It looks quite impressive and futuristic on first glance — a hotel that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star from the Star Wars films. Remarkably, however, the hotel will not be built in Las Vegas or Dubai. It is instead planned for Baku, capital of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Fan IQ thinks that the project is an attempt to increase Baku’s chances of hosting the 2016 Olympic Games, and if so, the sports blog believes it might just have succeeded.

So although the 2016 Games are a long way off, if you’re a city that wants to host them, you better get your act together.

Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, officially has it’s #$%@ together. They’re in the intense running for the 2016 Games - which will be announced next year - and I think they just took the lead.

How so?

Well, my friends, they’re going to build a hotel based off of the Death Star from Star Wars for the Games.

The full post is available on Global Voices Online.

As Komitas grinds to a halt because of ill-devised road works and other municipal “development” all underway at the same time despite the disruption it causes, Zarchka at Life Around Me reports that construction in another part of the city has now been stopped. The reason? Well, plans to build an underpass under a road in the center hit a snag. Quite a big one, actually. More precisely, the Yerevan Metro.

This is kind of a continuation to the post on Oneworld Multimedia blog about the construction mess in Yerevan and alleged money being spent on digging deep needless holes as if for constructing subways, although the rumor has it that “…the construction is being done now so that the authorities can spend as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time and siphon off much of it…”

However, this allegation may turn out to be true especially when the huge hole dug along Khanjyan street at Khanjyan and Tigran Mets intersection is now filled back.

What I got from talking to some people, no subway will be constructed there as one of the reasons I was told was that only after digging deep into it they found out that the metro passes under that area!

Almost funny, if it weren’t that sad. How on earth could they not take into consideration the fact that they might stumble upon the underground, especially when by simple logics one may presume that the line from Hanrapetutyan Hraparak to Zoravar Andranik stations should pass right under that area!!?? Didn’t they bother to shoot a glance at the metro map before starting their destruction??!!

If that’s not the case, then I wonder, what is a logical explanation for laying a double layered asphalt along Khanjyan street, then digging it deep, then filling it back??

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From time to time fellow blogger Garo (aka Christian Garbis) at Notes from Hairenik and I joke with each other that nothing can surprise us anymore. We’re used to such stupidity or the unexpected in a country that pretty much anything is possible even if it defies all common sense and logic. This also extends to the insane amount of construction under way in the city and the fact that it is all being undertaken at the same time even if it creates only anarchy and chaos on the roads and at times can be life threatening.

One rumor going around is that the construction is being done now so that the authorities can spend as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time and siphon off much of it as has always been the case even during the Soviet era. The Mayor’s name has specifically been mentioned, and to be honest, there seems to be no other logical reason for why Yerevan has become a dust bowl and the scene of so much construction work that it can be virtually impossible to travel in the city.

Yes, I know, such rumors even from seasoned and well-respected analysts and journalists are only just that, but what can you think when you come across stories such as the one carried by A1 Plus today?

Cars and gazelles ascending the stairs near Vardan Mamikonyan’s statue are at the peril of turning upside down. Because of the current construction, drivers had to pass around the pavement to get to the destination in time. The pavement is presently closed down, so they have to ascend the nearby staircase.

Ludicrous. Absolutely plain stupid and one that can only surprise even in a county full of idiotic urban planning and municipal development decisions. You have to look at the story if only for the photos and video. This city is controlled and run by retards and imbeciles. Unfortunately, one response to this story from a friend was simply that city is also inhabited by idiots too. The roads are certainly full of them.

Following the collapse of a high-rise building in Baku, Carpetblogger has an interesting post quoting from an interview with Soyun Sadikhov by the Russian Trend News Agency on the construction boom in Azerbaijan’s capital. Well, I say interesting, but perhaps I should say alarming — and not least because the same issue probably apply to Yerevan as well where similar criticisms have already been voiced about the largely corruption-driven development downtown.

