Could ‘superblocks’ help Barcelona return to its late-19th-century vision of urban utopia, clearing out the snarled streets so mini neighborhood blocks can literally breathe? The rapidly expanding Catalan city was suffocating within its medieval walls before engineer Ildefons Cerdá came up with his controversial plan to tear them down and build a gridded district called Eixample way back in the 1870s. This orderly block-based approach met with a lot of resistance when it was proposed, yet ultimately became a model for urbanization before the burgeoning density of the industrial era choked it with cars and filled its air with pollution.

The plan was for the population to be spread out equally, with green spaces, schools, markets and other necessary neighborhood functions easily accessible from every block. While it did help make Barcelona healthier at the time, each of those tiny streets has been invaded by too many cars for the city to handle, and apartment blocks have sprouted up where parks used to be. Eixample has just 1.85 meters of green space per inhabitant, compared to Amsterdam’s 87.5, and the air quality and sedentary lifestyle are leading causes of death.

Barcelona’s urban planning committee wants to reverse that with ‘superilles,’ or superblocks. First, traffic would routed to larger roads on the perimeters, with cars, trucks and scooters only allowed within each block if they belong to residents. 186 new miles of cycling lanes throughout the city will encourage biking, and an orthogonal bus network keeps public transit on main thoroughfares. Each superblock would become like its own little city, with its own character.

This new city structure would free up 160 intersections for foot traffic, events, gatherings and other community-based purposes. The process is being conducted through gradual changes utilizing existing infrastructure, starting with nine areas. Sant Martí, a district that already hosts car-free days, will act as one of the main guinea pigs in a series of trial and error experiments the councillors call “tactical urbanism.”

“We have, as a base [for the plan], Cerdá’s Eixample, which was undermined by greed,” says Salvador Rueda, director of Barcelona’s urban ecology agency. “What was green in the plan was slowly overtaken and built on. And then, when cars arrived, they slowly overtook more and more space… We want to reclaim those green spaces and that can only be done through a drastic mobility change.”

Few nations have experienced quite the explosive rate of growth over the last century as China, and a new photo series shows us just how dramatic those changes actually look on the ground. Photographer, computer scientist and MIT alum Dheera Venkatraman pored through books and archives to find images taken in the 20th century and then went out and re-took them, shot by shot, attempting to frame them exactly as they were originally photographed. All of the new imagery has been converted to black and white to highlight what’s different and what has managed to survive after decades of frantic industrialization.

The result is a series called Time Travel in China, creating pairs of images that Venkatraman likens to a ‘spot-the-difference’ game. Agricultural fields become towns, skyscrapers shoot up into the air, bridges stretch across waterways, dirt roads are paved, infrastructure becomes more complex.

Yet not only do the contours of the land and the silhouettes of the mountains remain the same, a surprising number of buildings do, too, especially temples and historical structures. In some cases, the only notable shifts in a forty- or even eighty-year period are the vehicles, some lights and a handful of modern towers.

“When most people travel, they think of traveling in space,” she says. “Whether it’s hiking through a national park or learning about a distant culture, it’s usually about the destination. This time, I decided to travel in time.”

“It wasn’t always easy to get that perfect angle match,” she continues in a post on PetaPixel. “In some places, the vantage point ended up being in a private location, and in some cases there was a large obstruction or building preventing me from getting the same view. But nonetheless, I managed to capture several shocking contrasts over the past century of Chinese history.”

Far from its typical location in the woods and other remote places, an archetypal cabin looms over the bustling city of Athens from its rooftop perch two meters above the top of most high-rises. Proposed by Panos Dragonas and Varvara Christopoulo, the elevated urban hut brings a structure with a rural connotation representing quiet and solitude into an environment that’s nearly the exact opposite.

Instead of hills and trees, the hut looks out onto a landscape of man-made design. But the designers posit that these urban spaces, busy as they may be, can still provide a space for meditation and peace – as long as you go to extremes.

Urbanization has made isolated spaces hard to come by, so the dream of escaping to a cabin in the woods is not as achievable or even idyllic as it once was. This project emphasizes how much the world has changed as our cities have grown, replacing nature with streets, skyscrapers and antennas.

The hut is a mere nine square meters (96 square feet) and lacks any modern amenities, offering only a few platforms for sleeping and sitting, much like a camping shelter in the wilderness.

