World Wide Wednesday: Los Angeles, Kazakhstan, and Guatemala City

Each week we will be focusing on blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. We’ll be on the lookout for websites outside the country that approach themes related to urban experiences and issues.

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• The BBC recently featured a Chinese “ghost town”, home only to deserted streets, empty buildings and half-finished infrastructure.  Located in Inner Mongolia the unnamed townn was planned by local officials to create economic opportunities in one of the country’s poorest counties. Unfortunately, construction on the project was abandoned half-way through due to poor planning and lack of funds.

• Despite the risks associated with building cities from scratch, plans for manmade urban utopias continue to pop up around the world. City planners in Astana, Kazakhstan have released plans to create a city of 20, 000 from the ground up. The new city will contain an artificial lake, palm trees, and Venetian-style houses. The catch? The city will be entirely indoors.  Dubbed simply the “Indoor City”, the project is being proposed as a way to combat the district’s bleak winters where temperatures can fall as low -40C.

• “Walking in L.A”, a fascinating series on GOOD.com, explores the pedestrian experience in a city dominated by freeways, traffic congestion and isolated communities. In part five of the series, “Race and Rail Lines”, author Ryan Bradley, looks at the radicalization of LA’S public spaces and transit systems. As Bradley writes “To write about public transportation and walking in Los Angeles, [one] has to write about race in Los Angeles, and that can get uncomfortable real quick because, honestly, the history of Los Angeles is the history of constructing a white city in a place that isn’t?never was”.

• Pictures of Guatemala City’s newest sinkhole are making their way around the internet and the effect is uncanny–an entire city block collapsed into a seemingly bottomless abyss. The Infrastructruist looks at the events that led to the catastrophe that swallowed two buildings, and why this gaping hole in the urban fabric may remain unfilled for years to come.

photo of Guatemala City sinkhole from Gobierno de Guatemala on flickr