What are the best places to go for summer vacation? Why not heading to Stockholm, the Swedish capital? For the Escape Plan column, our author writes about places and projects that are a must-visit in Stockholm – especially if you’re an urban planner.
Situated at Lake Mälaren’s outlet in the Baltic Sea, Stockholm resembles a landscape divided into several smaller islands and land areas. City development began on the small islet that is today Gamla stan, where architectural elements of both the Middle Ages and Classicism can be viewed. In spring, the city park Kungsträdgården is a must-see with its flower roof of pink, fluffy Sakuras and its mixed functionality. Stockholm is characterized by attentive adaptation and inspiration from external trends, but has also shown proof of innovation. In the 40s, the Modernist park policy “the Stockholm style” got international recognition and is still well preserved along the path of Norr Mälarstrand. By introducing the concept of “Stockholmian Landscape-urbanism”, Stockholm reinforces its notion as a leading-edge urban visionary with the extensive ongoing project Hagastaden.
Escape Plan: Stockholm – four places, four facets
Gamla stan
Gamla stan (the Old town) is the small islet where Stockholm was founded in 1252, and an obvious choice to get better acquainted with the “Venice of the North”. On 36 hectares of land, attractions such as the Royal Palace, the Great Church, several museums and all kinds of restaurants and shops are situated. The dominant architecture is of neoclassical style, employed until the late 1850s, a few houses even containing medieval fragments and facades. With charming cobblestone streets and narrow alleys, a pleasant walk starts on Västerlånggatan, the city’s most important business street until the 20th century. It runs from Mynttorget in the north to Järntorget in the south, continuing further down towards the Slussen area and the famous “Guldbron”, a bridge inaugurated by the end of 2020 connecting the Old Town with the hip Södermalm.
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Norr Mälarstrand
Another attraction is Norr Mälarstrand street on the island of Kungsholmen. Strolling down this path by the water, completed in 1943 by eminent city gardener Holger Blom and his assistant, the also renowned Erik Glemme, you are offered not only winding promenades, small bridges and playgrounds, but also an unbeatable view of Riddarfjärden. The functionalist park style became known in the ’30s and ’40s as “the Stockholm style”. The original plantings along the route are largely preserved from this time, with groves of alder, willow, poplar and birch, undulating lawns at the shoreline, and native aquatic plants. Following the route all the way down to the city, you will pass the City Hall, where the annual Nobel party is held.
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Kungsträdgården
Stockholm’s most central park is a park for all seasons. With historical roots dating back to the 15th century, today it is a meeting place and green center that connects Hamngatan and Karl XII’s square down to Strömgatan. In winter, part of the square is transformed into an ice rink and at the end of April, the cherry trees bloom in the northern part, an exquisite experience that has become a tradition for many Stockholmers to enjoy. The park is flexible, with many different spaces and functions, such as water games in the Forum pond, sculptures, chess games, long wooden benches and generous seating stairs. By continuing east towards Strandvägen, you will pass the ancient Dramaten, the Royal Dramatic Theater. Only a stone’s throw away, the Teatergrillen restaurant on Nybrogatan street features one of Stockholm’s oldest preserved interiors. The menu is classically Scandinavian and the atmosphere exclusive with large sofas and a luxurious touch of French boudoir.
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Hagastaden
A project that has been in full swing in the northern part of the city since 2014 is the famous Hagastaden. The aim is to unite the dense city with the surrounding landscape and strengthen the green link between the inner city, Solna, and Haga. To mimic a slowly developing city, the architectural goal is a symphonically oscillating verticality. Hagastaden extends from Vasastan and Norra Stationsgatan into Karolinska University Hospital and Karolinska Institutet, further out to Hagaparken. Hagastaden is unique in terms of density and ambition; nothing like this has ever been built in all of Scandinavia. Six thousand new homes and 50,000 jobs are what the project is expected to offer, with a completion date set to 2030.The budget of about 70 billion kronor will be expressing “Stockholmian landscape-urbanism” and provide evidence of innovation in a time where densification is a prominent keyword in urban planning.
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Place to stay: Hotel Diplomat, Strandvägen 7C
Restaurant: Teatergrillen, Nybrogatan 3
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Read the Escape Plan of Algiers here.
