Reading the Moscow Metro

Taganskaya Station at 36 meters below Moscow streets

Taganskaya Station at 53 meters underground

The announcement that the 77-year-old Moscow Metro would be wired for Wi-Fi access later this year prompted my perusal of photos from a visit to the Russian capital, where, daily, some 6.5 million daily riders descend into the subterranean netherworld. The second heavily used rapid transit system in the world, after Tokyo’s, the Moscow Metro was first constructed in 1935 and spans over 12 lines and 185 stations.

Flipping through hundreds of images largely fixated on babushkas, I stumbled upon a couple divergent snapshots of the Taganskaya Metro station, off Taganka Square. The depot provides an archaeological cross-section of Moscow’s transformative urbanism from the 1950s to 1970s.

Connecting the Koltsevaya Line with the Tagansko-Krasnopresnenskaya Line, Taganskaya actually consists of two stations, one for each line, at 36 and 53 meters below ground, respectively. The latter, deeper station was built in 1950, at the height of post-war garishness so typical of Stalinist Neoclassicism; the former station, closer to the surface, was added in 1966 and designed in a more spartan fashion, privileging function over form.

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Photos of the Week: Subway/Show Off

Subway, Budapest

Show off, Ezeres

These are just some of the striking images in our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.

Delving Brick Lane’s Layers

Early on a Friday morning, London’s Brick Lane bustles with Bangladeshis heading to prayers at the local mosque. The women wear brightly coloured saris and the men don long pastel robes, looking striking as they stride along this worn English street.

A few hours later, they are gone and the feel of the street has completely changed. Now it is busy with hipsters with slicked over retro haircuts and skinny jeans. Like the stars of alternative music videos, people lounge on benches outside cafes dragging at roll ups and drinking cans of beer.

These are just two of the many different scenes that are staged every day on Brick Lane. The long, narrow London road gained its name because it was used to transport bricks from the outskirts of the city to building projects in the centre. It now sits hemmed in between some of London’s poorest neighborhoods and the sleek skyscrapers of the City, London’s financial district, from which it couldn’t be more different.

For me, Brick Lane epitomizes that mingling of different cultures and rich multilayered history that make London so special. Other cities claim to be very multicultural, but the way London mixes tastes and traditions feels different. Hong Kong has residents who hail from different countries — but they remain somewhat segregated. In London, a huge variety of people knock up against each other every day.

London’s development has also been distinctive. Instead of new buildings occupying greenfield sites, or replacing old ones outright, you get developments that build upon what’s beneath. History piles on top of history, like layers of fallen leaves. Brick Lane has witnessed a particularly impressive number of these strata. As the artists Gilbert and George, who live just off the street, once said, Brick Lane has been (and seen) “everything”.

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Photos of the Week: New York/Istanbul

This week’s photos, of famous landmarks in New York and Istanbul on dreary December days, were taken by MissTschoermeni.

Every week, we feature striking images from our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.

Terminal Curiosity

It’s one way to see a city: pick a subway line, any line, and ride to the end. In theory, whatever narrow perceptions you’ve acquired by sauntering through any metropolis’ most busy downtown streets will be balanced out by impressions of its flavor of ragged urban edge.

That’s precisely what my friend Tanveer and I did when we were trying to think, a few years ago, of a creative way to explore Lisbon. Miles out from the tightly gridded 18th century streets of Baixa, the Portuguese capital’s heart, a sprawling housing estate greets anyone arriving at the end of the line with splashes of bold color — and creepily empty streets. It was exactly the contrast with the Lisbon depicted on postcards and tour guides I that would have imagined.

Most termini, though, aren’t very representative of the city’s outer rim. The end of the line is also a starting point — a place where many begin their journeys on cities’ rapid transit systems after disembarking from buses and cars. That means they’re often hubs of activity that mirror the bustle of urban cores — with the crucial distinction that they’re rarely as well-known or experienced by anyone who doesn’t live nearby, as foreign to most residents of those cities as to travelers.

In Berlin, I lived in a bizarre neighborhood of vast, snaking concrete buildings a long walk from the final stop on the U6 line. At Alt-Mariendorf, the line’s last station (or, depending on how you looked at it, its first one), there was a bustling pedestrian plaza that was a hive of activity. Yet, for all the relative action that seemed to transpire there, and not the languid courtyards closer to home, few Berliners were really passing through. The end of a ride they never took to its conclusion, Alt-Mariendorf is, for most regular passengers of the U6, more aspiration than destination.

