Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • Streets crowded with rickshaws in the pilgrimage city of Varanasi.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7890_1386445.TIF
  • Women panning for gold in the dust of streets full of garbage.
    MM7339_20070918_01548.tif
  • Rickshaws, bicycles and motorcycles crowd the streets in Varanasi.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7890_1386449.TIF
  • Women panning for gold in the dust of streets full of garbage.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7339_1198343.TIF
  • Street scene in Nairobi at corner of Kenyatta and Kimathi in the city center.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8259_2327891.JPG
  • Piles of trash line the streets in the Philippines.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702718.JPG
  • Piles of trash line the streets in the Philippines.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702632.JPG
  • Piles of trash line the streets in the Philippines.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702631.JPG
  • Piles of trash line the streets in the Philippines.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702616.JPG
  • Men sitting outside a shop on a street known for wedding attire. Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who move to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at 120 million (approximately 9% of the population). China is now experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history. An estimated 230 million Chinese (2010), roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year—an expected 250 million by 2012, and 300 to perhaps 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176322.TIF
  • The need for electrical power is so great in Shanghai that migrant workers are hired to hook them up by strapping a high voltage wire around their waist and pulling it across an already stressed grid by walking on the actual wires that bring the electricity.  There is a (dirty) coal power plant coming online every four to five days in China that could power a city the size of San Diego. Energy is wasted on an epic scale. One hundred cities with populations over 1 million faced extreme water shortages last year. China’s survival has always been built on the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible center. Thus, China has poor foundations on which to build the subtle network of institutions and accountability necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. The lack of independent scrutiny and accountability lies behind the massive waste in the Chinese government and destruction of the environment. Air pollution contributed by these plants kills 400,000 people prematurely every year.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176327.TIF
  • A woman talking on a cell phone on a city street at night.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176567.JPG
  • BBoy dancers stop traffic with their acrobatic moves on a city street in Old Quito. Hip hop is popular with young people in Ecuador, and these guys are members of a dance troupe that performs around the city.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_2512512.jpg
  • Morning sunlight reflections dapple W. Adams Street near Berghoff restaurant.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345833.jpg
  • Restored homes grace a street in the old Wicker Park neighborhood.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345819.jpg
  • State Street and the Chicago Theatre on a rainy night.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345813.jpg
  • Elevated view of Main Street with cars, pedestrians, and buildings.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7140_751011.JPG
  • These plastic flowers from China are in a street market in Mumbai. Plastic from the Dharavi slums goes to China as pellets and comes back as flowers.<br />
<br />
The Dharavi slum was founded in 1882 during the British colonial era, and grew in part because of an expulsion of factories and residents from the peninsular city centre by the colonial government, and from the migration of poor rural Indians into urban Mumbai.<br />
<br />
Dharavi has an active informal economy in which numerous household enterprises employ many of the residents.