In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is the East African city-state of Djibouti: a strategic choke point at the entrance to the Red Sea whose future remains uncertain… even with the support of China.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been described as a modern-day silk road. Encompassing a series of massive infrastructural and investment projects across parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, it follows several routes from mainland and coastal China, across the sea and over land, through the Central Asian republics and several southeast Asian port cities and reaching as far as Djibouti and Mombasa in East Africa, Duisburg in Germany and Venice in Italy. As part of an ongoing series exploring the effects this huge project is having on the cities involved, our first stop was the Chinese city of Xi’an, next up Djibouti City.
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The city state of Djibouti is one of the principal East African beneficiaries of the Belt and Road Initiative. Located on the Bab el-Mandeb strait – the strategically vital entrance to the Red Sea, where ships travelling from East Asia can quickly proceed through the Suez Canal, over the Mediterranean and onto the Atlantic Ocean – it also has the advantage of providing the main channel through which neighbouring (landlocked) Ethiopia trades with the world.
Improving the access to Djibouti’s much larger neighbour
As such, China has already funded a major railway link connecting Djibouti City to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, which opened last year and has cut journey times down from days to hours. Financed and built by China, using Chinese technology and operated according to Chinese standards, this railway is specifically geared towards improving the super power’s access to Djibouti’s much larger neighbour, whose rapidly growing economy offers, among other things: cheap labour, tariff-free trade with the US market (through the African Growth and Opportunity Act) and an important source of soybeans.
Economic “choke point”
China’s current and future plans also involve funding construction of the Djibouti International Free Trade Zone (DIFTZ). Free trade zones are special economic areas, usually based around major ports, which allow for goods to be landed, stored, handled and manufactured under specific customs regulations and generally without customs duty. Representing an essential feature of a global economy that relies heavily on the frictionless movement of goods, free trade zones are absolutely vital in the kind of economic “choke point” that the Bab el-Mandeb Strait represents.
Djibouti as the New Dubai?
The DIFTZ will become Africa’s largest free trade zone when it’s completed, spanning 4,800 hectares and offering dedicated logistics, retail, business support and processing facilities and reportedly bringing an estimated 350,000 new jobs over the next ten years. It will also host the Djibouti Business District, set to be completed in 2021, which a slick rendering shows jutting out towards the sea, with cruise ships docked on the waterfront and buildings grouped around a series of concentric treelined boulevards. It’s all somewhat reminiscent of nearby cities of the Arabian peninsula, indeed, some have gone as far as to call Djibouti the New Dubai.
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Unique strategic position
As with every city affected by China’s New Silk Road, things appear to be changing pretty fast. But for Djibouti, this is just the most recent episode in a long history of development brought about by its unique strategic position. While buildings from its long era as a French colony still fill the city, more recently, it has had the dubious honour of being the country with the most foreign military bases (US, China, France, Saudi Arabia and Japan all have bases stationed in the country). Meanwhile, its economic development in the past few decades has been driven by the decades long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, during which it offered Ethiopia a vital link to international markets.
Eritrea is soon to open two new free trade zones of its own
But here’s the kicker, this war was finally officially concluded last year. Now that its whole stretch of coast is fully accessible to the Ethiopian economy, Eritrea is soon to open two new free trade zones of its own, in the Red Sea ports of Massawa and Assab, a move which could cost Djibouti a 75% loss in Ethiopian trade and port tax revenue according to one report.
Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, according to a recent article in the South China Morning Post, the aforementioned Addis Ababa-Djibouti railway has already had to restructure its debt because of underuse caused by power shortages, leading some Chinese reports to question whether the Belt and Road Initiative has fully accounted for the risk involved in these ambitious infrastructural projects in developing countries.
The volatile and capricious nature of the global market
This says a lot about the exceptionally volatile and capricious nature of the global market in which all this urban development is supposed to be happening. Just as Djibouti could be the New Dubai, so too could it end up lumbered with a couple of massive white elephants in the form of an unused railway and an empty business district. Either way, ordinary East African cities are likely to lose out as their national governments are forced to compete in a race to the bottom to attract global trade.
Read the article about our first stop: the ancient yet thoroughly modern Chinese city of Xi’an.
Open from 1987-1999, Amsterdam’s RoXY nightclub emerged at the genesis of rave culture, enjoying success during a crucial turning point in the socio-economic organisation of the inner city.
