Once the proud 150,000+ capital city of Azerbaijan this dense and thriving city was taken by the Armenians and utterly trashed, vandalized and then abandoned. However, the Armenians still claim the territory as their own so no one has returned to reclaim the wrecked and ravished ruins of the city. However, some explorers still make their way to photograph what is left of this city whose residents may never see it again.
Ağdam (also, Agdam and Aghdam) was a town in the southwestern part of Azerbaijan and the capital of its Agdam Rayon. In July 1993, after heavy fighting, Agdam was captured by the forces of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic during its 1993 summer offensives. As the town fell, its entire population fled eastwards. In the immediate aftermath of the fighting, the Armenian forces decided to destroy much of Agdam to prevent its recapture by Azerbaijan.[1] More damage occurred in the following decades when the deserted town was looted for building materials. Agdam is currently a ruinous, uninhabited ghost town.[2] The town’s large mosque also survives in bad condition.[3]
Top, a view of the earthquake-damaged city of Beichuan on May 12. Below, the view on Tuesday, after a controlled drainage operation flooded parts of the damaged city. Liu Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images - The New York Times
A sudden and devastating earthquake leveled or unbalanced virtually every major building in Beichuan, leaving thousands dead and tens of thousands displaced to public buildings in nearby cities. Due to the extent of the damage it is unclear whether this city will be rebuilt or simply left to go to ruin – its reconstruction would require the leveling of most or all of the buildings that remain from the disaster.
Rescuers carry a survivor from the rubble of a collapsed building in Yinghua town in southwest China's Sichuan province on Friday. http://www.msnbc.msn.com
More than 71,000 people are dead, missing or buried under rubble following the devastating earthquake that hit China’s Sichuan province. Click on the map to find out more about some of the worst-affected places.
BEICHUAN — The Beichuan county was flattened by the 7.8-magnitude Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan province on May 12 two years ago.
More than 80 percent of the county’s buildings, including the worst-hit Beichuan High School, collapsed, leaving more than 20,000 people homeless.
The entire county has been moved to Yongchang town about 23 km from the former quake site for reconstruction which began last year. The new county will make its debut in October.
BEIJING — Low-lying areas in one of the towns most devastated by the May 12 earthquake were flooded Tuesday as a torrent of water was released from a dangerous lake formed by landslides, dislodging wrecked homes, cars and corpses.
Beichuan was a town of 160,000 nestling in one of the world’s most beautiful valleys. When rescuers arrived yesterday, they found a scene of unimaginable devastation and despair
When the 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit southwest China on May 12, 2008, Beichuan county was among the hardest hit. Twenty thousand people died in that county alone. In the county seat, it’s believed half the population perished.
Thousands of bodies remain entombed in the rubble of Beichuan. The city is in a deep valley, with mountains on all sides. The force of the earthquake sheared off the sides of those mountains, and the landslides roared straight down onto the city.
The city of Beichuan is abandoned. A fence topped with concertina wire prevents entry. But the ruined city has become a tourist attraction anyway.
During the heat of conflict in World War II, a few informants told German troops that one of their own officers was being held in a nearby French town. What ensued was a terrible massacre that only spared a handful of men and women who managed to escape. Children and women were rounded up into a church and burned alive, men were shot in the legs to die slowly in a barn. Today, the remains of the old city still stand as a memorial to the events of that terrible day and the new commune of Oradour has been relocated to a nearby area.
A sad story lies beneath the remains of this sorry looking city. It all started during World War 2, when informants told German troops that one of their officers was being held hostage here.
This turned into a massacre where disturbing events took place, such as children and women were taken to the church and burned alive. The men were shot in the legs and left to die in a barn.
Amazingly a few men and women did actually manage to escape. As you can see in the picture above no one could possibly return – and who would want to?
The city has been left to stand as a memorial and landmark to the people that died on that tragic day. The commune of Oradour however was relocated to a nearby area.
The original village was destroyed on 10 June 1944, when 642 of its inhabitants, including women and children, were massacred by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site and the original has been maintained as a memorial.
Kowloon Walled City was a loophole, a glitch never meant to exist. It grew organically devoid of building codes and largely absent of legal oversight, a kind of organic tent city times one thousand. As it grew without rules some areas were cut off entirely from natural light and air, crime ebbed and flowed and everything grew densely packed until the government finally intervened – evacuating the city and demolishing what remained.
In January 1987, the Hong Kong government announced plans to demolish the Walled City. After an arduous eviction process, demolition began in March 1993 and was completed in April 1994. Kowloon Walled City Park opened in December 1995 and occupies the area of the former Walled City. Some historical artifacts from the Walled City, including its yamen building and remnants of its South Gate, have been preserved there.
Kowloon Walled City - The most dense human habitation in world history. Foto: SkyscraperPage Forum
The Kowloon Walled City was an urban «megablock» in Hong Kong, comprised of 500 buildings that housed approximately 50,000 residents. For decades, the walled city was the last vestige of Chinese territory in British Hong Kong before it was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War. After the Japanese deserted Kowloon, it became a hotbed for illegal activity and was the site forbrothels, casinos, opium dens, secret factories, unlicensed clinics and cocaine parlors.
Hak Nam, City of Darkness, the old Walled City of Kowloon was finally demolished ten years ago, in 1993, and to the end it retained its seedy magnificence. Rearing up abruptly in the heart of urban Hong Kong, 10, 12 and in some places as many as 14 storeys high, there was no mistaking it: an area 200 metres by 100 metres of solid building, home to some 35,000 people, not the largest, perhaps, but certainly one of the densest urban slums in the world. It was also, arguably, the closest thing to a truly self-regulating, self-sufficient, self-determining modern city that has ever been built.
