Before/After Skyline Of Your City

[tdawg]

I love Warsaw's skyline. It's a great mix of Soviet-era and modern architecture.

[dubu]

Originally Posted by TheUnit

Warsaw:

1991:


2019:

give it 10 more years and I think it will be real nice. not hating on those buildings but im just not use to them. a skyscraper from the 50's and a weird shaped one.

[TheUnit]

Originally Posted by dubu

that's a real ugly building, that building to the left of that is ugly too. everything else looks nice, its only two buildings and one looks like its about to fall down heh.

Palace of Culture and Science is ugly, I agree. However it's one of Warsaw's many landmarks and it will stay there probably forever. I hope they will at least wash the building, because in the 50s/60s it was way brighter.

[dubu]

I had my tv set to the setting I use for reading and the building was dark green. I just switched it to standard and it looks better. has there ever ben a dark green building made to look like it blends into nature on purpose? that actually would be cool.

[TheUnit]

Originally Posted by dubu

I had my tv set to the setting I use for reading and the building was dark green. I just switched it to standard and it looks better. has there ever ben a dark green building made to look like it blends into nature on purpose? that actually would be cool.

I don't think so.

[dubu]

Originally Posted by TheUnit

I don't think so.

only in drawings I think

[Nite]

Toronto



https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/com..._2018_vs_2009/

[initiald]

Wow. 2004 was the only time I've been to Toronto and the skyline has grown so much.

[Steely Dan]

^ yeah toronto is another NA city that has been going through some pretty radical skyline enhancement recently.

consider this, in 2008 toronto had just 6 buildings over 700' tall.

today, including U/C towers, it has 23 700+ footers.

that's a quadrupling in just a little over a decade!

[muppet]

Canary Wharf, London - one of 5 rising clusters in the city

2017


https://envosort.co.uk/portfolio-ite...wharf-skyline/



Now:

P1000057 by RJS London, on Flickr

[Sam Hill]

Originally Posted by muppet

Canary Wharf, London - one of 5 rising clusters in the city

2017


https://envosort.co.uk/portfolio-ite...wharf-skyline/



Now:

P1000057 by RJS London, on Flickr

Damn you! Damn you London! [shakes fist at London]

Watching my city turn into more of a high-profile city, slowly, over the course of decades, is like watching paint dry. This is taking forever! I should just move to London, LOL.

I think my favorite "skyline" is London's. I put "skyline" in quotes because it's not really London's profile that's fun to look at so much as the aerials. It's this thick urban expanse that stretches toward the horizon, with clusters of modern skyscrapers shooting up here and there. There's something very unique and weird about it. It almost looks sci-fi. I have found myself pausing BBC World News, just to stare at the set's background imagery.

The last time I was in London, that egg building was just being topped off. That was forever ago. It's time for another visit.

[JAYNYC]

Originally Posted by muppet

Canary Wharf, London - one of 5 rising clusters in the city

2017


https://envosort.co.uk/portfolio-ite...wharf-skyline/



Now:

P1000057 by RJS London, on Flickr

Very cool to see what's happening in London.
Maybe one day it'll catch up to NYC.

1) What triggered all of the sudden recent development?
2) Was (anchor tenant) building signage prohibited in London prior to this year? In the 2017 photo, there is none visible.

[muppet]

I hear your pain - a rising city but not reflected necessarily in highrises. London has a big housing problem now for two decades and one never-ending property bubble, which is created in part by developers. The city is booming, and grows by 120,000 a year without room to expand (by law thanks to the Green Belt), which you'd think would be prime grounds for a highrise city, akin to Manhattan's island status with similar population and business demands. However development has only ever been piecemeal or in 'groundscrapers', compounded by European nimby laws that protect the sightlines to the UNESCO Word Heritage sites, palaces, cathedrals, 50,000 protected buildings, Lady Mary Ponsonby's garden shed and assorted hovels across the city centre and beyond. When one pensioner (the kind with lots of time on his hands) chopped down a bush on Richmond hill he laid waste to no less than 4 skyscrapers 8 miles away near St Paul's. These 14 vast viewing corridors are why the city is rising in disparate clusters. And London is only now losing it's long aversion to tall buildings, ever since Queen Victoria decreed nothing should exceed beyond a certain limit the height of her palaces, right until the 80s and 90s when 500 ugly, postwar tower blocks were demolished.