When a construction boom began in Baku, when I saw the process of this construction and the specialists engaged in this, I understood and relayed my fears that this type of construction has no future. That is a real communal grave….I saw that they made use of very low-quality reinforcements. The reinforcements being used in Baku absolutely do not correspond with the seismic conditions of Baku. […]

[…]

You know, I very often visit Baku and observe the ongoing changes. As for this mass and low-quality construction, I have said it many times and I still insist that a huge communal grave is being built in Baku. Baku city is being built without a general plan, and without expertise. In the chase for money and profits people forget to think of how people will live in these buildings.

How can one construct a skyscraper without taking into consideration services issues?! A lot of buildings are being constructed in the center of the city, but there are no new services. Nobody deals with construction of new sewerage, drainage, or water-supply systems. At a location, where previously a five-story building containing 100 families built during the USSR stood, now a twenty-two-story building is being constructed, but all the services remain the same. That is absurd. Is it so difficult to understand that a new building means many more dwellers, so new larger sewerage pipes and drainage is required? One cannot construct buildings without preliminary reconstruction of services.

[…]

Again I want to say that the guilt of this irresponsibility lies with the construction companies and their heads, employing such pseudo-labourers. Greed and cupidity of construction organizations, officials, investors financing such construction is what now happens in Azerbaijan. Such construction should be immediately stopped and measures should be taken to prevent the construction of communal graves for Baku residents. It would be better to construct less but with high quality.

The full post is here.

The construction boom has hit the capitals of all three Republics of the South Caucasus, and each country, although to a lesser extent in Georgia, significant concerns have been raised regarding the entire process in what is often corruption-driven urban development. In Yerevan, for example, architects, seismologists and environmentalists are deeply upset by the anarchic construction of the new Northern Avenue which many allege breaches the law, construction standards as well as human rights.

In May 2005, one person died on the controversial Yerevan construction site, and the BBC today reports that a high-rise building under construction in Baku, capital of the Republic of Azerbaijan, has collapsed. Workers on the construction site have died.

Baku city prosecutor Aziz Seidov told reporters that initial evidence pointed to shoddy construction work as the cause of the collapse.

High-rise buildings are springing up across the Azeri capital, thanks to a construction boom fuelled by the oil industry.

Local media have said that much of the construction is of a poor and in violation of safety standards.

They also say developers bypass building regulations by bribing corrupt officials.

Baku mayor Hajibala Abutalybov told the Reuters news agency the building that collapsed was being built without official permission.

The head of the construction company and another company executive have been arrested, Prosecutor-General Zakir Qaralov told the Associated Press news agency.

In what is an incident that should raise concerns here in Yerevan, where I doubt buildings are built to any higher standards than in Baku and where construction is also often illegal, Ria Novosti reports that the death toll now stands at 14. It goes without saying that the accident in Azerbaijan should result in actions against similarly sub-standard constructions in Armenia.

Environmental Protest Action, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

Yesterday saw another environmental protest held in Yerevan. Actually, although they are staged from time to time, they’re not so frequent it has to be said — probably because few people here actually think about such things. Despite respiratory problems and air pollution being on the rise, the number of green areas in the capital continues to decline usually to make room for some monstrosity of a building or cafe belonging to a corrupt government official, their relatives or business partners.

The announcement of the protest, which I posted on Wednesday, read as follows:

We are against all the actions which cause ecological disaster in our city. The greediness of our “elite” is beyond measure. The construction business has purposefully destroyed the green areas and the historical and cultural monuments of the city for the latest decade, turning it into an asphalt-concrete desert.

Yerevan residents intensely struggle for the green areas near the houses, yet women and children face the attacks of the police and other armed forces.

It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. Emergence of a huge foundation pit for construction in Opera garden by the Swan Lake became culmination of negligence and arbitrariness toward the ecological and cultural environment and toward public opinion.

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Komitas, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

You read about it first in the blogosphere here, here, here, and here, and now the mainstream media is starting to cover what many consider to be the anarchic, ill-thought out and incompetent attempt to redevelop Yerevan and ease some of the traffic congestion that has made living in in Yerevan something of a nightmare for pedestrian and motorist alike. Armenia Now backs up these concerns by reporting that there are environmental concerns about how the construction work is being carried out as well.