Amsterdam’s legendary RoXY nightclub closed down on 21 June 1999 in the most spectacular style. Beginning with the funeral of the club’s founder Peter Giele (who had died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 55) the day had already been a bit of a fiasco, with Giele’s corpse falling out of the coffin as it was being lowered into the grave. But it got worse at the wake, when some indoor fireworks started a fire that managed to burn the whole place down.
Significance to Amsterdam’s alternative scene
It was a sad end, and not one that Giele would have wanted. While it may have secured the club’s legendary status, the space was host to many important artworks and it represented the crowning achievement of a man whose significance to Amsterdam’s alternative cultural scene was immeasurable.
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Right time, right place
Operating for just over a decade, the club’s opening in 1987 came at an incredibly opportune moment. The late 80s was when house music really started to take hold in Western Europe, coming here in a process which started in the wake of disco, emerging from queer, black and Latino communities in Chicago, Detroit and New York in the early 80s and arriving in Europe by way of Ibiza and the legendary parties of DJ Alfredo at Amnesia.
The club that really captured the mood
In 1988, there was also the beginning of the so-called “Second Summer of Love” with a massive wave of free parties and illegal raves. Just as the previous summer of love in the late 60s was fuelled by LSD, so its successor was similarly fuelled by the widespread use of another new drug: MDMA, a substance which really stimulated euphoric, empathetic and loved-up experiences.
Around this time, several clubs cropped up that began to cater to the increasing numbers of people eager for an intense cocktail combining the drug; this new, often very soulful dance music; and also this incredibly vibrant and exuberant aesthetic, shaped by those black and queer communities who had first introduced the sounds in the early 80s. The club that really captured this mood in Amsterdam was the RoXY.
Converting the old Roxy porn cinema into a club
Situated near to the city’s famous flower market, the RoXY was founded as a collaboration between Giele, DJ Eddy de Clerque and magazine editor Arjen Schrama. Giele, however, was the driving force behind the project: he was the person who first saw the potential of converting the old Roxy porn cinema into a club and it was him who shaped the RoXY into what he called a “total art” experience, giving the club the backronym “Radical Outlet for the Xenomaniac in You”.
Filled with work from the local art scene
The toilets and the corridors were filled with work from the local art scene, there was a spectacular, constantly changing visual display produced by artist Gerald van der Kaap, and all this was underpinned by the music, with heavy emphasis on new genres, such as acid house, techno, jungle, drum and bass, breakbeat. Giele’s vision really resonated with the traditional modernist idea of “art for the masses”, providing a space where ordinary people could encounter experimental art, if they wanted to, but could just as easily get off their heads and dance all night.
An entertainment space
Prior to opening the RoXY, Giele was involved in setting up the squatted art gallery Aorta, located along the Warmoesstraat near the Oude Kerk and a lot of the ideas expressed in the RoXY were first developed there: providing an entertainment space alongside art, freedom for artists exhibiting, an emphasis on energy and a general decommodified, DIY aesthetic that took its inspiration from the punk movement that emerged a decade before.
A pretty exceptional moment in urban history
Both spaces would not have been possible without the wider socio-economic conditions prevailing in the city at the time. In Amsterdam, as with many of the other cities where rave really took hold in a big way, you have a very active movement seeking to challenge the fundamental organisation of working and living. This was helped by the still quite generous state benefits for artists and the unemployed. It was also helped by the fact that deindustrialisation and suburbanisation had left many cities with a large amount of underused space.
In other words, these cities gave a lot of people a lot of free space and a lot of free time. It was a pretty exceptional moment in urban history. Looking at the organisation of cities now, its difficult to see a time when a club like the RoXY could come back again.
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And today?
The building that housed the RoXY from 1987-1999 is located at Singel 465-467 in Amsterdam. Now there is a clothing store at the address. So what remains of the RoXY are the many stories, myths and also the DJs and Djanes who played and grew up there. One of them is Djane Isis whose career began in RoXY. In an interview with Vice – an online magazine – she talks about her experiences:
Isis: “The RoXY was a great place. There has never been anything like it since. It’s just incredible how much work was put into creating a unique atmosphere back then. Every week you could hear the best DJs there, accompanied by great performances and artwork. The club was literally multi-disciplinary. It was avant la lettre-also ahead of its time.”
