#infrastructure project

[sheltiechicago]

European Route E39: Norway’s Coastal Highway

Norway’s European Route E39 is the country’s biggest infrastructure project in its history. Estimated to cost around 50 billion dollars, this coastal highway will connect two sides of Norway and Denmark in a unique fashion. The road consists of underground tunnels, bridges over the sea, and multiple destinations. It is 1,330 km long and one of the longest single roads in the world as well. The project started in 2018 and is still continuing with solid progress. Although one end of the bridge will be in Denmark, the road is fully under the responsibility of the Norwegian Road Administration. The Administration is both constructing the road and the main component in the road’s maintenance.

Norwegian Public Roads Administration

Vianova

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"LES APPROCHES DU TUNNEL WELLINGTON," Le Petit Journal. June 11, 1933. Page 20. ----- Des membres du Comité exécutif ont visité mercredi dernier les approches du tunnel de la rue Wellington passant sous le canal Lachine, afin de se rendre compte s'il serait possible d'élargir la rue Murray du côté nord. Cela permettrait aux tramways de pénétrer dans le tunnel, sans qu'on soit obligé d'exproprier les rues Smith et Colborne sur une largeur de 80 pieds, et au coût énorme d'un million de dollars. Apparemment, on pourrait enlever la bâtisse (indiquée par une flèche à droite) située en face de l'entrée du tunnel (flèche à gauche) et décongestionner la circulation intense et dangereuse qui s'accomplit à cet endroit. Ce difficile problème n'est pas entièrement ... On voit dans notre gravure du ...examiner le tunnel. De des Services de la ville: O'Connell....Josn.... J.E. Blanchard, Lionel Bell et Alf. Legault. (Photo "Petit Journal")

[nepalenergyforum]

Government Allocates Rs 4 Billion for Bheri Corridor Development

The Finance Ministry has allocated Rs 4.20 billion for upgrading the Bheri Corridor, a key infrastructure project in Karnali Province. The budget will fund upgrades along the corridor from Tallu in Nalgad Municipality-12 to Tripurakot in Dolpa. Member of the House of Representatives and former Minister for Urban Development, Dhan Bahadur Budha, revealed that the Ministry of Physical…

[maxwellgeosystems]

The Ultimate Tool for Infrastructure Project Management

MissionOS transforms infrastructure project management with advanced technology and user-focused tools. Designed for complex projects like tunneling, railways, and highways, it combines real-time data monitoring, BIM integration, IoT compatibility, and GIS modeling to streamline workflows and improve collaboration. Gain actionable insights with advanced analytics and predictive tools, enabling better decision-making and proactive issue resolution. MissionOS supports quality control, risk management, and compliance, ensuring projects stay on track and within budget. Whether you're managing large-scale construction or critical infrastructure upgrades, MissionOS is your all-in-one solution for success.

[houboltroadextension]

Bridge in Illinois 

Discover the Houbolt Road Extension Bridge in Illinois, a vital infrastructure project improving transportation efficiency and enhancing access to global logistics. Learn how this toll bridge connects Joliet's I-80 to the CenterPoint Intermodal Center, supporting economic growth and reducing congestion. 

[townpostin]

Dhalbhumgarh Airport Clearance on Advisory Panel's Agenda in Aug 27 Meeting

Key Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (Forest Conservation Division) meeting to discuss forest land diversion for crucial infrastructure project Environmental committee to weigh Dhalbhumgarh Airport’s forest clearance, potentially advancing regional development aspirations. JAMSHEDPUR – A pivotal Forest Advisory Committee meeting, scheduled for August 27, is set to deliberate on…

[arcadebroke]

[fatehbaz]

"The most fashionable bathing station in all Europe". British industrialists and American mining investors plotting the colonization of the Congo, while mingling at Ostend's seaside vacation resorts. Extracting African life to build European railways, hotels, palaces, suburbs, and other modern(ist) infrastructure. "Towards infinity!"

---

In 1885, King Leopold II achieved an astonishing and improbable goal: he claimed a vast new realm of his own devising, a conjury on a map called [...] the Congo Free State. [...] [A] fictional state owned by the king, ruled by decree, and run from Brussels from 1885 to 1908. [...] This was [...] a private entrepreneurial venture [for the king]. The abundance of ivory, timber, and wild rubber found in this enormous territory brought sudden and spectacular profits to Belgium, the king, and a web of interlocking concession companies. The frenzy to amass these precious resources unleashed a regime of forced labor, violence [millions of deaths], and unchecked atrocities for Congolese people. These same two and a half decades of contact with the Congo Free State remade Belgium [...] into a global powerhouse, vitalized by an economic boom, architectural burst, and imperial surge.