    MM8515_20171118_17610.tif
  • Workers repair electrical power lines above pedestrians. The need for electrical power is so great in Shanghai that migrant workers are hired to hook them up by strapping a high voltage wire around their waist and pull it across an already stressed net by walking on the actual wires that bring the electricity.  There is a (dirty) coal power plant coming online every four to five days in China that could power a city the size of San Diego. Energy is wasted on an epic scale. One hundred cities with populations over 1 million faced extreme water shortages last year. China’s survival has always been built on the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible center. Thus, China has poor foundations on which to build the subtle network of institutions and accountability necessary to manage the complexities of a modern economy and society. The lack of independent scrutiny and accountability lies behind the massive waste in the Chinese government and destruction of the environment. Air pollution contributed by these plants kills 400,000 people prematurely every year.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176331.TIF
  • A transgender prostitute works with other sex workers in the Colonial district of Quito.  Sex workers have a designated leader who speaks out for them with the Office of Social Inclusion for the city. They are issued official identification cards, part of the city's attempt to organize sex workers and to improve their working conditions.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_2512382-1.JPG
  • A transgender prostitute works with other sex workers in the Colonial district of Quito.  Sex workers have a designated leader who speaks out for them with the Office of Social Inclusion for the city. They are issued official identification cards, part of the city's attempt to organize sex workers and to improve their working conditions.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_2512382-2.JPG
  • Marriage is different in China, from mass weddings like this, to the “bare branches” phenomenon where there are not enough women for all the men to marry. Couples aspire to the ideal of the billboard above them—the one-child family. But will their son be able to find a girl? According to the 2010 census, there were 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls, which is 0.53 points lower than the ratio obtained from a population sample survey carried out in 2005. However, the gender ratio of 118.06 is still beyond the normal range of around 105 percent, and experts warn of increased social instability should this trend continue. For the population born between 1900 and 2000, it is estimated that there could be 35.59 million fewer females than males. So maybe everyone eventually has a car, but can every boy have a girl? It is important for China’s leaders to placate the Comfort Class. From issues of grave consequence to trivialities, the government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. In Beijing, for example, newly prosperous residents are snapping up automobiles at a rate of 1,000 a day. The number of vehicles on the capital’s sclerotic roads has doubled in the past five years, to 3 million, or about a million more vehicles than in all of New York City.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176370.TIF
  • A transgender prostitute works with other sex workers in the Colonial district of Quito.  Sex workers have a designated leader who speaks out for them with the Office of Social Inclusion for the city. They are issued official identification cards, part of the city's attempt to organize sex workers and to improve their working conditions.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_2512382.jpg
  • A rainy night in Chicago on State Street.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345824.jpg
  • Migrant workers with jobs as moving men, play on the street outside an office building.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176454.JPG
  • A young woman talking on a cell phone on a street at night.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176533.JPG
  • A young woman laughing on a street in the Chaoyang district.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176556.JPG
  • Street Scene Beijing China.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176463-10.tif
  • A street scene with a Coca Cola kiosk.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176332.JPG
  • Elevated view of Main Street with cars, pedestrians, and buildings.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7140_756298.JPG
  • A trash collector on Jacinto-Vitas street in Baseco area.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702714.JPG
  • Sex workers talk with women trying to help them who work for Quito's Office of Social Inclusion.  They are issuing official identification cards to prostitutes and attempting to help improve their working conditions. They stand on the street near the Santa Domingo cathedral in the historic district.
    MELISSA FARLOW_04526_2512384.jpg
  • Daily life on Jacinto-Vitas street in Baseco area.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702716.JPG
  • Daily life on Jacinto-Vitas street in Baseco area.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702715.JPG
  • A trash collector on Jacinto-Vitas street in Baseco area.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702713.JPG
  • Trash trucks on Jacinto-Vitas street in Baseco area.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702712.JPG
  • Plastic that is sorted in the Dharavi Slums goes to China comes back as colorful artificial flowers in a market outside of Mumbai. This woman is shopping in the Dharavi slum through the rich array of colors for flowers for her wedding.<br />
<br />
The slum was founded in 1882 during the British colonial era, and grew in part because of an expulsion of factories and residents from the peninsular city centre by the colonial government, and from the migration of poor rural Indians into urban Mumbai. For this reason, Dharavi is currently a highly multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and diverse settlement. Dharavi has an active informal economy in which numerous household enterprises employ many of the slum residents leather, textiles and pottery products are among the goods made inside Dharavi. The total annual turnover has been estimated at over US$1 billion.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702735.TIF
  • People walk along streets and pedestrian bridges in the historic center of Quito.
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  • The old city area of Lahore.
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  • This Indian festival in the Ramblas Catalunya area of Barcelona is called Vaisakhi.  These are Sikhs from Punjab that started a procession in Ramblas Raval and carried it thru Ramblas Catalunya and ended at the Plaza St. Augustine. The festival includes the passing out of huge amounts of food.  The men in this street hauled cart after shopping cart of fresh fruit and passed it out to the public.