“Move freely as a woman”
Isis: “Moreover, it was the only place in Amsterdam where you could walk around as a woman and not be harrassed. There was a strict door policy, but inside was a uniquely safe and free environment, in which anyone could express themselves freely – gays, fashionistas, alternatives. Even completely naked people weren’t frowned upon.”
In Wikipedia it says: “The RoXY also enjoyed fame for its, very random, door policy. Those who were welcomed with an open door could just as easily be rejected the next time. Only a coveted membership guaranteed access. A positive consequence of the door policy was that there was usually a pleasant atmosphere inside.”
Theatrical ending
Isis: “By the time RoXY burned down in 1999, it had lost some of its magic. The fire was a big drama in Dutch house history, but in my opinion, it was the theatrical ending its founder Peter Gielen (RIP) would have wished for.”
Copyright of the text/interview with Isis belongs to Vice. Click here for the original interview. And here the version in German.
The exhibition Living the City tells over fifty stories from architecture, art, and city planning projects in the main hall of the former Berlin-Tempelhof Airport. The National Urban Development Policy exhibition runs from 25th September until 20th December 2020 and shows processes and opportunities for action in cities across Europe.
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Cities are full of stories — simultaneous, contradictory, overlapping, and inextricably connected. For three months, the former airport will be transformed into a venue for city life. In a walk-through urban collage, visitors will encounter a range of stories from people and projects that are actively involved in the city and civic society.
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These stories ask questions concerning fundamental activities like loving, living, making, participating, learning, playing, moving, and dreaming in the city. These are stories that shape and transform, that make you feel and think. Furthermore, a wide-ranging event and education program invites everyone to actively participate and contribute.
For more information click here.
In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is Venice, the original end point of the medieval Silk Road, with ambitious plans for modern expansion as part of the New Silk Road.
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In March this year Italy became the first major Western power to endorse China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In doing so the country smoothed the way for some major transformations in its trade infrastructure, particularly in the historic port cities of Trieste, Genoa and, above all, Venice.
Echoes of Marco Polo’s travels along the medieval Silk Road are too tempting to ignore. Back then, in 1271 to be precise, the teenage Venetian sailed with his father and uncle to Acre, rode camels to the Persian port of Hormuz and continued on to the Shangdu summer palace of Yuan Chinese emperor Kublai Khan (the grandson of Genghis Khan), eventually spending several years as an advisor to the emperor. Upon his arrival back in Europe, the young merchant recounted his story to the romance writer Rustichello of Pisa, while both of them were imprisoned in Genoa (which was at war with Venice by the time Polo returned). The so-called Book of Marvels that emerged from this encounter became a bestseller and inadvertently reinvigorated European interest in trading with the Far East (Christopher Columbus was said to have carried a copy of the book on his voyage to what he thought was the eastern edge of China but actually turned out to be the Americas).
Expansion and Preservation
Venice has changed a lot since Polo’s time. After enjoying several more centuries as one of Europe’s preeminent maritime powers, it experienced a steady decline following the shift in European trade from the Near East to the New World, to which Venice had relatively less access compared to the Western European powers. By the early 20th Century, it became clear that the lagoon could no longer support trade on the scale suitable for maintaining competition with other Mediterranean ports. An extension was therefore built on the nearby mainland in Marghera which re-established the wider Venice region’s important position in Mediterranean maritime trade, while preserving historic Venice so that it could become one of world’s most popular tourist destinations.
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This same spirit of expansion and preservation has fuelled a new proposal to build an offshore port eight nautical miles off the mainland. The Venice Offshore-Onshore Port System (VOOPS), as it is called, is intended to provide Venice with a maritime port in deep waters outside the lagoon, thereby allowing the Port of Venice to handle the largest cargo ships that carry over 20,000 TEUs without causing disruption to the area around historic Venice. In the process, it will also link the Venice with the nearby ports of Chioggia, Porto Levante, Ravenna, as well as the inland ports of Mantua and Padua, the Greek port of Piraeus (also receiving the Belt and Road treatment), and markets across the central European mainland.
“Made in Italy”
The ultimate prize, however, is stronger links with Chinese and East Asian markets hungry for goods “Made in Italy”: Ferraris and Lamborghinis, Italian wine, food, fashion, art, interior design and all the many Italian products that remain synonymous with quality and luxury. Integration will also bring more Chinese tourists to Venice, a big destination for a population still inspired by the story of Marco Polo.
