• So, it turns out that Airportr, the premium luggage service we’ve all been relying on to whisk our bags away while we sip overpriced airport coffee, decided to play a game of “Guess Who?” with our travel plans. Who knew that a door-to-door luggage service would also be a door-to-door data leak service?

    Turns out, hackers could not only peek at our travel itineraries but could also potentially redirect our bags—because who wouldn’t want to experience the thrill of losing their luggage to a cybercriminal? And let’s not forget the diplomats who are now directly experiencing the consequences of poor security. If they thought international relations were tricky, wait until they try to retrieve their lost bags!

    #TravelFails #DataBreach
    So, it turns out that Airportr, the premium luggage service we’ve all been relying on to whisk our bags away while we sip overpriced airport coffee, decided to play a game of “Guess Who?” with our travel plans. Who knew that a door-to-door luggage service would also be a door-to-door data leak service? Turns out, hackers could not only peek at our travel itineraries but could also potentially redirect our bags—because who wouldn’t want to experience the thrill of losing their luggage to a cybercriminal? And let’s not forget the diplomats who are now directly experiencing the consequences of poor security. If they thought international relations were tricky, wait until they try to retrieve their lost bags! #TravelFails #DataBreach
    A Premium Luggage Service's Web Bugs Exposed the Travel Plans of Every User—Including Diplomats
    Security flaws in Airportr, a door-to-door luggage checking service used by 10 airlines, let hackers access user data and even gain privileges that would have let them redirect or steal luggage.
    1 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri 0 önizleme
  • A short history of the roadblock

    Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to date back to the European wars of religion. According to most historians, the first barricade went up in Paris in 1588; the word derives from the French barriques, or barrels, spontaneously put together. They have been assembled from the most diverse materials, from cobblestones, tyres, newspapers, dead horses and bags of ice, to omnibuses and e‑scooters. Their tactical logic is close to that of guerrilla warfare: the authorities have to take the barricades in order to claim victory; all that those manning them have to do to prevail is to hold them. 
    The 19th century was the golden age for blocking narrow, labyrinthine streets. Paris had seen barricades go up nine times in the period before the Second Empire; during the July 1830 Revolution alone, 4,000 barricades had been erected. These barricades would not only stop, but also trap troops; people would then throw stones from windows or pour boiling water onto the streets. Georges‑Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of Paris, famously created wide boulevards to make blocking by barricade more difficult and moving the military easier, and replaced cobblestones with macadam – a surface of crushed stone. As Flaubert observed in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘Macadam: has cancelled revolutions. No more means to make barricades. Nevertheless rather inconvenient.’  
    Lead image: Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to have originated in early modern France. A colour engraving attributed to Achille‑Louis Martinet depicts the defence of a barricade during the 1830 July Revolution. Credit: Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris. Above: the socialist political thinker and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui – who was imprisoned by every regime that ruled France between 1815 and 1880 – drew instructions for how to build an effective barricade

    Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann widened Paris’s streets in his 1853–70 renovation of the city, making barricading more difficult
    Credit: Old Books Images / Alamy
    ‘On one hand,wanted to favour the circulation of ideas,’ reactionary intellectual Louis Veuillot observed apropos the ambiguous liberalism of the latter period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. ‘On the other, to ensure the circulation of regiments.’ But ‘anti‑insurgency hardware’, as Justinien Tribillon has called it, also served to chase the working class out of the city centre: Haussmann’s projects amounted to a gigantic form of real-estate speculation, and the 1871 Paris Commune that followed constituted not just a short‑lived anarchist experiment featuring enormous barricades; it also signalled the return of the workers to the centre and, arguably, revenge for their dispossession.   
    By the mid‑19th century, observers questioned whether barricades still had practical meaning. Gottfried Semper’s barricade, constructed for the 1849 Dresden uprising, had proved unconquerable, but Friedrich Engels, one‑time ‘inspector of barricades’ in the Elberfeld insurrection of the same year, already suggested that the barricades’ primary meaning was now moral rather than military – a point to be echoed by Leon Trotsky in the subsequent century. Barricades symbolised bravery and the will to hold out among insurrectionists, and, not least, determination rather to destroy one’s possessions – and one’s neighbourhood – than put up with further oppression.  
    Not only self‑declared revolutionaries viewed things this way: the reformist Social Democrat leader Eduard Bernstein observed that ‘the barricade fight as a political weapon of the people has been completely eliminated due to changes in weapon technology and cities’ structures’. Bernstein was also picking up on the fact that, in the era of industrialisation, contention happened at least as much on the factory floor as on the streets. The strike, not the food riot or the defence of workers’ quartiers, became the paradigmatic form of conflict. Joshua Clover has pointed out in his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, that the price of labour, rather than the price of goods, caused people to confront the powerful. Blocking production grew more important than blocking the street.
    ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn’
    Today, it is again blocking – not just people streaming along the streets in large marches – that is prominently associated with protests. Disrupting circulation is not only an important gesture in the face of climate emergency; blocking transport is a powerful form of protest in an economic system focused on logistics and just‑in‑time distribution. Members of Insulate Britain and Germany’s Last Generation super‑glue themselves to streets to stop car traffic to draw attention to the climate emergency; they have also attached themselves to airport runways. They form a human barricade of sorts, immobilising traffic by making themselves immovable.  
    Today’s protesters have made themselves consciously vulnerable. They in fact follow the advice of US civil rights’ Bayard Rustin who explained: ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.’ Making oneself vulnerable might increase the chances of a majority of citizens seeing the importance of the cause which those engaged in civil disobedience are pursuing. Demonstrations – even large, unpredictable ones – are no longer sufficient. They draw too little attention and do not compel a reaction. Naomi Klein proposed the term ‘blockadia’ as ‘a roving transnational conflict zone’ in which people block extraction – be it open‑pit mines, fracking sites or tar sands pipelines – with their bodies. More often than not, these blockades are organised by local people opposing the fossil fuel industry, not environmental activists per se. Blockadia came to denote resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline as well as Canada’s First Nations‑led movement Idle No More.
    In cities, blocking can be accomplished with highly mobile structures. Like the barricade of the 19th century, they can be quickly assembled, yet are difficult to move; unlike old‑style barricades, they can also be quickly disassembled, removed and hidden. Think of super tripods, intricate ‘protest beacons’ based on tensegrity principles, as well as inflatable cobblestones, pioneered by the artist‑activists of Tools for Action.  
    As recently as 1991, newly independent Latvia defended itself against Soviet tanks with the popular construction of barricades, in a series of confrontations that became known as the Barikādes
    Credit: Associated Press / Alamy
    Inversely, roadblocks can be used by police authorities to stop demonstrations and gatherings from taking place – protesters are seen removing such infrastructure in Dhaka during a general strike in 1999
    Credit: REUTERS / Rafiqur Rahman / Bridgeman
    These inflatable objects are highly flexible, but can also be protective against police batons. They pose an awkward challenge to the authorities, who often end up looking ridiculous when dealing with them, and, as one of the inventors pointed out, they are guaranteed to create a media spectacle. This was also true of the 19th‑century barricade: people posed for pictures in front of them. As Wolfgang Scheppe, a curator of Architecture of the Barricade, explains, these images helped the police to find Communards and mete out punishments after the end of the anarchist experiment.
    Much simpler structures can also be highly effective. In 2019, protesters in Hong Kong filled streets with little archways made from just three ordinary bricks: two standing upright, one resting on top. When touched, the falling top one would buttress the other two, and effectively block traffic. In line with their imperative of ‘be water’, protesters would retreat when the police appeared, but the ‘mini‑Stonehenges’ would remain and slow down the authorities.
    Today, elaborate architectures of protest, such as Extinction Rebellion’s ‘tensegrity towers’, are used to blockade roads and distribution networks – in this instance, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK printworks in Broxbourne, for the media group’s failure to report the climate emergency accurately
    Credit: Extinction Rebellion
    In June 2025, protests erupted in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Demonstrators barricaded downtown streets using various objects, including the pink public furniture designed by design firm Rios for Gloria Molina Grand Park. LAPD are seen advancing through tear gas
    Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
    Roads which radicals might want to target are not just ones in major metropoles and fancy post‑industrial downtowns. Rather, they might block the arteries leading to ‘fulfilment centres’ and harbours with container shipping. The model is not only Occupy Wall Street, which had initially called for the erection of ‘peaceful barricades’, but also the Occupy that led to the Oakland port shutdown in 2011. In short, such roadblocks disrupt what Phil Neel has called a ‘hinterland’ that is often invisible, yet crucial for contemporary capitalism. More recently, Extinction Rebellion targeted Amazon distribution centres in three European countries in November 2021; in the UK, they aimed to disrupt half of all deliveries on a Black Friday.  
    Will such blockades just anger consumers who, after all, are not present but are impatiently waiting for packages at home? One of the hopes associated with the traditional barricade was always that they might create spaces where protesters, police and previously indifferent citizens get talking; French theorists even expected them to become ‘a machine to produce the people’. That could be why military technology has evolved so that the authorities do not have to get close to the barricade: tear gas was first deployed against those on barricades before it was used in the First World War; so‑called riot control vehicles can ever more easily crush barricades. The challenge, then, for anyone who wishes to block is also how to get in other people’s faces – in order to have a chance to convince them of their cause.       

