In Pictures

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In Pictures: Metropolis

As modern cities evolve at unprecedented speed, do we shape our urban environment or does it shape us?

Globally, cities are growing upwards and outwards at unprecedented speed, fundamentally changing the way we live and work. Not many places have grown as rapidly as Qatar’s capital Doha
Published On 14 Nov 2014

Ours is an urban planet. Since 2009, the number of people living in towns and cities has overtaken the number living on the outskirts.

Across the globe, cities are growing upwards and outwards at unprecedented speed, changing the way we live and work. This could be a golden age of architecture, or a time of unrestrained commercial speculation.

How our world will look for generations to come is being decided daily, yet too few of us are engaging with the debate. In this supercharged world of instant communication and instant message, many are too busy looking down. It may be time for us to look up.

Watch more on Metropolis: A Time Lapse Perspective – Al Jazeera Correspondent’s creative exploration of architecture and our relationships with modern cities.

Critics dismiss newly minted Gulf capitals like Doha as (***)instant cities(***), calling them mere facades; vanity projects for wealthy patrons and their foreign architects
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But there are less visible sides to Doha(***)s current development boom. Some areas in the old town still give a sense of what the city looked like before the discovery of oil and gas
London is a metropolis that became the first truly international city of the modern age more than two centuries ago. But today, it is being radically redrawn by the global economy
London is seeing record growth, its population jumping more than 100,000 in 2013. The residential property market also rose 20% in the first six months of 2014, driven to a large degree by foreign money
But some structures, like the 87-storey foreign-owned Shard building, have received mixed reactions, with critics saying that its presence changes the character of the London skyline
For many, New York created what we imagine a modern metropolis to be. The(***)New York Skyline(***) is what new cities around the world aspire to, whether consciously or unconsciously
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But few cities divide opinion more than New York. A towering celebration of modernity for some is, for others, a(***)beautiful catastrophe(***) of elite spires soaring above the poor
Many cities seek to emulate New York without understanding the sacrifice this entails. Are megacities today ignoring the people on the pavements in the race for the sky?
Some say cities should come with a warning: Just as they rise, so can they fall
No city has fallen further or harder than Detroit. The US city, which was once one of the great American cities, has become the poster child for urban decline
Cities have always been in motion; they have to be to evolve and adapt. But the question remains: Is the speed of that change excluding the people from the process? Do we shape our cities or do they shape us?