I'd like to point out that those "SUVs" are in fact commercial vans usually used by builders and other tradesmen in favour of pick-up trucks which aren't popular in the UK. Notice they have no side windows. Them being red may indicate that they are destined to be postal vans for Royal Mail but thats just a guess.
i'm just now noticing that for the red SUV image you can cross your eyes and look at it crosseyed and bring it back into focus so the image looks 3D (like a magic eye).
And I thought different socio-economic strata were squished together here in NYC. (Not everywhere of course, I realize there isn't exactly much mid/low-income housing on Park Ave and 68th Street.)
So, without implying that they would, what's to stop folks from one side of the "wall" from simply jumping over, hopping up the terraces and robbing those rich sonsofguns blind?
@Roklimber: if you hadn't ID that as sao paulo i might have mistaken it for thialand or actually any number of tourist destinations in the far east. upon closer inspection the bricks on the 'slum' side of the wall are a dead giveaway that it's not.
@92BuickLeSabre: what stops anyone anywhere from robbing someone blind? poor is not the same thing as criminal although the two appear to be correlated for some crimes. furthermore there's no telling what, if anything, in those poolside condos is actually worth stealing. the sonsofguns might have paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for something but it's not worth nearly that much on resale in a black market. one can only assume that thieft is either rampant or simply not worth the risk for most, given that the aparements exist and appear occupied i'm inclined to think the later.
@Roklimber: Slightly zooming out that Google Maps photo provides an interesting perspective with regard to other very nearby towers; they appear to be leaning toward each other!
One of the more fascinating imagery anomalies I've seen.
That first image is positively arcology-like! I love pictures of hyper-dense urban living. (Suburbia sucks!) Makes me almost want to move to China just to live in a place like that.
Or I can wait until Seattle resembles towns like that. They way they've been putting up huge apartment blocks and condos these last 15 years I have to wonder. Hyper-dense urban dwelling may come to us all someday.
@corpore-metal: unfortunatly for me my own D.C. looks across the other ocean for inspiration and i'm doomed to a short stacked city scape for the foreseeable future. i imagine we will be among the last to adopt, at least within the district.
So DC is already a short but large and confused sprawl like London, Rome or Paris as opposed to vertical canyons like NYC, Chicago or Hong Kong. It's just going to get bigger until bleeds into everything.
It might have something to do with geography too. Maryland is mostly flat, so DC had room to spread out. Rather than being on an island or in a hilly region which forces you to start stacking things up.
@corpore-metal: it's a costal region surrounded by rivers, bays, and swamps on one side and bluffs on the other.
DC's height restrictions and the height restrictions in some of its suburbs, like alexandria, are urban planning designed to create a more european/colonial feel. however it lacks the fractal street designs found in european cities, at least in the district itself, which were born out of cart roads and walking paths gradually evolving into streets as the city slow grew and engulfed them. the district is not without it's own forms of confusion, however, thanks to l'enfant's brilliant 'let's add tons of diagonal cross roads to the standard city grid of rectangular blocks.' so all the roads are, for the most part, either perfectly straight or circles in the district.
Yes, being the nation's capital, DC benefited from good urban planning right from the start. It was meant to be a beautiful city. I just wonder how long that's going to last as all the East Coast cities begin to bleed into each other. Gibson's Sprawl is on it's way!
@corpore-metal: Call me claustrophobic, but apartment buildings make me crazy.
The thought of living in a place where the dwellings are stacked like cord wood and all look the same--being just doors with numbers on them... well, you can have it. Give me a house in the countryside, or even wooded light urban residential, any day of the week.
I'm not opposed to arcologies, but they need to have a lot of open (and preferably green) space inside (the "ecology" part of arcology). Mazes of identical, artificially lit hallways cannot be good for the psyche.
@Atnakena: you don't spend your time in the hallways of an apartment building but in the apartments within (the 'apart' part of apartment). there are plenty of buildings with no structural walls on the interior, where the layout of the rooms is entirely up to the occupant. it's not as soulless or mind numbing as you might think.
@Atnakena: Exactly. It's like living in cages, and it does to people what it does to rats. It's so depersonalizing and gray and hopeless, like a prison.
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
Just what I was thinking ...
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
[www.fototucavieira.com.br]
And here's the satellite image, thanks to google:
[maps.google.com]
05/14/09
And I thought different socio-economic strata were squished together here in NYC. (Not everywhere of course, I realize there isn't exactly much mid/low-income housing on Park Ave and 68th Street.)
So, without implying that they would, what's to stop folks from one side of the "wall" from simply jumping over, hopping up the terraces and robbing those rich sonsofguns blind?
05/14/09
05/14/09
And in the satellite image, that pool looks like a penis. There, that's my daily penis comment.
Penis.
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
One of the more fascinating imagery anomalies I've seen.
[maps.google.com]
05/14/09
05/14/09
Would link a video but googlefail=youtubefail.
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
Or I can wait until Seattle resembles towns like that. They way they've been putting up huge apartment blocks and condos these last 15 years I have to wonder. Hyper-dense urban dwelling may come to us all someday.
05/14/09
05/14/09
So DC is already a short but large and confused sprawl like London, Rome or Paris as opposed to vertical canyons like NYC, Chicago or Hong Kong. It's just going to get bigger until bleeds into everything.
It might have something to do with geography too. Maryland is mostly flat, so DC had room to spread out. Rather than being on an island or in a hilly region which forces you to start stacking things up.
05/14/09
DC's height restrictions and the height restrictions in some of its suburbs, like alexandria, are urban planning designed to create a more european/colonial feel. however it lacks the fractal street designs found in european cities, at least in the district itself, which were born out of cart roads and walking paths gradually evolving into streets as the city slow grew and engulfed them. the district is not without it's own forms of confusion, however, thanks to l'enfant's brilliant 'let's add tons of diagonal cross roads to the standard city grid of rectangular blocks.' so all the roads are, for the most part, either perfectly straight or circles in the district.
05/14/09
Yes, being the nation's capital, DC benefited from good urban planning right from the start. It was meant to be a beautiful city. I just wonder how long that's going to last as all the East Coast cities begin to bleed into each other. Gibson's Sprawl is on it's way!
05/14/09
The thought of living in a place where the dwellings are stacked like cord wood and all look the same--being just doors with numbers on them... well, you can have it. Give me a house in the countryside, or even wooded light urban residential, any day of the week.
I'm not opposed to arcologies, but they need to have a lot of open (and preferably green) space inside (the "ecology" part of arcology). Mazes of identical, artificially lit hallways cannot be good for the psyche.
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
05/14/09
That's one of the concentration camps once we won the war.
05/08/09
05/08/09
05/08/09
Lots of people are colorblind, and most of them are red/green colorblind.
-Kle.
05/08/09
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
12/03/08
I'm starting to think Evillene had it right.