    2025-06-11
    Kristina Rapacki

    Share
    #short #history #roadblock
    A short history of the roadblock
    Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to date back to the European wars of religion. According to most historians, the first barricade went up in Paris in 1588; the word derives from the French barriques, or barrels, spontaneously put together. They have been assembled from the most diverse materials, from cobblestones, tyres, newspapers, dead horses and bags of ice, to omnibuses and e‑scooters. Their tactical logic is close to that of guerrilla warfare: the authorities have to take the barricades in order to claim victory; all that those manning them have to do to prevail is to hold them.  The 19th century was the golden age for blocking narrow, labyrinthine streets. Paris had seen barricades go up nine times in the period before the Second Empire; during the July 1830 Revolution alone, 4,000 barricades had been erected. These barricades would not only stop, but also trap troops; people would then throw stones from windows or pour boiling water onto the streets. Georges‑Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of Paris, famously created wide boulevards to make blocking by barricade more difficult and moving the military easier, and replaced cobblestones with macadam – a surface of crushed stone. As Flaubert observed in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘Macadam: has cancelled revolutions. No more means to make barricades. Nevertheless rather inconvenient.’   Lead image: Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to have originated in early modern France. A colour engraving attributed to Achille‑Louis Martinet depicts the defence of a barricade during the 1830 July Revolution. Credit: Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris. Above: the socialist political thinker and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui – who was imprisoned by every regime that ruled France between 1815 and 1880 – drew instructions for how to build an effective barricade Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann widened Paris’s streets in his 1853–70 renovation of the city, making barricading more difficult Credit: Old Books Images / Alamy ‘On one hand,wanted to favour the circulation of ideas,’ reactionary intellectual Louis Veuillot observed apropos the ambiguous liberalism of the latter period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. ‘On the other, to ensure the circulation of regiments.’ But ‘anti‑insurgency hardware’, as Justinien Tribillon has called it, also served to chase the working class out of the city centre: Haussmann’s projects amounted to a gigantic form of real-estate speculation, and the 1871 Paris Commune that followed constituted not just a short‑lived anarchist experiment featuring enormous barricades; it also signalled the return of the workers to the centre and, arguably, revenge for their dispossession.    By the mid‑19th century, observers questioned whether barricades still had practical meaning. Gottfried Semper’s barricade, constructed for the 1849 Dresden uprising, had proved unconquerable, but Friedrich Engels, one‑time ‘inspector of barricades’ in the Elberfeld insurrection of the same year, already suggested that the barricades’ primary meaning was now moral rather than military – a point to be echoed by Leon Trotsky in the subsequent century. Barricades symbolised bravery and the will to hold out among insurrectionists, and, not least, determination rather to destroy one’s possessions – and one’s neighbourhood – than put up with further oppression.   Not only self‑declared revolutionaries viewed things this way: the reformist Social Democrat leader Eduard Bernstein observed that ‘the barricade fight as a political weapon of the people has been completely eliminated due to changes in weapon technology and cities’ structures’. Bernstein was also picking up on the fact that, in the era of industrialisation, contention happened at least as much on the factory floor as on the streets. The strike, not the food riot or the defence of workers’ quartiers, became the paradigmatic form of conflict. Joshua Clover has pointed out in his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, that the price of labour, rather than the price of goods, caused people to confront the powerful. Blocking production grew more important than blocking the street. ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn’ Today, it is again blocking – not just people streaming along the streets in large marches – that is prominently associated with protests. Disrupting circulation is not only an important gesture in the face of climate emergency; blocking transport is a powerful form of protest in an economic system focused on logistics and just‑in‑time distribution. Members of Insulate Britain and Germany’s Last Generation super‑glue themselves to streets to stop car traffic to draw attention to the climate emergency; they have also attached themselves to airport runways. They form a human barricade of sorts, immobilising traffic by making themselves immovable.   Today’s protesters have made themselves consciously vulnerable. They in fact follow the advice of US civil rights’ Bayard Rustin who explained: ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.’ Making oneself vulnerable might increase the chances of a majority of citizens seeing the importance of the cause which those engaged in civil disobedience are pursuing. Demonstrations – even large, unpredictable ones – are no longer sufficient. They draw too little attention and do not compel a reaction. Naomi Klein proposed the term ‘blockadia’ as ‘a roving transnational conflict zone’ in which people block extraction – be it open‑pit mines, fracking sites or tar sands pipelines – with their bodies. More often than not, these blockades are organised by local people opposing the fossil fuel industry, not environmental activists per se. Blockadia came to denote resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline as well as Canada’s First Nations‑led movement Idle No More. In cities, blocking can be accomplished with highly mobile structures. Like the barricade of the 19th century, they can be quickly assembled, yet are difficult to move; unlike old‑style barricades, they can also be quickly disassembled, removed and hidden. Think of super tripods, intricate ‘protest beacons’ based on tensegrity principles, as well as inflatable cobblestones, pioneered by the artist‑activists of Tools for Action.   