It’s now possible to flip through the key chapters of Barcelona’s life as a city, through the The Historic Charter of Barcelona. This is a new interactive mapping project tracking the history of the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region from 150 A.D.
Cape Town-based photographer Johnny Miller reveals distinct lines between rich and poor in a striking (and unsettling) series of photographs. Taken using drones, the aerial perspective presents the harsh reality of past Apartheid policies and the continued disparity in a way that can’t be ignored.
No essay or magazine article in the world can convey the stark divide between the extreme rich and the extreme poor as this photo does - taken of the Paraospolis Favela and Sao Paulo, Brazil. The photo is one of a series of amazing images showcased here on the deputydog blog.
This shows the social relationship of economy in space. It is the physical and visual representation of how we are divided into different classes; working class, middle class and upper class. It is the line of poverty (left) against wealth (right). Is this how our space should be used? Or should space be more integrated? Should space be defined by our income and working situations?
Unequal Scenes portrays scenes of inequality in South Africa from the air. Discrepancies in how people live are sometimes hard to see from the ground. The beauty of being able to fly is to see things from a new perspective - to see things as they really are. Looking straight down from a height of several hundred meters, incredible scenes of inequality emerge. Some communities have been expressly designed with separation in mind, and some have grown more or less organically.
During apartheid, segregation of urban spaces was instituted as policy. Roads, rivers, “buffer zones” of empty land, and other barriers were constructed and modified to keep people separate. 22 years after the end of apartheid, many of these barriers, and the inequalities they have engendered, still exist. Oftentimes, communities of extreme wealth and privilege will exist just meters from squalid conditions and shack dwellings.
Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.
Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias A.C. – a nonprofit telcoms company operated by and for indigenous groups in Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz – has received a license to operate cellular services in at least 356 municipalities. It’s the first time the Mexican telcoms regulator has given a operations license to an indigenous social group.
TIC is the sequel to a network created by Rhizomatica, who installed internet-based telephony in remote communities serviced only by expensive payphones, lowering the cost of calls by as much as 98%. TIC is a co-op venture with Rhizomatica, and the communities it will serve with high-speed wireless telephony and internet connectivity are both underserved and overbilled by Mexico’s for-profit telcoms companies.