Congo profits supplied King Leopold II with funds for a series of monumental building projects [...]. Indeed, Belgian Art Nouveau exploded after 1895, created from Congolese raw materials and inspired by Congolese motifs. Contemporaries called it “Style Congo,” [...]. The inventory of this royal architecture is astonishing [...]. [H]istorical research [...] recovers Leopold’s formative ideas of architecture as power, his unrelenting efforts to implement them [...]. King Leopold II harbored lifelong ambitions to “embellish” and beautify the nation [...]. [W]ith his personal treasury flush with Congo revenue, [...] Leopold - now the Roi Batisseur ("Builder King") he long aimed to be - planned renovations explicitly designed to outdo Louis XIV's Versailles. Enormous greenhouses contained flora from every corner of the globe, with a dedicated soaring structure completed specifically to house the oversize palms of the Congolese jungles. [...]

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The Tervuren Congo palace [...]. Electric tramways were built and a wide swath of avenue emerged. [...] [In and around Brussels] real estate developers began to break up lots [...] for suburban mansions and gardens. Between 1902 and 1910, new neighborhoods with luxury homes appeared along the Avenue [...]. By 1892, Antwerp was not only the port of call for trade but also the headquarters of the most profitable of an interlinking set of banks and Congo investment companies [...]. As Antwerp in the 1890s became once again the “Queen of the Scheldt,” the city was also the home of what was referred to as the “Queen of Congo companies.” This was the ABIR, or Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, founded in 1892 with funds from British businessman “Colonel” John Thomas North [...].

Set on the seaside coast, Belgium’s Ostend was the third imperial cityscape to be remade by King Leopold [...] [in a] transformation [that] was concentrated between 1899 and 1905 [...]. Ostend encompassed a boomtown not of harbor and trade, like Antwerp, but of beachfront and leisure [...] [developed] as a "British-style" seaside resort. [...] Leopold [...] [w]as said to spend "as much time in Ostend as he did in Brussels," [...]. Ostend underwent a dramatic population expansion in a short period, tripling its inhabitants from 1870–1900. [...] Networks of steamers, trams, and railway lines coordinated to bring seasonal visitors in, and hotels and paved walkways were completed. [...] [A]nd Leopold’s favorite spot, the 1883 state-of-the-art racetracks, the Wellington Hippodrome. Referred to with an eye-wink as “the king incognito” (generating an entire genre of photography), visitors to the seaside could often see Leopold in his top hat and summer suit [...], riding his customized three-wheeled bicycle [...]. By 1900, Ostend’s expansion and enhancement made it known as “the Queen of the Belgian seaside resorts” and “the most fashionable bathing station in all Europe.” Opulence, convenience, and spectacle brought the Shah of Persia, American tycoons, European aristocrats, and Belgian elites, among others, to Ostend.

---

Leopold’s interventions and the Congo Free State personnel and proceeds played three pivotal and understudied roles in this transformation, all of which involved ABIR [British industrialists].

First, it was at Ostend that an early and decisive action was taken to structure the “red rubber” regime and set it in motion. In 1892, jurists such as [E.P.] had ruled, contravening [...] trade laws, that the king was entitled to claim the Congo as his domanial property [...]. Leopold [...] devised one part of that royal domain as a zone for private company concessions [...] to extract and export wild rubber.

Soon after, in 1892, King Leopold happened to meet the British “Colonel” John Thomas North at the Ostend Hippodrome. North, a Leeds-born mechanic [...] had made a fortune speculating on Chilean nitrates in the 1880s. He owned monopoly shares in nitrate mines and quickly expanded to acquire monopolies in Chilean freight railways, water supplies, and iron and coal mines. By 1890 North was a high-society socialite worth millions [...]. Leopold approached North at the Ostend racecourse to provide the initial investments to set up the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company (ABIR). [...]

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One visible sign of Ostend’s little-known character as Congo boomtown was the Royal Palace Hotel, a lavish property next to the king’s Royal Domain, which opened in 1899. With hundreds of rooms and a broad sweep of acreage along the beachfront, the palace “occupied the largest space of any hotel in Europe.” [...]

