May 5, 2012, 7:35 am

Living in the New Metropolis

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Martin Roemers/Anastasia Photo, via Panos PicturesStreet vendors and shopping crowds at a market in a Muslim quarter of the city centre near Mohammed Ali Road, in Mumbai, Maharashtra, 2007.

“About half of humanity lives in a city, and by 2050, it’s likely that 70 percent of the world’s population will be in urban areas, according to United Nations predictions,” Martin Roemers writes in the Sunday Review of The New York Times.
In the project “Metropolis,” Mr. Roemers is documenting the “megacities of our time — places with populations in excess of 10 million,” he writes. “Every megacity is a theater, and every city has a different stage and different actors.”
“My question is, how can people live in cities that are so immense?” he writes. “Crowded cities in India like Mumbai and Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta); Dhaka, Bangladesh; Manila; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Karachi, Pakistan, have traffic jams all the time.”

My photos on this subject are a work in progress, and in the coming two years, I will visit more cities in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. According to the United Nations, there will be 37 megacities by 2025.
I am taking photographs of crowded places where you notice not only the city’s dynamic character but also the individual making his way in the big city. Specifically, I’m looking at the small stories of the street vendor, the commuter, the passer-by, the market stallholder and other pedestrians who populate the street or are a part of the traffic. I present this by photographing busy locations from above.

Read full article here.