Although the zoning plan for Yerevan’s Kentron (central) community is still under discussion, it has already got off the drawing board causing an uproar among experts.

“The zoning plan for city center is being implemented with violation, since work began before the plan was approved. Even if it was the best tree-planting project for the center, all the same it was to have been gotten underway only after approval,” Sona Ayvazyan, an environmental expert for Transparency International Armenia, says.

[…]

Yerevan Project Institute Director Gurgen Musheghyan tries to give an answer to the issues raised by the environmentalists. He says this way a whole free area will be spared.

“The number of cars has increased in Yerevan so much today that traffic is in a paralyzed state, people stand in traffic congestions for hours. Taking into account these problems, we have decided to put the river Getar flowing through one of the city’s central thoroughfares, Khanjyan street, into a tube in order to broaden the street and allow the freed space to be used,” Musheghyan explains, angering environmentalists even further.

“There is no country where a natural structure, a river, would be shut in order to lay a transport route. Furthermore, now they envisage putting the polluted water of the Getar into tubes. And it is simply inadmissible to put polluted water not having contact with air into a closed space, taking into account the fact that the Getar was not only a water facility, but also vegetation and verdure,” says Environment Legal Protection Center chairwoman Aida Iskoyan.

According to Iskoyan, a traffic regulation program could have been developed without the proposed plan.

Khazhak Drampyan, who was Armenia’s motor transport minister in the Soviet times, also criticizes the tactics of the city authorities.

“Almost in all European countries minibuses are replaced by other means of public transportation, such as tram, bus. The number of underground stations is increased in order to keep air pollution low and relieve the traffic on the roads. But the opposite is being done in Yerevan today, since the owners of minibus services are from within the authorities and have handsome profits from their operation,” Drampyan says.

[…]

Independent experts, however, think that expecting such results in condition of widespread unauthorized construction is, to put it mildly, unrealistic.

“We do not see the mechanisms for the realization either of the master plan or the project. If our local authorities were able to manage the city properly, then today there wouldn’t be cafes at the expense of green areas. And what is happening at the crossroads of Khanjyan and Tigran Mets streets today? In the hottest spots of the city several subway passages are being dug at a time, turning traffic into a real nightmare, in the case when everything could have been done with proper calculation,” Armenian Botanical Association Chairwoman Marina Oganesova says.

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Komitas, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

Just came back after popping out for 10 minutes to take some more photos in the immediate vicinity of where I live and as you can imagine, the situation is even more chaotic when there are pedestrians, motorists and construction workers around. One day I hope they’ll get all of this finished. Two years of chaos and unordered construction work is really too much and I can’t say that I’ve seen any improvement in roads or other forms of local infrastructure as a result.

I’m sure work needs to be done, but it should also be with some proper coordination, safety measures and alternate routes in place first. Besides, they already dug up most of the intersection opposite the HSBC Komitas bank and after completing that a few months ago they’re now doing it again. It’s also worth pointing out that this area is hardly illuminated at night and it’s potentially lethal for traffic even as it stands in the daylight.

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Komitas, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2007

After chatting with Garo (aka Christian Garbis) from Notes from Hairenik last night about traffic congestion in Yerevan and the haphazard and sloppy manner in which road and other repairs are undertaken here I decided to photograph the streets on my way first to the bank near where I live at the beginning of Komitas and the supermarket at the bottom of Kassian. Both are my local neighborhood, and perhaps sloppy isn’t the right word. Negligence by those doing the construction work is probably more to the point.

Open manhole covers as well as building materials and debris left lying around have made a three or four minute journey a safety hazard for pedestrians and motorists alike. It used to be that inhabitants could rightly say that the roads in Yerevan were far better than in Tbilisi, capital of the neighboring Republic of Georgia, but that now appears to be no longer the case from my experience from three visits there in the past year and a half.

[Note: this post was just truncated by Wordpress because of perpetual problems with the lousy internet connection here. I probably won’t find the time to add what’s now missing, but the rest of the photos have now been restored].

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