E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS.
Reuters
Laborers work at the construction site of a commercial complex in the eastern Indian city of Bhubaneswar, India on Thursday, May 19
Build it and they will come. Or perhaps not.
David Gray / Reuters
A crack runs across a deserted street as two men walk in front of the unopened Ordos Museum in the Kangbashi district of the town of Ordos in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on May 11.
Ordos was first dubbed China's "empty city" in a 2009 report by Al-Jazeera.
According to Reuters, the Kangbashi district of Ordos is filled with thousands of residential apartments and duplex-style homes built to house workers for the nearby coal mines. There are also many large office towers, administrative centres, government buildings, museums, theatres, school playing fields and exhibition centres. However, the estimated one million people that were expected to move into or visit the district's now decaying buildings have yet to appear.
David Gray / Reuters
A large monument depicting fighting horses stands in the main square in the Kangbashi district of Ordos.
Bill Powell of Time described the scene on his visit last year:
Only a handful of cars drive down Kangbashi's multilane highways, a few government offices are open during the day and an occasional pedestrian, appearing like a hallucination, can be seen trudging down a sidewalk, like a lone survivor of some horror-movie apocalypse.
David Gray / Reuters
A policemen stands in front of a traffic light at a main intersection in the Kangbashi district of Ordos.
Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, examined the situation in Ordos in the context of China's real estate boom.
M. Spencer Green / AP
Debris falls as demolition begins at the last high-rise of Chicago's Cabrini Green public housing complex, March 30, 2011, in Chicago. Cabrini-Green was built on Chicago's North Side starting in the 1940s.
The final stage of demolishing Chicago’s Cabrini Green public housing project begins
NBCChicago.com reports
Demolition began Wednesday morning of Cabrini Green's last standing high-rise.It marks the final stage of a years-long initiative to raze the housing project and signals the last chapter in the development's storied, troubled history.
The few remaining residents moved out of the now-vacated building in December. At one time, Cabrini Green was made up of 10 sections, built over a 20-year stretch that started in 1942, and was home to 15,000 people.
The development became known for gang violence, deteriorating conditions and an unspeakable crime surrounding Girl X, a 9-year-old found strangled, raped and poisoned in a stairwell.
Crime in the complex was so bad that Cabrini became know nationally as the worst housing project in the country.
Babu / Reuters
Laborers work at the construction site of a commercial estate in the southern Indian city of Chennai on Feb. 1.
Workers at construction site in India
Beautiful color palette.
Ben Margot / AP
Construction work continues on the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Jan. 4, 2011, seen from Treasure Island in San Francisco.
Construction work continues on the San Francisco Bay Bridge
Engineers and San Francisco Bay area politicians learned the lessons of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The 7.1-magnitude quake caused a 250-ton section of the Bay Bridge to collapse. The bridge reopened within a month, but the quake made it clear that the Bay Bridge required major repair or replacement in order to withstand the next major earthquake. Construction on a replacement for the eastern span began on January 29, 2002. The project is expected to be completed by 2013.
Stringer Shanghai / Reuters
City administration bureau personnel look on as excavators are used to demolish buildings in a residential area in Wuhan, Hubei province, Nov. 16. Local authorities classified a total of 80 buildings as illegally constructed structures, and the demolition was carried out under the supervision of police and the city administration bureau
Building demolition
I was drawn to the man vs. nature elements in this frame.