The story of cities
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Will we live in buildings made out of waste, heavily surveilled smart cities, or maybe floating communities designed to cope with rising sea levels?
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When the Cheonggyecheon Stream replaced a traffic-filled stretch of elevated freeway with public space, water and vegetation it looked like a modern urbanist’s dream. The reality is more complicated, finds Colin Marshall
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Is this privately financed city project in the heart of occupied West Bank a momentous trailblazer, or a colossal folly? Harriet Sherwood pays a visit
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Ebène Cybercity was built 15 years ago to create a modern working environment for Mauritians and bring a hi-tech hub to this island nation. So does it offer a roadmap for Africa - or a warning of problems ahead?
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As the country opens up to the outside world, the old capital has become the latest playground for international developers, putting the city’s historic fabric under pressure. Will its people be able to keep up?
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The richest and poorest residents of Argentina’s capital are separated by the walls of gated communities. When heavy rains in 2013 left those outside the barriers vulnerable to severe flooding, their only hope was to tear them down
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Photographer and activist Richard Nickel spent much of his life battling to preserve Chicago’s diverse architecture. His death, while trying to save remnants of its Stock Exchange building, gave him ‘an almost mythic status’ in the city
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Twenty-five years after it opened, Kenya has announced its third biggest ‘city’, the Dadaab refugee complex, is to be shut down. But for many residents, this sprawling slum in an inhospitable desert is the only home they know
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In the 1970s, the World Trade Centre stood beyond the edge of the city and convinced the world that Dubai was open for business
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Twenty-five years ago, Medellín was the most dangerous city on earth. Yet its most infamous criminal, Pablo Escobar, also helped create the conditions that sparked an extraordinary revival – by taking the city to the brink of collapse
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Civil rights activist Floyd McKissick dreamed of a southern utopia where the racially integrated community would be planned and managed by African Americans. Although the city was never completed, some traces remain
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In the 60s Hamburg officials planned to demolish a fishing village to make space for a new container terminal. As port cities struggle to keep up with an ever-changing industry, how will Hamburg face the challenges of the next generation?
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In the 1960s, Vancouver’s historic downtown was at risk of being razed for modern road projects – only for an extraordinary protest movement to turn the tide, helping transform it into one of North America’s most ‘liveable’ cities
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As an architect and mayor, Jaime Lerner led the movement that transformed Curitiba into an environmentally friendly ‘laboratory for urban planning’. The secret? ‘We had to work fast to avoid our own bureaucracy’
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While concrete was being poured across Europe’s cities, Denmark’s capital found itself at a crossroads: would it follow the car-centric vision of grand boulevards and streets in the sky – or keep its citizen-focused design?
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Four decades on, Paolo Soleri’s revolutionary Arizona desert vision of super-dense living remains a work in progress. Oliver Wainwright meets the volunteers who haven’t given up hope in his fusion of architecture and ecology
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The Long Read: Despite decades of mockery, the city’s modernist buildings and wide boulevards are now hailed as visionary. But as developers move in, could there be trouble in this urban paradise?
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In 1965, Chile launched a bold new policy which became infamous for officials’ use of white chalk to mark out plots of land for Santiago’s poorest families. Half a century on, did it really help those in need – or simply deepen social divisions?
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When city planning supremo Robert Moses proposed a road through Greenwich Village in 1955, he met opposition from one particularly feisty local resident: Jane Jacobs. It was the start of a decades-long struggle for swaths of New York
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Macedonia’s capital was rebuilt after the 1963 earthquake with a cutting-edge modernist vision. Now, critics say the hollow Doric columns and clumsy statues of ‘antiquitisation’ are transforming the city into a mini-Las Vegas
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In the 1960s, a Dutch engineer devised the ‘white bike’ plan to counter the rise of pollution and cars. His invention has since revolutionised public transport all over the world – so why has cycle-loving Amsterdam never embraced it?
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When LA was stripped of its beloved streetcar in the 1960s, the city was quickly thrust into a traffic-clogged world of private cars and diesel buses. But with the involvement of automobile and oil companies, was this the work of a conspiracy?
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When Warsaw’s Old Town was destroyed by Hitler’s troops in the second world war, the nation mobilised to rebuild the city with the rubble of its own destruction – and the work of Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto
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Lee Kuan Yew’s vice-like grip on power helped create a byword for cleanliness, efficiency and safety. What lies beneath this ‘Disneyland with the death penalty’?
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The planners of independent India’s new capital failed spectacularly in their attempt to create a poverty-free utopia. Their legacy is a sprawling city awash with slums and hampered by bureaucracy
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Created in 1959 to lure foreign investors with tax breaks, the Shannon Free Zone proved revolutionary across the world. But in today’s world of looser trade and tax havens, Ireland’s innovators face an uphill battle to stay relevant
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In August 1945, a 16-kilotonne atomic bomb killed 140,000 people and reduced a thriving city to rubble. Hiroshima has been reborn as a place of peace and prosperity, but will memories of those dark days die with the last survivors?
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After the ruinous Hawke’s Bay earthquake, rebuilding a city in the midst of the Great Depression seemed impossible. But through artistry and enterprise, Napier became home to the highest concentration of art deco buildings in the world
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Hitler’s megalomaniacal project to raze much of Berlin and transform it into his global Nazi capital killed thousands. Today, its few remnants are chilling, mundane, even graceful – and inseparable from a barbaric chapter in history
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Adriano Olivetti turned a small, Italian typewriter company into a global phenomenon – but his true obsession was transforming its headquarters, Ivrea, into a model industrial metropolis. The city has still not recovered
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Designed for Stalin as the world’s first completely planned city, Magnitogorsk has yet to confront its controversial past – from the forced labour that helped build it in record time, to the severe pollution that has plagued its residents
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In 1955, Sophiatown was one of the last areas of black home-ownership in Johannesburg. Then the bulldozers arrived to evict these residents, confirming apartheid’s brutal suppression of black upward mobility
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The story of cities: the tales we missed