The City in its final form went back barely 20 years. In origin, however, Kowloon City was much the oldest part of Hong Kong, and one of the few areas in the vicinity populated when the British first arrived in 1841 to claim Hong Kong Island and the southern-most tip of the Kowloon Peninsula for their own. It was a proper Chinese town, laid out with painstaking attention to eternal principles. The Chinese believed that a town should face south and overlook water with hills and mountains protecting its rear, and in these terms the City was very happily placed, with the great Lion Rock just to the north of it and Kowloon Bay immediately to the south.
Deserted Floating City of Oily Rocks. Foto: WebEcoist
Deserted Floating City of Oily Rocks, Azerbaijan
Off the coast of Azerbaijan sits what remains of one of the strangest organically-evolved cities in the world. Oily Rocks started with a single path out over the water, built on the backs of ships sunken to serve as foundations. This system of paths grew and evolve to serve the oil-drilling industry and eventually were widened to create space for houses, schools, libraries and shops for the workers and their families. Today, most of it sits abandoned and some paths and buildings have sunk back under the surf never to be seen again.
A Soviet Stamp commemorating Oily Rocks, the first off-shore oil project in the world. Azerbaijan International.
It was the stuff of legends, that night of November 7, 1949. Out there on the trestles hovering over the depths of the sea, nobody could sleep that night. If their calculations were correct, it would be the historical night everyone had been waiting for, the culmination of years of work. There, off the coast of Azerbaijan, would mark the first time oil had been recovered from depths in the sea.
And just as predicted, it happened. Oil was struck at a depth of 1,100 meters beneath the Caspian. And when that black, thick fountain started to pour forth, no one could contain their excitement and exuberance. Everyone rushed to feel it, to put their hands in it and smear it all over their arms and faces, hugging each other and shouting for joy. Their hard work had finally proved successful.
A new name was coined that night: no longer would the place be known as «Black Rocks.» The source of the «black» that passing ships had noted even a hundred years earlier, had finally been confirmed. Henceforth, it would be called «Oily Rocks» (Neft Dashlari).
Members of that first expeditionary team often used to recall that night that took place nearly 50 years ago. The group was led by Aghagurban Aliyev, a geologist and Yusif Safarov, Deputy Head of the Exploration Drilling Trust, who was responsible for determining exactly where they should drill. Mikhail Kavyorochkin headed up the Exploration Drilling Trust.
Neft Daşları (also, Neftyanyye Kamni and Nerftekamni; in English, Oil Rocks) is a settlement in Baku, Azerbaijan. The settlement forms part of the municipality of Çilov-Neft Daşları in Əzizbəyov raion.[2]
The Oil Rocks Drilling Platform is located in Neft Daşları. A full town on the sea, it was the first oil platform in Azerbaijan. It was built in 1947 as an exercise of Soviet and Azeri ambition. The Oil Rocks lies 45–50 km (28–31 mi) offshore on the Caspian Sea and extracts oil from the shallow water portion of the Absheron geological trend. The most distinctive feature of the Oil Rocks is that it is actually a functional city with a population of about 5,000 and over 200 km (120 mi) of streets built on piles of dirt and landfill. Most of the inhabitants work on shifts; a week on Oil Rocks followed by a week on the shore. The small city includes shops, school and a library. After almost 60 years the Oil Rocks is still quite unusual as Azerbaijan’s first and largest oil platform.
Once the pearl of Azerbaijan’s industry, the Oily Rocks rig teeters on the brink of ruin — even as the region ushers in a coming oil boom. Is there a future for the world’s oldest drilling platform, and for its workers?Marcel Theroux reports from the Caspian Sea.
BAKU, Azerbaijan — The men from Pennzoil refuse to say they got burned in Azerbaijan, but they do concede that doing business there is a long haul.
«Business is not a sprint here, it’s a marathon,» said Paul Justice, Pennzoil’s vice president for public affairs.
The Houston-based company now has a 10 percent stake in the international consortium exploiting three Caspian Sea oil fields. But they have also been involved in a natural gas project that has run less smoothly. The project is now up and running, but Pennzoil has not yet been paid the $150 million it is owed for it.
El Consejo de Gobierno de la Comunidad de Madrid ha aprobado la ‘Operación Chamartín’, con lo que el plan urbanístico para construir una ‘city’ financiera en la capital ha salvado su último escollo. La operación incluye la construcción de 16.000 viviendas, 4.000 de las cuales serán protegidas, y la edificación de torres de oficinas para 68.000 trabajadores. La nueva ciudad estará lista en 2021, si se cumple la previsión de ejecución en 15 años.
El Ayuntamiento y Fomento ya firmaron el acuerdo la pasada semana.
La Comunidad temía que el tráfico colapsara la zona norte.
También han aprobado el decreto que regula la profesión de porteros.
SE AMPLIARÁ LA ESTACIÓN Y SE CERRARÁ LA M-30 NORTE La ‘operación Chamartín’ incluye 16.000 viviendas, 4.000 de ellas protegidas
* Este ambicioso proyecto consolida un distrito financiero
* El Ayuntamiento cerrará la M-30 con la construcción del by-pass Norte
* Fomento remodelará la estación de Chamartín
39°59′35″N 46°55′50″E
Azerbaijan
Arquitectonico 
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