#abandoned cities

[jt1674]

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[wonderful-prompts]

Prompt #1169

Step by trembling step, they joined the others in a cavernous ballroom.

Shattered mirrors on the walls reflected strange light from beyond the empty window panes. Debris and layers of untouched dust littered what once was a grand, shining floor.

The leader’s footsteps were just as cautious as their own, knowing full well that this palace beneath their domain could have been built above something else. Darker corners of the room were approached with faltering certainty.

[architectureandfilmblog]

Happy World Ocean Day!

Although i made these Drowned London paintings awhile back, I remembered them the other day while watching to this interesting video featuring Sir David King, former science advisor to the UK government, and founder of the Centre for Climate Repair. In it, he gives an introduction to the science of climate change, emphasising the severity and urgency of the problem but also suggesting some hopeful potential strategies for not just mitigation, but reversal.  

Obviously it’s not London that will be the first victim of rising sea levels, but rather hugely populous areas of the global south. King, along with other scientists, predicts that mega cities such as Calcutta and Jakarta will be underwater and completely uninhabitable within 30 years. So to celebrate World Ocean Day, let’s try to do our bit in our own lives to support emissions reduction and climate repair in every possible way we can, particularly for the sake of those who will be hit first by rising sea levels. 

[staticspaces]

Polder - 2012

The quiet streets of the abandoned Village of Doel in Belgium.

[timespanner]

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away. Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

[zombiearkham]

[refractionaudio]