The problem is VOOPS was approved under the previous President of the Venice Port Authority Paolo Costa, who left the role in 2017. His replacement Pino Musolino has been considerably less enthusiastic about the plan, describing it as “pharaonic” in scope, totally out of proportion to the projected traffic passing through the upper Adriatic. While the project has not been outright rejected, its future is very much uncertain.
Populist Indecision
This indecision repeats itself on the national stage. Last year, elections delivered success for two populist parties, the Five Star Movement, who became the largest party, and the newly rebranded Lega (previously the northern Italian-focused Lega Nord), who led the largest coalition. After long negotiations, the two parties went into coalition together, with their two leaders, Luigi di Maio and Matteo Salvini each becoming deputy prime ministers under the premiership of compromise candidate and Independent politician Giuseppe Conte.
Whereas di Maio has been relatively positive about the Belt and Road Initiative, Salvini is much less enthusiastic, refusing to meet the Chinese President Xi Jinping when he visited earlier this year. Since the election, Salvini’s star has risen and the M5S popularity has plummeted, which means that it will likely be some time before Italy’s endorsement of the Belt and Road Initiative brings concrete results in Venice.
In an ongoing series exploring the effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the cities involved, our next stop is the port of Rotterdam in The Netherlands, which must deal with increasing competition from land and sea as a result of China’s rise.
After a third of its buildings were destroyed during the 1940 Nazi blitzkrieg invasion of The Netherlands, the Port of Rotterdam rose phoenix-like from the rubble to become the world’s busiest port by 1962.
Benefitting from its position at the entry point of Western Europe, a region that was (and, of course, continues to be) home to several of the world’s wealthiest countries, Rotterdam held this position for a remarkable stretch of over four decades, until it was finally overtaken in 2004, first by Singapore and then by the Chinese Port of Shanghai. Since then, it has fallen out of the top ten largest ports in the world and now lies eleventh behind eight Chinese ports, as well as the ports of Dubai and Singapore.
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This probably says as much about recent changes in China as it does about the fortunes of Rotterdam and Europe more broadly: China, a country with a population twice that of the whole of Europe, has merely begun to close the gap.
Even so, the trend is suggestive of a general direction of travel that’s worth exploring.
A big port with little to gain
As previous articles in this series have shown, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has largely targeted cities which will can be easily integrated into China’s trade routes and can directly benefit from the investment and technical and logistical expertise that China offers. As a port which was already developed, and already supported by a prosperous national economy, Rotterdam has relatively less to gain from Chinese support.
That said, the railway-based “Belt” half of the Belt and Road Initiative is likely to have at least some indirect impact on Rotterdam’s role in transnational trade.
From centre to periphery
Rail’s main advantage is that it offers a middle ground: less expensive (though slower) than air freight and faster (though more expensive) than ship freight. Whereas the journey from China to Rotterdam takes a ship well over a month to complete, and on average around 55 days, the same trip can now be completed within two weeks by rail. This middle ground is also achieved with markedly less carbon emissions, something which will become increasingly important in the century to come.
The trouble this poses for Rotterdam is that it lies on the very periphery of China’s budding transcontinental rail network, something which is underlined by the fact that other European nations had already conducted rail trade with China for several years before the first freight train from China arrived in Rotterdam on July 23 2015.
What’s more, the frequency of trains to Rotterdam remains considerably lower than it is for other European cities east of Rotterdam. As an article in the Dutch newspaper AD explains, while the number of trains that travel between China and Europe is now 24 each week, many of these don’t go beyond Germany, mostly ending up in Duisburg in Germany and other cities in Central and Eastern Europe.
This suggests that, as the rail network continues to develop, Rotterdam could become a progressively less essential source of international trade for other countries in the European heartland.
Panic in the press
This is certainly the fear expressed in the Dutch press, which has become increasingly panicked about China’s infrastructural development in recent years, seeing it as a direct threat to the country’s economy, and a general threat to the West’s global pre-eminence.
Surveying the facts on the ground, however, it’s hard not to conclude that Rotterdam will actually probably be fine. It’s a relatively wealthy city in a very wealthy country, whose diverse and highly developed economy is more than capable of riding the wave of change brought about by China’s global infrastructural development, taking advantage of new and improved connections with the European heartland and beyond.
