Archive Digger

For as long as there have been cities, governments have embraced various schemes for urban planning, ranging from the imperial: Rome’s universal grid plan, to the practical: Manhattan, to the spiritual: Salt Lake City’s numbered grid centered on Temple Sqaure, to the militaristic: Florence’s star shaped defense against canon-fire.

But a city laid out like an animal?

The Peru’s ancient Nazca Lines  demonstrate  the human impulse to make giant animal shapes in the earth, but the government of southern Sudan has decided to go one step further: build cities in the shapes of animals:

An amusement park sits in the ear of a rhinoceros; a five-star hotel takes the place of its eye. Another city takes the awkward image of a giraffe, with a golf course on its chest and a sewage treatment plant on its tail.

The government of Southern Sudan this week unveiled urban blueprints to rebuild cities in the shape of animals, raising eyebrows across the globe.

The rationale behind these cities, in a one of the world’s poorest nations, has yet to be fully explained. Certainly it’s an attention grabbing move, but will it make for a livable urban environment?