This week’s photos were taken from a hotel in downtown Atlanta by Greg Hickman. These are just some of the striking images in our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.
The aroma of wood smoke is not one of the things I expected to smell when I moved to a new apartment on the 35th floor, but there’s a rooftop barbecue restaurant just down the street from my building and the smell often floats upwards. When I sit on my balcony, I can watch little clumps of people around the fires, grilling fishballs and pork chops.
In Montreal, I always thought it was better to be close to the street. Why sequester yourself in a high-rise, buffeted by northern winds, when you could be close to neighbours and the street and your local dep, which is always well-stocked with beer? As much as I could appreciate a good view, being able to watch alley cats make their nightly inspections seemed somehow more important.
In too many parts of Hong Kong, though, proximity to the street does not confer many real pleasures. The traffic is noisier, the pollution more irritating, the sunlight so very fleeting. In the absence of a true convivial streetlife, life on a low floor is not a matter of engagement with your surroundings, just a feat of endurance.
View from the Manhattan Bridge. Photo by Vivienne Gucwa
View from the High Line. Photo by Vivienne Gucwa
Every week, we feature striking images from our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.
Perhaps not quite what you’d expect.
Thirty years ago, Shenzhen was a collection of farming towns and fishing villages home to not much more than 300,000 people. It is now a sprawling metropolis of several million, with around 3.5 million in the city centre and another five or six million in the suburbs and industrial towns that stretch for miles beyond.
The story of Shenzhen’s growth has been told many times, in many places, but it is still hard to understand exactly how quickly the city has grown until you see it from above. 1,200 feet above ground, in the observation deck of Shun Hing Square, the city’s tallest building, the ad hoc nature of Shenzhen’s development becomes obvious.
It might only be thirty years old, but Shenzhen has been built and rebuilt so many times, it has the urban layers of a city four times its age. Country fields developed into worker-unit housing blocks in the 1980s were redeveloped into low-rise private housing in the 1990s and then into high-rises in the 2000s. None of these generations fully subsume the other — there are always traces left of the past — and the city is littered with discarded planning initiatives, like attempts to build tree-line boulevards that were abandoned after just a few blocks.
Last month, I paid a visit to Hong Kong Reader, a great independent bookstore on the seventh floor of a building in Mongkok. Before I entered the shop, though, I gazed up the stairwell and wondered whether there was an interesting view from the roof. I climbed an extra few floors and emerged onto a rubbish-filled rooftop with a view of only the surrounding buildings and billboards.
On the roof next door, somebody had left a pile of rose petals to dry in the sun. (A romantic gesture?) I took a few photos, gazed at my reflection in the mirrored windows of an office tower across the street — and noticed, out of the corner of my eye, two men staring at me from an even higher rooftop a few buildings away.
Startled, I looked up. One man took a drag on his cigarette. They continued to stare. I wondered what they were doing up there and my mind flashed to the climax from Infernal Affairs when Tony Leung sneaks up on Andy Lau with a gun. A bit unnerved, I ducked back into the stairwell and went down to the bookstore.
Looking north over Lafontaine Park and the Plateau in 1965
It’s a rare treat to come across some aerial photographs that are both old and high-resolution. I recently happened across a bunch in the Flickr photostream of Le présent du passé de Montréal, who also has lots of photos of street scenes, markets, buses and streetcars from the 1940s to the 1980s.
While there’s some good shots of the central parts of the city, like the one above, most of the aerials focus on Montreal’s north end. The photo below shows the notorious Acadie Circle in 1974. The parking lot of the Rockland Centre mall is on the lower right and the north end of Park Extension is just above that. The empty fields on the centre-left have since become home to the Marché Central, a wholesale food market surrounded by a terrible collection of suburban big-box stores.