King Leopold met American mining magnate Thomas Walsh there, and as with North, the meeting proved beneficial for his Congo enterprise: Leopold enlisted Walsh to provide assessments of some of his own Congo mining prospects. The hotel was part of [...] [a major European association of leisure profiteers] founded in 1894, that began to bundle luxury tourism and dedicated railway travel, and whose major investors were King Leopold, Colonel North [...].

At the height of Congo expansionism, fin-de-siècle Antwerp embodied an exhilarated launch point [...]. Explorers and expeditioners set sail for Matadi after 1887 with the rallying call “Vers l’infini!” (“towards infinity!”) [...].

---

Text above by: Debora Silverman. "Empire as Architecture: Monumental Cities the Congo Built in Belgium". e-flux Architecture (Appropriations series). May 2024. At: e-flux.com/architecture/appropriations/608151/empire-as-architecture-monumental-cities-the-congo-built-in-belgium/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post was added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[actual-lea]

My niche Severance headcanon of the day (as mentioned briefly in Black Mile) is that several years ago, Gemma had a short but intense cycling phase that she dragged Mark along for.

[aroaceleovaldez]

You've talked about the pjo fandom's lack of fandom infrastructure a lot, what I want to ask is: why do you think the pjo fandom has so little?

I've seen other much smaller fandoms that have just developed infrastructure as the years go on but pjo feels like it's stayed quite stagnant in that regard. I would've thought that with pjo being so big there'd be a lot more than there is. Did we have a lot then we lost it along the way or did we just not develop it that much?

We definitely used to have way more! In my infrastructure list there's a LOT of old infrastructure blogs from back in the day. There's definitely more than what's on that list, but a lot of those blogs have been deactivated or otherwise lost. I've also talked a bit like [here] about some of the old stuff the fandom used to regularly have, like events that no longer run, common tag games and other community habits, etc. We also used to have more zines and other collaborative projects. These just don't happen nearly as often in our community anymore, because the people running them stopped being able to and nobody was able to pick them up and they were forgotten.

I mostly attribute this change to new fandom attitudes and the loss of community. Back in the day I feel like one of the most influential things to the fandom environment was how a lot of younger fans often looked to big-name-fans for how they should behave and navigate fandom spaces. A lot of people are familiar with the old "big 3" fanartists of the day - Viria, Burdge, and Minuiko - but what a lot of people don't remember is they used to trade art back and forth all the time! And with other artists/fans in the community! They were all just genuinely friends and so much collaboration happened between them! That's how we got a lot of the old big AUs and concepts in the fandom because people loved sharing those and collaborating. And because a lot of young folks often mirror the people they look up to in communities, younger fans were mimicking that behavior and there was a lot of exchange and communication and community happening in the fandom at the time. That behavior was demonstrated, replicated, and encouraged!

And young fans mirroring BNFs they look up to is still absolutely a thing! You can see this all the time if you just take a quick glance at fanart - how many character designs are clearly influenced from large artists in the fandom? Insert every Piper with Velinxi heart-shaped cowlicks here. But because there's a lot of ideas now about curating online presences as if it's a business (or literally turning it into a business) or outputting "content" we see a lot less of people - particularly larger fans in the community - vocally interacting with other fans. Everything feels very sanitized and polished and impersonal. There's way less exchange between fans now, or at least way less vocally.

And this is also pushed by general "new/passive fandom" culture as i generally refer to it, where there's so much more emphasis on consumption and "content" versus community (and again, that idea of curating socials like a business/brand). When everything kind of shifted with the like 2016-2018 adult content bans and everybody was moving around between platforms, folks lost a lot of means of learning about fandom history and their communities and how those communities looked. A lot of fans - including now older fans - have never known that fandom is supposed to be a community, and so now we have the older fans in the community with this very content-oriented presentation of fandom that is how fandom is generally advertised in mainstream media, because that's how they learned about it and how new fans are learning about it. They have no easy means to learn fandom history and nobody to mirror appropriate social fandom behavior from (which is also what i attribute to why so many fandoms have become "more toxic" or rude in recent years - especially with quarantine meaning a lot of young folks lost irl means of learning to mirror appropriate social behavior).

