.

A deep male voice tuned to these frequencies stimulated a resonance phenomenon throughout the hypogeum, creating bone-chilling effects. It was reported that sounds echoed for up to 8 seconds during the testing. Archaeologist Fernando Coimbra reported that he felt the sound crossing his body at high speed, leaving a sensation of relaxation. When it was repeated, the sensation returned and he also had the illusion that the sound was reflected from his body to the ancient red ochre paintings on the walls. One can only imagine the experience in antiquity: standing in what must have been somewhat odorous dark and listening to ritual chant while low light flickered over the bones of one’s departed loved ones.

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(Gregor Schneider) Bleak Houses by Deborah Ripley

Upon entering Die Familie Schneider, visitors walk down a narrow, darkened hallway to a series of doors and a staircase. One door leads to a cramped kitchen where a woman dressed in brown and wearing rubber gloves is robotically washing a dish. Behind her is a grimy little sitting room devoid of decoration except for a curious, small 19th century landscape painting leaning against the wall. Back out in the hall and up the staircase are two more doors. One leads to a brightly lit bathroom, in which a man, behind the shower curtain, is masturbating, breathing heavily, apparently oblivious to visitors observation. The other door leads to a seedy, motel-like bedroom with a fake white fur bedspread and mirrored wardrobe doors. The air is oppressively hot and smells sickly. Slumped beside the bed is either a child or a small adult -- it is difficult to tell because the person is hidden beneath a plastic garbage bag. There is a sense that some unspeakable crime has been committed here. From the inside, the room appears to have no windows, even though windows are visible from the street. Clearly this is a secret inner room that Schneider has constructed.

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Piranesi, and his enduring influence by Jonathan Jones

The reason these images have such a dark vitality is not that they are protests or satires, however. Piranesi is more than half in love with his prisons. They are a place his imagination can wander, and at the same time an impossible place - the prints contain spatial paradoxes, including a staircase that exists on two planes simultaneously. It is a place without limits or contexts: Piranesi's prison interiors have no outer walls, and each vista is cut off only by the frame of the image itself. The spaces are so big, so continuous, that they may not even be interiors; this may be a city that has grown into a world, where interior and exterior are no longer definable. There are views through arches of almost recognisable Roman sights - the colonnade of St Peter's. But there is nothing to tell us that these mark terminal points of the prison. Instead, they are incorporated into it.

If inside and outside no longer exist, up and down are what create the sense of power beyond description. While prisoners undergo mysterious torments, luckier souls pass by on parapets or bridges that have no logic or necessity. Piranesi argued that architecture should indulge in grotesque ornament; the architecture of his prisons is redundant, it is not functional, it relishes itself. There is a perverse freedom to this that makes it easy to understand why Edgar Allan Poe was a fan - Poe's story The Pit and the Pendulum is a transcription of the world of Piranesi's carceri. The awful thing about Piranesi's punishments is that you don't quite know how they work, or what the thinking could be behind them. A wheel with spikes around its circumference; a post with more spikes; a kind of chandelier suspended from a beam, which on closer inspection looks like it might be ringed with meathooks; pulleys, one of which raises and lowers a basket big enough to contain a person into a huge marble vat...

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