“Almost everyone in Berlin knows their names,” filmmaker Janosch Delcker introduces his recent short film, which takes viewers to the stations at each end of every Berlin U-Bahn line, “but scarcely anyone has ever been there”. He could be speaking about the last stop of any subway line in the world.

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New Art, Old Wall

If you walk through San Lorenzo, currently one of Rome’s most “trendy” neighborhoods (even if it’s also said to be “underground”) you will probably come upon this very old wall while jumping off of Tram no. 19.

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Visualizing Globalization 2.0

Imagine this: you’re walking down a side street in Midtown Manhattan and turn onto Fifth Avenue, facing uptown. But there, instead of the void of sky that usually greets the vista north toward Central Park, a massive mountain blocks the view, crowned with an uncharacteristic religious symbol. Then it strikes you: you’ve seen this rocky mass before. It looks every bit like Rio de Janeiro’s Corcorvado peak, topped with its famous statue of Christ the Redeemer. And that’s because it is Rio’s Corcorvado mountain — moved right into the heart of New York.

Welcome to the world of Ciro Miguel. The São Paulo architect spends his spare time dreaming up landscapes in which familiar urban landmarks from around the world collide. The images he’s kitbashed together are his own; most involve elements from his home country, Brazil, or New York, where he was a graduate student. Others encompass his world travels. It’s in the way Miguel’s collages represent the places and ways many travel now, in fact — reflecting trends in trade and politics driven by globalization — that they can be seen as more than mere dreamscapes, representing connections and evoking experiences that have become very real.

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Rome, cité envoutante…

Erasmus, Giardino degli aranci, Roma

Les matins se succèdent à un rythme soutenu et déjà depuis une semaine je suis ici sans pouvoir prétendre comprendre ni saisir l’essentiel d’une ville tentaculaire. J’ai parcouru, à la marche, en métro, en tram, en voiture et en bus ces milliers de kilomètres de rues parfois monumentales, parfois disparates, sans trouver le fil conducteur d’une cité devenue immense par son histoire plusieurs fois millénaire.

Et toujours, le véritable essence de Rome se défile alors que je pensais la saisir, pointer le réel, stabiliser une lecture de cette métropole folle et amoureuse. Et pourtant les adjectifs se multiplies : Rome l’éternelle, la ville aux milles églises, la cité antique autour d’une chaotique mégapole du 21e siècle. Le beau, le laid. La ruine d’Auguste, le fascisme de Mussolini, l’avenir présenté par Odile Decq.

Et rien n’est jamais vrai ni si juste dans mes mots que le portrait que je dresse de Rome est balayé par le vent de la mer.

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Lido di Ostia – ruine, fantasme et nostalgie

Renato Guttuso, Spiaggia, 1955-1956

J’embarquai dès le matin dans ce fantasme au bord de la Mer de Rome et qui traine toujours avec moi, comme un paysage qui me harcèle.

Ce n’est qu’un paysage, une carte postale tragiquement exotique – et qui me fit revenir en mémoire avec force l’oeuvre Spiaggia de Guttuso, le peintre sicilien mort à Rome. Seulement un panorama, de ruines et de routes ceinturées par ces pins parasols, et qui, tel les bras du Tibre, se jettent dans la mer azure qui borde la cité de Rome et son antique port d’Ostia.

On commence par prendre ce train, à la Basilique San Paolo, et qui nous mène au travers des banlieues pavillonnaires jusqu’à ces paysages de la campagne romaine. Nous ne sommes pas encore à la mer, que déjà nous accroche le Quartier Euro et où le souvenir du fascisme nous domine et crée cette étrange amertume d’une époque que pourtant je n’ai pas connu, mais qui me fascine comme tout architecte cherche à comprendre cet homme nouveau que le modernisme souhaitait façonner. La Rome nouvelle et le romain moderne imaginés par Mussolini. Cet échec d’une recherche de la perfection, idéologique.

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Caffè Portofino, Roma

Il me semble que rien ne frappe d’aplomb comme le soleil et la vitalité romaine. Et spécialement au départ de Paris, ville qui se cherche une définition, alternant entre la bourgeoise snobinarde et faussement moderne et la bohème pathétique et incohérente, formant une armée de poètes et penseurs qui, cigarette appuyée mollement au bec, s’attaquent farouchement à un système capitaliste que pourtant ils façonnent eux-mêmes et encouragent à chaque instant de leur vie. L’esprit de contradiction !