    MM7890_20100419_09674.tif
  • Shrouded in a light, misty snow, Chapin Parkway is one of seven tree-lined boulevards planned for the Buffalo, New York park system. Although other cities have implemented this kind of plan, it was in 1868 that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux tried to integrate a system of parks and parkways for the first time.<br />
<br />
Olmsted designed the parkways so that within steps of each resident’s door was the entrance to a park-like setting. The parkways in Olmsted’s day were smoothly paved and intended solely for use of private carriages. Featuring 200-foot rights of way and flanked by several rows of trees, they were designed to provide open space for the neighborhoods through which they passed.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MM6560_956194.jpg
  • There are 2.6 billion armpits in China, according to an ad man, and someone has to sell them deodorant. This shop-owner (right) thinks a guy wandering Nanjing Road in a full knight suit will do the trick for his snack shop.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176447.JPG
  • The Baseco Slums in Manila is known as the Recycling and Plastic Waste Industry hub of the Philippines. Trucks loaded with plastic trucks on the right side of the frame are caught up in congestion in Manila traffic which ranks as some of the worst in the world.  Infrastructure problems, high population and accidents are some of the causes.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702702.TIF
  • Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions of the country moving to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. An estimated 230 million Chinese in 2010, roughly equivalent to two-thirds the population of the U.S., have left the countryside and migrated to the cities in recent years. About 13 million more join them every year. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories. Men often get construction jobs while women work in cheap-labor factories. So many migrants leave their homes looking for work they overburden the rail system. In the Hunan province, 52 people were trampled to death in the late 1990s when 10,000 migrants were herded onto a freight train. To stem the flow of migrants, officials in Hunan and Sichuan have placed restrictions on the use of trains and buses by rural people. In some cities, the migrants almost outnumber the residents. One young girl told National Geographic, “All the young people leave our village. I’m not going back. Many can’t even afford a bus ticket and hitchhike to Beijing.” Overall, the Chinese government has tacitly supported migration as means of transforming China from a rural-based economy to an urban-based one. From the New York Times: “As a result, China’s rulers face a dilemma: the very policies that cater to the urban middle class come at the expense of the rural poor. The revised law on property ownership pushed through despite objections from old-line conservatives, the law for the first time gave equal weight to both state- and private- ownership rights. But a look at the fine print shows that the law only protects things dear to the rising middle class: real estate, cars, stock-market assets. Farmers, on the other hand, will still be unable to purchase their land and instead will be forced to lease plots from the government.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176463-2.tif
  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park. Seventy couples participated in a mass marriage event that started at a shopping mall and ended up in Century Park for the ceremony.
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  • The Dharavi slum area of Mumbai.
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  • A young woman in costume during the October Week holiday.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176442.JPG
  • High school students at the Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345826.jpg
  • People walking in Shenzhen on a rainy night.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176293.JPG
  • A girl plays in the Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345834.jpg
  • Traffic in Shenzhen at night.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176292.JPG
  • The Kumkapi neighborhood, primarily immigrant, in Istanbul.
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  • Children in a parade commemorating the opening of Parliament in 1920.
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  • An Indian festival, Vaisakhi, in Barcelona's Rambla de Catalunya area.
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  • A photographer takes images of an Indian festival, Vaisakhi, in Barcelona's Rambla de Catalunya area.
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  • Billboards advertising gold wedding jewelry.
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  • Onlookers watch an Indian festival, Vaisakhi, in Barcelona's Rambla de Catalunya area.
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  • An Indian festival, Vaisakhi, in Barcelona's Rambla de Catalunya area.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7890_1386371.TIF
  • Guards on the Bund during the October week holiday.
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  • Guards on the Bund during the October week holiday.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176440.JPG
  • October Holiday week along the Bund on the Puxi side of Shanghai where this couple is one of the lucky ones. “Bare Branches”—a phenomenon where a boy just cannot find a girl is becoming more and more of a social problem. According to the 2010 census, there were 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls. For the population born between 1900 and 2000, it is estimated that there could be 35.59 million fewer females than males. Maybe everyone eventually can have a car, but can every boy find a girl?
