urbanisation

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Batumi

In pictures | Ghost apartments and hyperbuilding in Batumi

by Ian McNaught Davis

•7 min read

Since 2008, the port city of Batumi on Georgia’s Black Sea coast has attracted visitors with the bright lights of tourism, trade, and gambling. Soaring tourism statistics in the popular casino town has brought with it a construction boom — one that seemingly has no end in sight. Rampant construction on vacant patches of land punctuates the city of 160,000. The echoes of jackhammering and grinding ricochet off the multi-story high-rise buildings that continue to sprout into Batumi’s skyline.

Baku

The end of Shanghai — Baku’s district on the railway tracks

by Volodymyr Soboliev

•6 min read

Shanghai, the nickname of a small district running alongside Baku’s main railway line, is set to be demolished, and the tracks fenced off in the houses’ place. While locals tell of the tragic deaths of children hit by trains in Shanghai, some say the compensation offered by the government for demolishing their homes is not enough to move elsewhere in the city. No one really knows how ‘Shanghai’, a small slum in eastern Baku’s Keshla neighbourhood, got its name, not even the people liv

Renovated Pekini Street (Tbilisi City Hall photo)

aghmashenebeli

Opinion | Lack of care and forethought hold back Tbilisi’s development projects

by Irakli Zhvania

•7 min read

Tbilisi and its inhabitants are accustomed to major renovations at election times — a ‘tradition’ for politicians and city administrations. Such timely expressions of care for the city started under the United National Movement and have continued with Georgian Dream. [Read in Georgian — სტატია ქართულ ენაზე] These projects seek to improve the appearance of buildings, streets, or entire neighbourhoods — from superficial painting of façades to technical interventions, from improvised additio

Agriculture

Urbanisation in Chechnya: why do people leave their ancestral villages

by Volodymyr Soboliev

•5 min read

Chechnya, like many other modern-day republics of the Russian Federation, has experienced desolation of highland villages and an outflow of people, mostly young people, to the cities in the plains. People commonly say that they leave their ancestral villages in search of a ‘better life’. In fact, the reality often falls short of the migrants’ expectations, because even the largest city with its shiny skyscrapers often can’t give them what they’re looking for. During the active phase of t