honorable mention
Gianluca Calise united kingdom
title
The unsustainable development
Finance has been the driving force of the real estate growth. Since the stable increase of housing prices in London during last years, real estate is considered a safe form of investment. Many new developments are purchased as investment vehicles and left empty, just waiting for the price rising. A virtual value for a virtual city with severe implications for real people.
The increase in the price of houses has far exceeded growth in earnings, pushing, as a consequence, “Londoners” with a medium earning out of London. In 2014, the average house price in London exceeded almost 10 times median earnings. Since the impossibility to find a flat at an affordable price, nearly a quarter of young adults in London live with their parents, up from one in six in the late 1990s. According to the London’s Poverty Profile 2015, 27% of Londoners, 2.25 million people, live in poverty after housing costs are taken into account.
My photographic journey in London councils documents how urban development can be far from people’s need. I show new ghost developments in every borough, walking in the deserted streets through dark buildings, with few lights at the windows, witnessing the absence of human presence.
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entry description
London is the city that showed the most intensive development in the world after Tokyo during the last eight years, and its landscape is changing dramatically from an architectural point of view, but also from a social point of view, since it has not been designed for people but for finance, and most of new developments are uninhabited.Finance has been the driving force of the real estate growth. Since the stable increase of housing prices in London during last years, real estate is considered a safe form of investment. Many new developments are purchased as investment vehicles and left empty, just waiting for the price rising. A virtual value for a virtual city with severe implications for real people.
The increase in the price of houses has far exceeded growth in earnings, pushing, as a consequence, “Londoners” with a medium earning out of London. In 2014, the average house price in London exceeded almost 10 times median earnings. Since the impossibility to find a flat at an affordable price, nearly a quarter of young adults in London live with their parents, up from one in six in the late 1990s. According to the London’s Poverty Profile 2015, 27% of Londoners, 2.25 million people, live in poverty after housing costs are taken into account.
My photographic journey in London councils documents how urban development can be far from people’s need. I show new ghost developments in every borough, walking in the deserted streets through dark buildings, with few lights at the windows, witnessing the absence of human presence.
about the photographer
Gianluca Calise is an Italian photographer living in London. Following a Master Degree in Economics in Rome, he studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, at London College of Communication and Central Saint Martins in Londonback to gallery