“The urban hut creates a voluntary isolation cell over the ruins of the new Great Depression. The hut returns to the city both as a primary form and as a standard of minimum living, and establishes a heterotopia in the stepped skyline of Athens.,” say the architects.

Hundreds of outlandish architectural proposals envisioned for cities around the world are rejected every year, but some are notable for their vision, controversial nature or sheer scale. Berlin, for example, would be a very different place if Hitler had won World War II, and massive cities designed by Buckminster Fuller could be floating on the seas just off American shores. These seven unbuilt urban wonders of the world range from feasible concepts and almost-built developments to utopian pipe dreams.

Welthaupstadt: Hitler’s Vision for Berlin

If Hitler had won World War II, as he expected, this is what he planned to do to Berlin: turn it into ‘World Capital Germania,’ filled with monuments honoring himself and the Third Reich. The photograph depicts a miniature model Hitler created along with Albert Speer, the “first architect of the Third Reich.” Among the massive planned structures were an Olympic stadium that would remain the largest in the world today if it had ever been completed, a large open forum, and a triumphal arch based on Paris’ Arc de Triomphe (only much larger, naturally.)

The city would have been reorganized around ‘The Avenue of Splendours,’ a north-south axis serving as a parade ground with traffic diverted into an underground highway. Sections of the tunnels were started but never completed, and remain in place today.

Project X: Disney’s EPCOT as a Real City

Walt Disney wanted EPCOT (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) to be a real, functioning city, and had every intention of making it so when he first began working on ‘Project X,’ the basis of what would eventually become Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Walt wanted EPCOT to be the opposite of 1950s Los Angeles, where he lived and worked. Plans for the project were designed in the special ‘Florida Room’ at Disney Studios. With a thirty-story hotel as its centerpiece, EPCOT was meant to be “a utopian environment enriched in education, and in expanding technology. A perfect city with dependable public transportation, a soaring civic center covered by an all-weather dome, and model factories concealed in green belts that were readily accessible to workers housed in idyllic suburban subdivisions nearby.”

Walt made a film showcasing the new city and showed it to a few friends shortly before his death. Walt’s brother Roy was skeptical, however, and shifted the plans to create ‘Disneyland East,’ or Walt Disney World. EPCOT isn’t exactly what Walt imagined, but vestiges of his ideas can be seen in the city of Celebration, Florida, located on the Disney World property.

Dongtan, China: The First Mega Eco-City That Almost Was

Dongtan was to be an eco-friendly utopia, the worlds first large-scale sustainable city producing 100% of its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. Public transit was to be powered by clean tech like hydrogen fuel cells, though the city was designed to be walkable and bikeable. Organic farms within the city limits were to produce most of residents’ food. Developers imagined that Dongtan would serve as a shining example for cities across China and the developing world.

Plans called for the city to be partially constructed by 2010, with accommodations for 10,000 residents, and fully functional for 50,000 by 2020. They began to fall apart in 2006 when Shanghai’s former mayor, the most enthusiastic supporter of the project, was arrested for property-related fraud, and reporters visiting the site found that ground hadn’t even been broken.

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7 Unbuilt Urban Wonders Of The World

The rapid industrialization of China and its effects on the nation’s beautiful natural scenery are depicted taking over traditional landscape scenes in a stunningly detailed series of digital works by artist Yang Yongliang. The imagery of Song dynasty artists, who painted pastoral scenes filled with peaceful mountains and pristine waterways, is juxtaposed to disconcerting effect with futuristic megacities, leaving little land untouched by urban growth.

The viewer must get very close to each work to see all of the complexities contained within them. Yongliang has envisioned a future in which there is virtually no escape from the hand of man, with skyscrapers clinging to the sides of mountains and rivers clogged with boats. What might be a dark nighttime scene is hazy with light pollution, made even brighter by presumably smog-filled skies.

‘Sleepless Wonderland’, pictured above, even mimics the artistic style of 12th century Song dynasty painters with ‘cun’, traditional texture strokes that were used to outline trees and texture land surfaces. These Song landscapes have long been considered an ideal representation of the beauty of Chinese nature.

In other works, such as ‘Crocodile and Shotgun’, figures in traditional Chinese dress look out upon wasted landscapes filled with industrial remnants and land mines. ‘Bowl of Tapei’ offers two variations of the city: one idyllic, with hovering clouds, the other dystopian and steaming with factory smoke. See more at Galerie Paris Beijing.