The decline of Western global pre-eminence is very real, but really only significant because of how long it took to happen. So long as policymakers and port management swallow their pride and make the best of the new situation, nothing will change for countries that once stood out because the rest of the world had been held back by centuries of Western imperialism.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been described as a modern-day silk road. Encompassing a series of massive infrastructural and investment projects across parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, it follows several routes from mainland and coastal China, across the sea and over land, through the Central Asian republics and several southeast Asian port cities and reaching as far as Djibouti and Mombasa in East Africa, Duisburg in Germany and Venice in Italy. As part of an ongoing series exploring the effects this huge project is having on the cities involved, our last stop was Athens, next stop, Tehran.
In May last year President Trump pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement better known as the “Iran Nuclear Deal”. Established between Iran and the US towards the end of his predecessor President Obama’s administration, the deal was meant to reverse decades of hostility between the two nations and bind Iran to reducing its nuclear capability, while committing the US to lifting a sanctions regime which has had extremely damaging effects on Iran’s economic development over the years. With Trump’s reversal, Iran returned to its role as a pariah state in the eyes of the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
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It is in this context that China is seeking to position Iran as one of the essential nodes in its Belt and Road Initiative. Which begs the question, will America’s new relationship with Iran get in the way of China’s plans?
It’s a question that gets us closer to the heart of what this whole Belt and Road project is really about. In essence, it represents a threat to the current world order and a roadmap for a 21st Century dominated not by the US but by China. But this isn’t the place to explore these big geopolitical maneuverings. Instead, we’re here to understand how they affect things at the urban scale of Tehran.
Bringing in a host of international rail investment
The effects of the Belt and Road Initiative will be most dramatically felt in the rail infrastructure of both Tehran and Iran more broadly. Most importantly, China is building a 3,200km railway stretching from its mainland, passing through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and ending up in Tehran. As part of this, China has initiated a project worth $1.5bn to electrify the railway line that runs from Tehran to the nearby city of Mashhad, and which also passes through Shahrud, where the Iranian Space Agency is located.
Much of this development also brings in companies from several other international players. Ferrovie, Italy’s state rail company, has signed a $1.37 billion deal to build a high-speed railway between the nearby cities of Qom and Arak. Russian company Transmashholding and French company Alstom are supplying rolling stock and carriages. Meanwhile, Japan has signed a deal to provide $10bn in funding for various railway ventures, including two railways linking north and south Tehran.
However, new US sanctions on Iran are set to affect all of these countries later this year (along with China and also Greece, Turkey, South Korea and India). As well as posing a serious obstacle to the aforementioned development, the sanctions will also prevent Iran from selling oil to these countries, which will in turn limit the state’s ability to supply its citizens with certain basic necessities.
The effect of sanctions was already felt on 25 May last year, when a series of spontaneous demonstrations sprang up in Tehran, with shopkeepers closing their stalls and protestors filling the historic Grand Bazaar, in response to out-of-control inflation that had seen the value of Iran’s rial drop to 90,000 to the dollar.
Though these protests weren’t a direct result of the sanctions – Iran had already experienced protests throughout the country earlier in the year, the biggest since the Green Movement of 2009 –it seems likely that further sanctions will lead to more protests, since they will help to exacerbate several pre-existing problems in the city.
A majority in Tehran are barely managing
As the most populous city in western Asia, with a population of fourteen million if you count the wider metropolitan region, Tehran has its fair share of complex urban problems. In addition to financial difficulties, the city also hosts some of the world’s highest levels of congestion and air pollution. Meanwhile, citizens face a major cost of living crisis and suffer under an atrocious planning regime: the legacy of an inadequately implemented 1960s masterplan developed by “godfather of the shopping mall” Victor Gruen (for more on this check out Oliver Wainwright’s recent article on Iran for The Guardian).
All this adds up to a situation which is barely manageable for the majority of citizens.
Citing a survey conducted by Iran Urban Economics Scientific Association on Iran’s English language papers the Financial Tribune claims that 70% of Tehran’s population “have exceeded the optimum level”, by which they mean the city can only provide just over two million of its residents with decent living conditions.
In light of this, and the forthcoming sanctions escalation, it feels like the Belt and Road Initiative is doomed to make only a dent in the mounting problems faced by Tehran’s citizenry.
That is, unless China willfully flouts the American line. Watch this space.