In smaller and newer fandoms, communities form easier and if they're the groundwork for the fandom it will persist and self-perpetuate most of the time. In general if a fandom is able to maintain that community aspect, it usually does just fine! (As per usual I point to the furry fandom as a great example of an older fandom with good infrastructure and community.) This is why I like to harp on about building community and reinstating these types of environments and blogs and such, and generally discussing the fandom's history as much as I can and remember it. People can't fix problems they don't understand or things they don't know about, so making that information as accessible as possible and encouraging these things is important.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"FEAR COAL FAMINE; TRACTION COMPANY TO RESORT TO OIL," Vancouver Sun. October 9, 1912. Page 3. --- B. C. Electric Applies to City for Permission to Install Auxiliary Tanks on Main Street. --- MATTER IS URGENT, SAYS REPRESENTATIVE ---- Trouble Over the Connection of the Burnaby Line at Commercial Drive ---- Bearing out the reports printed exclusively in The Sun as to the possibility of a coal shortage in Vancouver unless a settlement be soon effected with the striking coal miners on Vancouver Island, the British Columbia Electric yesterday took action that indicates a fear that there will be a coal famine within the next few weeks which will seriously cripple their service. To meet this condition they petitioned the board of works for leave to lay a temporary siding on Union street, on which they could place oil tanks to supply their bollers with a portion of the fuel they require.

In a letter to the board Chief Engineer Conway of the B. C. Electric pointed out that if there was shortage of coal it would be absolutely necessary that they have some other means of keeping their boilers going.

City Engineer Fellowes was in sympathy with the request of the company, but the members of the committee refused to allow unprotected oil tanks on the street.

Might Burn False Creek. Ald. Baxter pointed out that if they should catch fire, the whole bed of False Creek would be in a blaze within a brief interval and half the property along the shore be destroyed.

A representative of the company who was present declared that the matter was urgent. The company wanted the tanks within the next week or fortnight, and could not wait to put in permanent tanks, as certain members of the committee proposed they should.

It was eventually decided that the company should be allowed to put in underground tanks, which would com- ply with the regulations of the Under- writers' association. The privilege is, however, only given for six months, and the tanks have to be so placed as not to interfere in any way with the traffic on the street.

B. C. E. Up Against It. Apparently the B. C. Electric company is up against it in the matter of making connections between the Burnaby line and the city service at Commercial drive.

Three years ago council gave the company permission to make a temporary connection, and now the B. C. E. want it to be made permanent. In a letter to the board of works they stated that an order for the connection had been made by the railway commission, but as the railway commission's jurisdiction ceases at the end of the Burnaby line's private right-of-way, it was evident, and the board satisfied itself that there was and could be no order regarding the Commercial drive connection.

Some of the members of the committee wished to give the company peremptory notice to take their curve out, but better counsels prevailed and finally it was decided that the engineer be asked to write and ascertain just what the company proposes to do. The feeling of the committee is that the company should find some other means of connection with the city.

Street Is Impassable. A deputation from Commercial drive asked the council to have the street made passable as soon as possible. They said that on their part of the street there were twenty-two stores vacated, simply because there was no access to them.

The city engineer placed the blame partly on the Bitulithic company. which has the contract for paving the street, and partly on the fact that material had to be found for other streets, where pavement had been begun first.

Several members of the deputation stated that the sidewalk facilities were even worse than the roadway. Many buildings have to be moved back, and in places there is not room for people to get into the shops. The matter will be taken up a once by the proper officials and all the relief possible given.

It will be two months, according to Chief Engineer Fellowes, before connection can be made between the sewerage system of Point Grey and that of Vancouver.

[soulless-bex]

demigods are a bunch of preteens with adhd who climb a wall of lava for fun over the summer. their sense of danger is very, very skewed

my point is, there should be more instance of demigods doing stupid shit while out in the mortal world (on non-quest instances)

[fluviusevos]

leftists online love doing this thing where they automatically default to china good 👍 usa bad 👎 after beginning to recognise us propaganda... but without any of the recognition of china as a just as insanely capitalist fueled nationalist landscape involved in insanely successful neo-colonialist movements in the global south and caribbean. like their inability to see nonusamericans of colour as people (but rather as props for their own political values) seeps into their perception of viewing non-us politics as synonymous with non-us ethnicity and race so within attempting to unlearn the sinophobia they've encountered within us sociopolitics, considering how removed they actually are from viewing the country and its people as anything other than opposition to the us they can look to in rebellion, they just end up putting chinese politics on a pedestal

[rouge-fauna]

Today on Transportation Engineering: best sidewalk ever

Honestly, I can’t decide which is dumber, the utility polls going in after the sidewalk or the sidewalk being put in around the existing polls…

[stone-cold-groove]

Construction of the Greater New Orleans (GNO) Bridge over the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana - 1954 to 1958.