A disappearing past, a forgetting present, a fading future...

ORIGINAL POST: UN PASSATO CHE SCOMPARE, UN PRESENTE CHE DIMENTICA E UN FUTURO CHE CANCELLA

 

Let’s try to picture a house, our house. Our shelter, the place where we rest, where every day we find ourselves in. We may travel all around the world, but home is always our fixed point, our main destination. Now let’s imagine losing it, having to abandon it forever…let’s picture a village, or a city, let’s picture every single place we hang around every single day. Let’s picture a memory of our childhoods. And now, let’s picture a cemetery of houses, of broken memories and ruins of interrupted lives…this was the sad destiny of many towns, and will be the inescapable destiny of many others. 

Large is the number of ghost towns in Italy and the world, larger than what one would imagine. Some to resist time and destruction for now, others are gone forever, erased from memory and maps alike. Many can be the causes for this most times traumatic and painful abandon. Earthquakes, floods, fires, landslides, natural phenomena in front of which we remain defenceless. Many towns were forgotten and left alone even before dying. Maybe after being exploited for as long as they could produce wealth. And then they empty slowly, and slowly they become skeletons of the past. Because man needs a home to feel safe, but the home too needs man to keep standing… The present of many houses, today, is this… 

 

Romagnano Al Monte, abandoned after the Irpinia Earthquake, Italy.

 

But the future could be even worse…

 

The future of Timbuktu

 

A city like Detroit has lost more than 700.000 residents in the last 30 years. Half a century ago it numbered almost 2 million inhabitants, today it’s down to 900.000 and the number keeps dropping. But Banjul, capital city of Gambia, faces the risk of complete sinking due to erosion and the rising of the sea level. Mexico City, too, is sinking, because of the aquifer that constitutes the city’s primary drinking water source. Each time one of its residents drinks a glass of water, the city subsides a little. In the last 100 years, it has sunk as much as 9 metres. Naples could potentially be destroyed by a Vesuvio eruption, as could San Francisco by the infamous “Big One”.

 

How Detroit looks like today

 

Past can’t be changed, but it’s in the present that we can do something to keep whole cities from disappearing or being forgotten. In Italy, a recent report by Legambiente and Serico-Gruppo Cresme has forseen that in 2016 4.395 will be the towns that, if no interventions are made, will suffer a progressive housing problems: 42,2% of Italian towns, 10,4% of the population. Among these, 1.650 are destined to become actual ghost towns, which means a fifth of all Italian municipalities, the 4,2% of the population. To the already numerous ghost towns will thus add more, in a spiralling motion of relentless abandon. 

For many, ghost towns are places with a mysterious charm, remote corners to experience the absence of man where there once was a heavy presence. Apocalyptic landscapes of a destroyed past, where a camera can capture a decaying but still attractive and seductive remain of someone else’s lives. But it’s not so for everyone…for those who lived there, it’s not a ghost town, it’s home disappearing into oblivion. In our journey through these villages, we met many people who sadly told us “We’ve been forgotten”. This is the truth. We have forgotten that in Italy there still are authentic and wonderful places, where old cultures and traditions still survive, where people live simply and with fond attachment to their roots. We’ve seen these villages emptied, now inhabited only by the elderly because the young have gone away. Those very elderly who already had to abandon their homes and now see their hometown disappear. Ghost towns can be enhanced by telling their story, as long as we don’t stay indifferent. They existed and still try to survive, but if nothing is done they will die with the last who lived there. We must help them be remembered, and most importantly avoid them falling apart forever. And if for many of them it’s already too late, for many others there’s still much that can be done to contrast their abandon and prevent a piece of Italy from being forgotten. For a place with no memory has no future, but future is what we create in the present…

(Translation by Marco Salvadori)

Link to ORIGINAL POST.

