Urbanization

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Cities grow fastest when economies transform, and artists have recorded both the promise and the cost. Charles Marville photographed the narrow medieval streets of Paris in the 1860s as Baron Haussmann's rebuilding swept them away, and Gustave Doré's engravings for London: A Pilgrimage (1872) show railway viaducts looming over packed rows of slum housing.

China's building boom since the 1990s produced a new wave of responses. Zhang Dali spray-painted outlines of his own profile on Beijing walls marked for demolition and photographed them for his Dialogue series, begun in 1995. Weng Fen's photographs Sitting on the Wall (2002) show schoolgirls perched on walls, looking out at raw new skylines. In Los Angeles, Lauren Halsey builds architectural installations carved with the signs, slogans and faces of South Central, the neighbourhood where she grew up, as it faces redevelopment. Look for cranes, demolition marks and new towers rising beside old streets.