A building goes up here, a building comes down there, and over time the entire skyline become different. You could live at the same address for 50 years and not really notice how much has changed. This happens even in a small town, where I struggle to describe what a particular neighborhood looked like when I was a kid. But with the power of photography, we can see what our cities looked like in the past, and how vastly different they are now (some more than others). The above picture is what Shanghai’s Pudon district looked like in 1987. In only three decades, it has changed considerably, with skyscrapers growing upward to accommodate the city’s 14 million residents.
See a roundup of then-and-now images of 13 cities around the world and see how their skylines have changed over time.