Je suis arrivé sur Roma ce matin, après une nuit folle passée à errer entre la colère et l’épuisement. Hier, un contrôleur français s’est fait attaqué près de Dijon. Cet horrible évènement – ce qui semblerait complètement farfelue en Amérique – poussa l’ensemble des contrôleurs à user – abusivement il me semble – de leur droit de retrait, faisant des centaines de milliers d’otages – ces clients dont j’étais – prient sur les quais bétonnés de Paris. Et laissez-moi vous dire que de trouver un avion à la dernière minute n’est ni facile ni agréable dans cette cité où l’internet ne se trouve pas à chaque coin de rue, comme à New York ou Montréal.

C’est avec le souvenir – et force de croire quelques courbatures – de la nuit passée justement entre deux fauteuils à l’aéroport d’Orly, que je savoure ce caffè si mérité à la terrasse de ce bar d’une grande via du quartier où j’habite l’instant précieux d’un moment.

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Walk This Way

Only a block north from the construction barriers surrounding the former site of the World Trade Center, which brim with boastful renderings of progress on the nearly-complete September 11th Memorial, another, less conspicuous hole opens up in Lower Manhattan’s lapidary landscape. Compared to the blocks bordering Ground Zero, it’s a stretch of Church Street that’s relatively empty. Maybe that’s part of why the netting surrounding this construction site was passed up as glossy adspace showcasing the real estate to come and instead given over to art — currently, Israeli artist Maya Barkai’s installation “Walking Men,” which juxtaposes images of pedestrian walk signs from around the world.

In North America, it’s easy not to devote much thought to the design of “walking men”. While the pictograms are relatively new to the US — until recently, it was still not uncommon to come across a spelled-out “WALK” sign on the streets of New York — bright-white walk symbols are now not only fairly uniform across dense American cities, they’re also uniformly ignored by jaywalkers, who normally treat the signals as well-meaning but unnecessary suggestions.

Elsewhere, though, walk signals are much more diverse — and sometimes more meaningful. In Germany, pedestrians who cross against the light aren’t really braving traffic as much as the reproachful glances of those dutifully remaining at the opposite corner. From Munich to Münster, old women wait at otherwise empty street crossings for the signal to change — on principle. Ordnung — the organizing principle of German civilization — begins at the intersection.

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Photos of the Week: Straight Shooter

This week’s photos were taken in Glasgow by Stephen Cosh and in New York by Camille Beckles.

Cosh writes: This guy always plays in Buchanan Street. His guitar playing is first rate but his singing is pretty poor. He saw me taking his picture and nodded towards his guitar bag, hinting at me to donate to his cause, so I gave my son a couple of pounds and he ran up and threw it in. Then my boy whipped out his camera and fired one off right in his face! He’ll make a great street shooter one day!

Beckles writes: Took shelter under construction scaffolding. The rain kept stopping and starting, so that when you thought the coast was clear and ventured out under the open sky, it started downpouring again and you had duck in somewhere else to let it pass. Took 20 minutes to walk three blocks.

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Photos of the Week: Scenes from Tbilisi

All of this week’s photos were taken in Tbilisi, Georgia, by S_Peter.

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Mega(city)transect

In 1999, American biologist J. Michael Fay set out on a project to map and survey the vegetation of Africa’s entire Congo River basin. Heavily promoted by National Geographic as “The Megatransect,” Fay’s feat involved 455 days of walking across 3,200 miles of largely untamed territory. Biologists had actually been using the term “transect” to describe such surveys since the late 19th century, but Fay’s epic-scale journey brought it widespread public recognition. In 2004 and 2005, he and Geographic extended the brand by conducting a “Megaflyover” of Africa, taking photos every 20 seconds during a 60,000 mile plus journey in a small bush plane.

Legendary as the natural surveys of explorer-biologists like Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt are, expeditions like theirs — and Fay’s — are increasingly rare now that most of “the field” has been crossed and recrossed. Geographers have turned their attention toward changes, rather than gaps, in maps of the earth’s surface — particularly those with less than natural causes. So it’s unsurprising that they have become fixated on the sites of the most intense human population growth and activity — cities. By 2008, urban centers contained, for the first time, over half the world’s people.

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