The Metropolitan Expressway at Acadie Circle, 1974
Bulbous black taxis and double-decker buses might supply London’s most recognizable transport iconography, but Britain, where the railroad was born, has long been a nation defined by trains. A look at two videos of London’s rail station at rush hour confirms the country’s undying regard for rail. The crowds pulsating through Waterloo Station in 1970 were at the mercy of the antiquated, almost Steampunk-styled signal equipment featured in the first video, a British Transport Film fished up from the archives of the British Film Institute last year, but if they were at all aware of this, it didn’t stop them from swarming the station in droves (though, being British, they also manage to organize the chaos into an occasional orderly queue).
Not even the materialism of the Thatcher years, their emphasis on homeownership, nor subsequent real estate booms, all of which promoted car ownership and the expansion of the London’s suburban commuter belt along the motorways radiating from the city, could seriously challenge British railways’ importance. Still less hemorrhage resulted from the 1993-7 privatization of the UK rail system, achieved, in the eyes of many, for no practical purpose and with disastrous results; in fact, traffic since privatization has actually increased, even as public impressions of the railways’ reliability and safety have declined. More passengers were carried in 2006 than in any year since 1957.
Part of the brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window was the way it acknowledged voyeurism as part of urban life. In the city, we’re always being watched and we’re always watching others, be it on the street, from across a café or on the web, through street photography.
I’d be lying if I said that the thrill of spying on others wasn’t part of the reason why I like rooftops. The exchange of glances on the street is replaced by a position that gives you a privileged view of everything around. I’ve never seen anything particularly exciting from a roof — it’s not like I bring a pair of binoculars — but I do enjoy catching the occasional glimpse into the normally sheltered world of somebody’s private life. Not too long ago, while hanging out on a friend’s rooftop, I was able to catch part of a World Cup game being watched on a large high-definition TV in the building next door.
Obviously I’m not alone. Peepers, a new film by Montreal’s Automatic Vaudeville Studios, takes the idea of rooftop voyeurism and builds a movie around it. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m happy to see some of the rooftops I know and love featured in the trailer. At least one of the scenes looks like was filmed on the rooftop where writer/actor Mark Slutsky lives — a rooftop my friends and I have snuck up to many times.
Soccer game seen from the roof of the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre
Tokyo defines concrete jungle: over 2,000 square kilometers of closely-packed, largely monochrome buildings set amid a tangle of clogged, winding roads, elevated highways, rail lines, and telephone wires. For many who are lost amid the ceaseless forward march of its sidewalks and churning perambulations in the corridors of its vast train stations, cafes perched several stories above the street — often, to further their escapist appeal, sporting French or Italian themes — offer rare opportunities to step back from the city’s omnipresent crowds and inexorable movement.
As much as they are respites from urban intensity, these perches also provide the best means to gain some perspective on the unwieldy metropolis. Their patrons may appear trapped in tiny windows when viewed from the street below, but they offer a scattered audience cheap, upper-balcony tickets to the spectacle of the city — itself snarled, not just in traffic, but anxiety and routine.
There’s nothing particularly special about this building. Built in the 1970s, it’s a highrise like any other, with a handful of small flats on each floor. None of the apartments have balconies; there is no club house or swimming pool; the only bit of shared space, beyond the dimly-lit concrete corridors, is the rooftop, which is divided into two narrow platforms on either side of the elevator’s machine room. Laundry lines crisscross the roof, but on a drizzly night, there are no clothes to be seen.
The view from here is attractive because of its ordinariness. Below is a brightly-lit football pitch, the sound of whistles and shouts echoing off the walls of surrounding buildings. To the south, apartment buildings jostle for space on the Mid-Levels, each trying to climb higher than the next in a quest for sea views. Exhausted, they pause for respite halfway up the dark, looming mass of Victoria Peak. To the east, IFC makes an appearance in the narrow gap between towers.
The glow of apartment windows stirs voyeuristic curiosity. In one, cool flourescents illuminate a dingy kitchen. Another window reveals a posh living room filled with art. Each is a portal into another Hong Kong, another set of lives, another set of stories.