Basically the developers nurture a special algorithm which means they only build a set amount of housing to keep the prices ever higher, whilst Londoners endure the smallest housing in the West, the longest commutes (less density means more people can only afford to live further and further out), and the highest prices for both. Build too much (read: highrises) and the rip-off prices can't be maintained. Textbook capitalism without the safeguards to prevent it from becoming feudalist.

However, sometime in 2014-2016 pressure from the Mayor and his drive to build more affordable housing upset the formula enough to unleash hundreds of highrise plans, now made profitable, that were waiting long in the wings. They are of course reaching fruition now - 76 highrise buildings will be completed this year, 541 on paper to come. - waiting again because...

...a big thing happened in 2016 - the Brexit vote, so almost everything you see was planned before then. Now everyone's held off once more, to see with bated breath what'll happen next. Either everything stops in Year Zero, or the masses from the post-apocalyptic ruins from the rest of the country start moving in (as seen in the capital booms in de-populating countries such as Japan and Russia).

It's never about demographic demand, it's only ever really about economic climate.

[muppet]

Anchor signage has been on those buildings since ever, going up in the mid noughties - so I'm wondering if the 2017 date from the source is innaccurate (though the buildings correspond). I'm wondering if the estate suddenly banned them ( I remember the citibank and HSBC logo disappearing sometimes), then unbanned them again, or the tenants moved out then back. Or its Photoshop.

Edit : it may well be Photoshop, to avoid the logo curtailments:

https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-pho...-image80124800

[subterranean]

Originally Posted by muppet

Basically the developers nurture a special algorithm which means they only build a set amount of housing to keep the prices ever higher, whilst Londoners endure the smallest housing in the West, the longest commutes (less density means more people can only afford to live further and further out), and the highest prices for both. Build too much (read: highrises) and the rip-off prices can't be maintained. Textbook capitalism without the safeguards to prevent it from becoming feudalist.

The idea that the housing situation in London is some sort of centrally planned conspiracy by developers is absurd. It's growth pressures and a restrained market, plain and simple - just like everywhere else except Texas.

[tdawg]

Holy crap, Canary Wharf! I had no idea.

[JManc]

All those buildings will be packed up and moved to Dublin and Amsterdam after Brexit.

[muppet]

Originally Posted by subterranean

The idea that the housing situation in London is some sort of centrally planned conspiracy by developers is absurd. It's growth pressures and a restrained market, plain and simple - just like everywhere else except Texas.

Please do read, it's called 'landbanking', a consortium of developers, speculators and investment companies who sit on land (over a million plots) with building permission, but don't build. Despite govt edicts, a housing crisis and a booming population strain.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...g-land-banking

"As Jeffreys puts it, land banking is a symptom, not a cause, of our dysfunctional housing market. “Developers have to buy land upfront at a very high price,” he says. “Then they have to get a return for their shareholders, so of course they are only going to build at a speed that keeps prices high.”"

"The fact that land values are so high in the first place is due in part to an entire industry of land promoters and “strategic land companies”. They enable landowners to make big gains upfront based on the projected profits of a speculative development, without having to shoulder any of the cost or risk of actually building that development"


"A 2012 study for the Greater London Authority, by consultants Molior, found that 45% of sites in London with planning permission for new homes were owned by a company which did not build homes. The list includes “developers who do not build”, along with owner-occupiers, historic landowners, government, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, universities, churches – anyone looking to use land for short-term trading, tax sheltering purposes or simply as a long-term investment."

[muppet]

Originally Posted by JManc

All those buildings will be packed up and moved to Dublin and Amsterdam after Brexit.

Dublin has already taken many of the hedge funds, and Paris and Frankfurt are already busy battling it out for the finance. One of my friends, a head lawyer for PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts about 700,000 job losses for London's Brexit if/ when the city loses its shine.

[muppet]

Anyhoo, the other two most notable clusters - about half the buildings will be completed or near this year

Vauxhall (the last slice of undeveloped central London), formerly industrial:




The City (very clumped together to hide from St Paul's Cathedral).


https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/05/londo...-2026-7207174/

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/trave...ttraction.html