2011
Rachel Ward
The Battle Japan’s Losing: Population Falls Again - Japan Real Time - WSJ
About 146,200 more people died than were born during the year, another sobering record high, for the fourth straight year. The spread of people is also increasingly becoming concentrated in cities as economically struggling rural towns and villages empty. A little over 90% of citizens reside in cities. Indeed, there are more people who reside in Tokyo’s concrete jungle alone, about 12.66 million people, than all of the small towns across the country combined (11.86 million), according to the ministry numbers.
Devastated towns stuck in limbo | The Japan Times Online
His is one of only 50 boats out of 1,000 that survived intact — and only because he remembered the advice of old-timers and took it out to sea immediately after the tsunami warning sirens wailed. From the bay, he watched the waves hit his town.
2010
From the Photo Desk
Urban Legends - By Joel Kotkin | Foreign Policy
Perhaps we need to consider another approach. As unfashionable as it might sound, what if we thought less about the benefits of urban density and more about the many possibilities for proliferating more human-scaled urban centers; what if healthy growth turns out to be best achieved through dispersion, not concentration? Instead of overcrowded cities rimmed by hellish new slums, imagine a world filled with vibrant smaller cities, suburbs, and towns: Which do you think is likelier to produce a higher quality of life, a cleaner environment, and a lifestyle conducive to creative thinking?
2009
Haunted Houses, Ghost Towns, Haunted Hotels, Ghost Stories - HauntedHouses.com
make it known: Music Monday: Avi Vaknin
Last year, I wrote about a web-documentary that I was watching - Gaza Sderot: Life In Spite of Everything. It documented the lives of average Israeli and Palestinian people in the Israeli/Palestinian border towns of Gaza and Sderot.
Sighting Prisons and Prison Sites « Prison Photography
Prison Valley is a web-documentary in production right now by Frenchmen David Dufresne and Philippe Brault. It looks at Colorado’s prison towns during the recent recession.
Big Stories, Small Towns - Port Augusta - About the Project
Barge Burgundy - Cruise aboard L'etoile
0047 Publications
The increased activity in the Arctic has already begun to change the content and fabric of the urban north. The continued regional development will involve meetings and fusions amongst an array of cultures and styles, between history and modernization, between civilization and nature, between east and west, between nations looking for resources and towns and cities hoping to get a share, all staged in a vast landscape with widespread urban nodes. The question is how these encounters will play out.
Northern Experiments – The Barents Urban Survey 2009 is a collaborative effort to discuss selected key cities and urban phenomena in the Barents Region, containing the northernmost areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland and of Northwest Russia. The project is directed by 0047 in co-operation with The Barents Triennale and Pikene på broen.
Ogle Earth: Altinum revealed... and in Google Earth
Altinum was a prosperous Roman city on the coastal lowlands of northern Italy. It was sacked by Attila the Hun in the 5th century AD, and conquered by the Lombards a century later. Historians now speculate that these events prompted inhabitants from Altinum and other towns in the vicinity to resettle on more easily defended islands in a nearby lagoon... thus founding Venice. (Wikipedia has a good concise history of the town.)
10 Most Amazing Ghost Towns - Oddee.com (ghost towns, best ghost towns)
ghost town photography
360 - Urban Villages in Paris (1920) « Strange Maps
Paris that was being colonised, by its provinces: “By the mid-nineteenth century, half the inhabitants of Paris came from the provinces and most of them did not consider themselves Parisian. Migrants spent as little money as possible while away from home. Mentally, they never left their pays (…) In certain Paris streets, the sounds and smells of villages and provincial towns drowned out the sounds and smells of the capital. For many, their street cry was the only French they spoke.”
The day of San Valentin (14 of February)
2008
life in spite of everything at the map village street editors
SubmarineChannel.com
