(In the photo above: Kong Siu-kau, 63, a cage home resident for several years relying on government pension, sits in his cage bed in Hong Kong March 20, 2009. The monthly rent of a caged-bed, the lowest standard for a shelter in Hong Kong besides sleeping on the street, costs $150. ©REUTERS/Bobby Yip).

As explained in a great article at Urbanphoto, cage homes have been around for a long time, having first emerged after World War II when hundreds of thousands of refugees from mainland China arrived in Hong Kong.

Reuters reports:

While the financial hub of Hong Kong enjoys a reputation as one of Asia’s most affluent cities, its wealth gap is among the worst in Asia, with around 100,000 of the city’s 7 million people living in tiny units of less than 60 square feet, according to Sze.

“The government doesn’t really have a perspective for helping these people,” said Sze, who called on the government to build more public housing and to ban such cage home dwellings.

Hong Kong’s government says that public housing is available with an average waiting time of 1.9 years for general family applicants and 1.2 years for the elderly. There is also short-term assistance available for people who need housing immediately.

“People choose to live in bedspace apartments and cubicles probably because these apartments are mostly conveniently located in the urban areas,” said a government spokesman.




Tai Lun-po sleeps in a small cage in Hong Kong’s Tai Kok Tsui district July 16, 2008.
© REUTERS/Victor Fraile

We thought Hong Kong’s Hongza houses scheme was just weird, but this is not only bizarre, it’s an outrage. It’s one thing to live in poverty, quite another to have to pay a luxury fee for precarious living conditions that don’t even meet the most basic necessities. Hong Kong’s Schoeni Gallery, ann annual art charity event displayed these cages directly to the public to showcase the widening gap between the poor and rich in Hong Kong.

Chau Kam-chuen, 55, a former caged home resident, poses with his former caged-bed inside a gallery as part of the Hong Kong Art Walk March 11, 2009. © REUTERS/Bobby Yip

CNN covers it in video:

(via Arkinet) Photos and captions (except © SoCo) © Reuters.

Old masters kept special building technologies high. For many centuries the main, and often the only tool of builders was the axe. The saw tears wood-fibers, thus making them open for water. As for the axe, it crushes fibers and so seals the butt-ends. This is why saws were used only in joinery.

these are some beautiful and haunting examples of Russian wooden architecture.

Some of them look like the people just left, and in some cases even the furniture remains. The reason they are so undisturbed, is that they are situated deep inside the Russian forests.














(via english russia)

“With lifts in just two of the City’s 350 or so buildings, access to the upper floors of the 10 to 14 story apartment blocks was nearly always by stairs, necessitating considerable climbs for those who lived near the top. This was partly alleviated by an extraordinary system of interconnecting stairways and bridges at different levels within the City which took shape -somewhat organically- during the construction boom of the 1960′s and early 1970′s. It was possible for example, to travel across the City from north to south without once coming down to street level.”

Let’s add to this description, the one of this grid placed over the district’s temple (right in the center of the Walled City) on which inhabitants having their windows on the courtyards throw away their garbage, transforming the temple’s environment into a shadowy underworld.

(click on the picture above to see it in high resolution, it’s an amazing hand drawn cross section)

below is a 40 min. long German documentary in four parts which was filmed in 1989 within the Kowloon Walled City. The density of this Hong Kong district – the highest in the world before it got destroyed in 1993- creates the feeling of an underground autarkic world, the quintessence of an heterotopia, with its protocols of entrance/exit, its superimposition of several worlds layers (see link 3) and its imaginary of freedom/danger within it.

(via boiteaoutils)

In 1974 the coal was exhausted and Mitsubishi officially announced the closing of the mine. Nowadays it is a ghost island, nobody has ever lived there since 1975. It was the most densely populated area in the world and suddenly it became uninhabited!

In 2002 Mitsubishi decided to donate the island to the city of Nagasaki and since 2009 certain parts of the island can be visited (before that the access to the island was limited to historians and journalists). The round-trip ferry from the port of Nagasaki costs 4500 yen.

(more amazing photo’s can be found here)
(via kirainet)

This hilly suburb of Cairo is home to the Zabbaleen, a community of mainly Coptic Christians. Since the ’50s, they have been making a living by collecting, sorting and disposing of Cairo’s waste. The Zabbaleen generally perform this service very cheaply. Waste food is fed to livestock, mainly pigs; what cannot be repaired or reused -steel, glass, textile and plastic bottles- is sorted by hand and sold as raw materials; some material is burnt as fuel. It is claimed that they reuse or recycle 80-90% of the waste they collect (a figure that the most modern waste management systems can only dream of), however this must be put into context of the fact that the they concentrate on wealthier areas.

More amazing than the trash-strewn architecture and garbage-stuffed city streets is the strange fact that this place is fully occupied and abuzz with activity. People live, work, eat and sleep within this product graveyard, and spaces not occupied by people are given over to livestock or made into guerrilla urban gardens.


In 2003, waste management was privatized. Foreign multinational companies won rights to collect garbage in Cairo, cutting the Zebbaleen out of the trash business. Ironically, due to a government financial restrictions, the firms ended up outsourcing to the Zebbaleen. But for much less than they had made before.
(via dornob and wemakemoneynotart)

(via archi-ninja)

SESC Pompéia is an urban facility that contains theaters, gymnasiums, a swimming pool, snack bars, leisure areas, restaurants, galleries, workshops and other kind of services. This SESC unit is located at Rua Clélia 93, in São Paulo City, Brazil. It was designed in 1977

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo, or MASP is an important fine-art museum located on Paulista Avenue in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It is an authentic landmark of the largest Brazilian city.
the museum is renowned for its extraordinary collection gathered since the end of World War II. Internationally recognized for its diversity and quality, the museum’s holdings are considered the most important of Latin America and all Southern Hemisphere, with thousands of works ranging in period from antiquity to contemporary art.