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176439.TIF
  • Downtown Detroit's skyscrapers touch the night sky.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT6613_1457273.jpg
  • The Chicago river and buildings from the London Guarantee Building.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345822.jpg
  • Indian Muslims at the call to prayer on the roof of a Kolkata mosque.
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  • Poolside dining at the Clevelander Hotel, a popular nightspot.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1312337.jpg
  • Poolside dining at the Clevelander Hotel, a popular nightspot.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5959_1312318.jpg
  • Cloud Gate or simply 'the bean' by Anish Kapoor in Millennium Park.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345831.jpg
  • Cloud Gate or simply 'the bean' by Anish Kapoor in Millennium Park.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345823.jpg
  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176576.JPG
  • A young woman adjusting hair and makeup.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176541.JPG
  • A young woman talking on a cell phone.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176486.JPG
  • A dragon dance for promotional purposes on East Nanjing Road.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176424.JPG
  • Pedestrians in downtown Shanghai.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176414.JPG
  • Workers pull electrical power lines above pedestrians.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176329.JPG
  • A pedestrian shopping area in downtown Guangzhou at night.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176318.JPG
  • A pedestrian shopping area in downtown Guangzhou at night.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176317.JPG
  • The government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. Like anyone else, their experiences and those of their families shape members of the comfort class. When their parents talk about the Great Leap Forward (the disastrous Mao campaign in the late 1950s that left 20 to 30 million dead of starvation) and the subsequent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, they mostly tell horror stories that would put anyone off politics forever. One event that the comfort class does remember is the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989. But to young Chinese, the Tiananmen protests are less a source of inspiration than an admonishment. Continued popular uprisings like Tiananmen, they believe, would have have provoked a counter reaction by conservative forces that would have led to a return to fortress China, meaning no more iPods, overseas shopping trips or snowboarding weekends.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176463-1.tif
  • A walkway from the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.
    MELISSA FARLOW_MT5887_1345814.jpg
  • A young woman with a camera in a pedestrian shopping area.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176571.JPG
  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176369.JPG
  • Reflection of a teenage schoolgirl sitting behind her father in a car.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176355.JPG
  • Shoppers in pajamas in the 200 block of Guangdong road near the Bund.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176335.JPG
  • Shoppers in pajamas in the 200 block of Guangdong road near the Bund.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176334.JPG
  • People on the 236 bus in Guangzhou.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176324.JPG
  • Plastic statues collected from a recycling plant in San Francisco, California.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702848.JPG
  • Susanne is marrying her boyfriend in Hong Kong next week and they are moving in together. This is the view from her apartment.
    RANDY OLSON_MM7493_1176463-7.tif
  • A zero waste store and restaurant in Paris, France.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2703579.JPG
  • Women gather compost from restaurants and stores to be re-used by farmers.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2703522.JPG
  • A woman gathers compost from restaurants and stores to be re-used by farmers.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2703521.JPG
  • Men from a food internet ordering company deliver in re-used glass jars as an attempt to reduce one-use-plastic.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2703519.JPG
  • A zero waste store and restaurant in Paris, France.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702858.JPG
  • Plastic pinwheels and balloons for sale.
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  • Plastic pinwheels and balloons for sale.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702823.JPG
  • Rickshaw riders and drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702791.JPG
  • Pollution in the Buriganga River.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702773.JPG
  • The Dharavi slum in Mumbai.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702763.JPG
  • Tupperware for sale in Mumbai, India.
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  • Plastic items for sale in Mumbai, India.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702738.JPG
  • Plastic artificial flowers for sale in Mumbai, India.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702737.JPG
  • Plastic sorting in the Philippines.
    RANDY OLSON_MM8515_2702725.JPG
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