Photographer Andy Yeung offers us a whole new way to look at cities with his pictures of Hong Kong. Here's just one example. Click the image for a larger view.
There are more pictures at the link.
Yeung's photographs offer an interesting perspective on how hundreds of millions of people live today. I can't help but look at them and wonder how much extra stress and strain it causes to have to live under such surreal, artificial conditions - something for which Mother Nature surely never designed us. That may have a lot to do with the urban crime problem we discussed this morning.
Peter
10 comments:
It's a 'strange' city in more ways than one... Some people never leave the building they're born in. Everything they need is right there.
"Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself."-Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert Heinlein.
No way I could live in a place like that.
Hong Kong is a most interesting city with a unique mixture of old and new. You will see a Chinese apothecary with wares displayed outside the shop and on the other side of the street will be a modern jewelry store or new mall. There is always construction and there is always something to see.
Dave
I've a pilot friend that flies for a foreign carrier and he lives there. He enjoys it but it would drive me crazy. I'm glad to have a deep lot with lots of spruce so I can at least pretend I'm not in the city.
My wife's family lives there. I love to visit, but neither of us has any desire to live there - even for her, after a week or two the crowding gets oppressive. There are places that are relatively uncrowded (parts of Lantau island, and steeper areas of the Kowloon peninsula), but they're unbuildable, protected as parks, or have unworkable commute times for most people; in general only the very wealthy can afford the amount of living space that middle-class Americans take for granted.
Her nephew and his wife just bought an apartment. In a relatively inexpensive area with inconvenient transit connections they paid ~1000 US dollars per square foot for a ~375 square foot apartment. Prices run even higher for larger places in more desirable locations. And you'd be amazed at the number of people who live in an 800-900 square ft 2 bedroom apartment who have live-in maids.
City people are funny.
They make disparaging comments about country folk. For instance, they want to control our mobility and energy use (usually via "carbon").
But they are blind to their own consumption. Good article here: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679249/a-block-by-block-look-at-the-energy-consumption-of-new-yorks-buildings
Even this article completely ignores the energy that is embedded within the manufacturing processes that supplied the steel, concrete, asphalt, carpeting, plaster, glass, etc. Those fixed assets do not have an infinite life and strict accounting would "depreciate out" those hidden teracalories against the inhabitants.
I suspect the presumed "green" benefits of living like sardines in high rise buildings would look less green if embedded energy was accurately accounted for.
To me, that's an overhead picture of hell.
It's weirdly similar to this picture from nat. geo
http://s.ngm.com/2009/11/stoneforest/img/stone-forest-615.jpg
Of course it has a lot to do with the various crime problems you read about all the time.
Go figure: Any time you go anywhere you're crowded out, everyone's in your way. You always have to wait in long lines for services. When you need to go somewhere you're either stuck in a traffic jam or riding a crowded bus or subway train.
And the constant noise resulting from residing in an overpopulated place.
After a while one can get "fed up" enough they may simply "snap" and do something rash out of exasperation.
Does that notion sound so illogical?
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