Sanzhi: the mysterious UFO village

 

ORIGINAL POST: SANZHY, IL MISTERIOSO VILLAGGIO UFO

 

Sanzhi is a small village built on the coast of Taiwan between the late 70s and early 80s. These mysterious houses gave origin to a series of legends on aliens and paranormal phenomena even claiming the village to be cursed. They call them “UFO houses”, and the several photographs taken of the place clearly show the reason…

At first impact, the village looks like an alien town out of a science fiction film, but actually it is an abandoned town, or rather, a town that maybe never was occupied. These incredible twenty-some three-family buildings with private gardens and communal swimming pools are the work of the visionary Yu Zi, who worked under Taiwan government’s commission in its intent to promote and exploit the area as a seaside resort. The UFO houses derive from a trend born in the late 60s from movies like Mika Taanila’s “A new stance for tomorrow” and from such publications like “Tomorrow’s house from yesterday” tracing a “Retro-futurism”, an imaginary future in a past that never existed. The energetic crisis in the late 80s, however, didn’t allow the completion of the buildings, which were then bought by a local beer company with the intention of transforming the village in a five stars touristic resort, going for an even more minimalistic look: white houses, with bright interiors and a “The clockwork orange”-inspired design. But in the same year the company decided to halt the construction: some sources say that a lot of strange incidents took place during the works, and that these stories scared the people to the point of them advising the tourists against going to the area, convinced that in the UFO houses dwelled the spirits of those who died there. Apparently there was something sinister about the project, a curse of some sort that didn’t let anyone who took it up finish the work. 

 

The incomplete buildings of the UFO houses suffered a progressive structural decay over time, and the vegetation overtook every building. Inside it’s still possible to find furniture, beds, sofas, furnishings and fittings of any kind, making the place look like it was once inhabited. This is because, in Taiwan, when a residence is set for sale, one or more flats are furnished to demonstrate how the rooms can be set up. On sunny days, the alien village, with its various and vivid colours, looks like an abandoned recreation ground. But when the sky is dark, the landscapes takes surreal tones and the atmosphere becomes ominous: it’s like travelling through time to the ruins of the future.

Unfortunately, it looks like these mysterious buildings, destination for photographs and curious from all around the world, have now been demolished… as always, we create anything but get back nothing.

 

Image gallery on ORIGINAL POST

(Translation by Marco Salvadori)

Las Vegas: the lights switch off

ORIGINAL POST: LAS VEGAS, LE LUCI SI SPENGONO

It may seem impossible, but the city of sin and entertainment, is now losing all its majesty. Today, in fact, Las Vegas is facing the worst economic crisis in its history and the neon city’s splendour is slowly fading, like it lit up in the past…

Founded on May 15, 1905 as a railway village, Las Vegas became an actual city on March 16, 1911, when it adopted its first charter of public law. The name comes from a Spanish word that means “The Meadows”, because in the area, located in the boundless Nevada desert, there were a water wells that enabled the formation of some green areas. The construction of Hoover Dam, completed in 1936, enabled the city to develop and expand . After the legalisation of gambling, in March 19, 1931, Las Vegas called back the famous gangster Bugsy Siegel who, in 1946, opened the popular first hotel casino: the Flamingo. To money brought by tourists and gamblers then added that brought by the military who who worked at the nearby Nellis Air Force Base, in which, during the years of the Cold War, many nuclear tests were executed. Its growth was exponential exponential, and in what is now known as the “Strip”, dozens of hotels and casinos that consecrated Las Vegas as the gambling place par excellence were built. The economic and construction boom has been rapidly expanding for many years, and the building of hotels and casinos was growing. With the economic crisis that began in 2008, Las Vegas has also incurred a severe blow…

According to The Economist, the economic foundations of the city appear to have been irreversibly compromised and so Las Vegas has surpassed Detroit as themost abandoned city of America. The unemployment rate has reached 15%, with more than 30,000 people having lost their jobs in the casinos and hotels. Also in 2010 one tenth of the houses in the city was distrained, five times the national average. In the north districts this reaches one house out of five. House prices have fallen by 60%, and 70% of people who had bought home was left with a loan much higher than the value of the property. The result of this deep crisis is that entire districts are now deserted, with no lighting and no cars, while “On sale” signs are increasing in front of houses, and homeless people dwell in the abandoned buildings. Even the large hotels have not been spared and, although recently new ones like the huge new complex “Aria” were created, others were abandoned and demolished like the historic “Hotel Sahara”, which was inaugurated in 1952 and hosted stars such as Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and the Beatles, as well as being a famous set for films. In addition, large spaces that were to be used for new casinos were unbelievably left empty.

In short, Las Vegas, the city of perdition and excess, could become a scenic ghost town in the future…

Image gallery on ORIGINAL POST

(Translation by Marco Salvadori )