neon tigers

Peter Bialobrzeski
neon tigers

Photographs: Peter Bialobrzeski

Text: Florian Hanig and Christoph Ribbat

Publisher: Hatje Cantz

111 pages

Pictures: 93

Year: 2004

Price: 90 €

Comments: Hardcover, 24,5 x 30 cm, color photographs. First edition. In very good condition. Text in German and English.

""Tiger Cities" is the name given to these upstarts that have taken a huge leap onto the world stage and caught up on three hundred years of European urban development in just one generation. And where politicians and business people put their faith in an old American symbol of success: skyscrapers. They gauge the modernity of a country and are beacons of the Asian economic miracle. Despite the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, construction is still taking place as if in a race: at the end of 2003, the 509-meter-high office and business tower Taipei 101, with the same number of stories, pushed the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur with their 452 meters and eighty-eight stories to second place. However, in some cities on the Chinese mainland the foundations have been laid for even taller buildings. The most audacious plans are those for a 1128-meter-

high giant in Shanghai, designed by Spanish architects, and fifty stories have even been planned for the social housing scheme in Singapore. Yet the streets in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, or Shanghai are no wider than in Europe; in fact the buildings are even closer together, thus creating a phenomenal density. The mass of people streaming out of the Hong Kong high-rise buildings after work is so huge that tourists are often swept along with the flow until they manage to reach the safety of a hotel foyer. Arrows and mesh partitions in the subway entrances channel the masses. A special police unit for "crowd control" monitors important crossroads using video cameras, in order to avoid tragedies such as the one on New Year's Eve 1993, when twenty-two people were trampled to death just after midnight by people celebrating in the amusement quarter Lan Kwai Fong."

- Excerpt from the text written by Florien Hanig