As recently as 1991, newly independent Latvia defended itself against Soviet tanks with the popular construction of barricades, in a series of confrontations that became known as the Barikādes Credit: Associated Press / Alamy Inversely, roadblocks can be used by police authorities to stop demonstrations and gatherings from taking place – protesters are seen removing such infrastructure in Dhaka during a general strike in 1999 Credit: REUTERS / Rafiqur Rahman / Bridgeman These inflatable objects are highly flexible, but can also be protective against police batons. They pose an awkward challenge to the authorities, who often end up looking ridiculous when dealing with them, and, as one of the inventors pointed out, they are guaranteed to create a media spectacle. This was also true of the 19th‑century barricade: people posed for pictures in front of them. As Wolfgang Scheppe, a curator of Architecture of the Barricade, explains, these images helped the police to find Communards and mete out punishments after the end of the anarchist experiment. Much simpler structures can also be highly effective. In 2019, protesters in Hong Kong filled streets with little archways made from just three ordinary bricks: two standing upright, one resting on top. When touched, the falling top one would buttress the other two, and effectively block traffic. In line with their imperative of ‘be water’, protesters would retreat when the police appeared, but the ‘mini‑Stonehenges’ would remain and slow down the authorities. Today, elaborate architectures of protest, such as Extinction Rebellion’s ‘tensegrity towers’, are used to blockade roads and distribution networks – in this instance, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK printworks in Broxbourne, for the media group’s failure to report the climate emergency accurately Credit: Extinction Rebellion In June 2025, protests erupted in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Demonstrators barricaded downtown streets using various objects, including the pink public furniture designed by design firm Rios for Gloria Molina Grand Park. LAPD are seen advancing through tear gas Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Roads which radicals might want to target are not just ones in major metropoles and fancy post‑industrial downtowns. Rather, they might block the arteries leading to ‘fulfilment centres’ and harbours with container shipping. The model is not only Occupy Wall Street, which had initially called for the erection of ‘peaceful barricades’, but also the Occupy that led to the Oakland port shutdown in 2011. In short, such roadblocks disrupt what Phil Neel has called a ‘hinterland’ that is often invisible, yet crucial for contemporary capitalism. More recently, Extinction Rebellion targeted Amazon distribution centres in three European countries in November 2021; in the UK, they aimed to disrupt half of all deliveries on a Black Friday.   Will such blockades just anger consumers who, after all, are not present but are impatiently waiting for packages at home? One of the hopes associated with the traditional barricade was always that they might create spaces where protesters, police and previously indifferent citizens get talking; French theorists even expected them to become ‘a machine to produce the people’. That could be why military technology has evolved so that the authorities do not have to get close to the barricade: tear gas was first deployed against those on barricades before it was used in the First World War; so‑called riot control vehicles can ever more easily crush barricades. The challenge, then, for anyone who wishes to block is also how to get in other people’s faces – in order to have a chance to convince them of their cause.        2025-06-11 Kristina Rapacki Share #short #history #roadblock
    WWW.ARCHITECTURAL-REVIEW.COM
    A short history of the roadblock
    Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to date back to the European wars of religion. According to most historians, the first barricade went up in Paris in 1588; the word derives from the French barriques, or barrels, spontaneously put together. They have been assembled from the most diverse materials, from cobblestones, tyres, newspapers, dead horses and bags of ice (during Kyiv’s Euromaidan in 2013–14), to omnibuses and e‑scooters. Their tactical logic is close to that of guerrilla warfare: the authorities have to take the barricades in order to claim victory; all that those manning them have to do to prevail is to hold them.  The 19th century was the golden age for blocking narrow, labyrinthine streets. Paris had seen barricades go up nine times in the period before the Second Empire; during the July 1830 Revolution alone, 4,000 barricades had been erected (roughly one for every 200 Parisians). These barricades would not only stop, but also trap troops; people would then throw stones from windows or pour boiling water onto the streets. Georges‑Eugène Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of Paris, famously created wide boulevards to make blocking by barricade more difficult and moving the military easier, and replaced cobblestones with macadam – a surface of crushed stone. As Flaubert observed in his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: ‘Macadam: has cancelled revolutions. No more means to make barricades. Nevertheless rather inconvenient.’   Lead image: Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to have originated in early modern France. A colour engraving attributed to Achille‑Louis Martinet depicts the defence of a barricade during the 1830 July Revolution. Credit: Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris. Above: the socialist political thinker and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui – who was imprisoned by every regime that ruled France between 1815 and 1880 – drew instructions for how to build an effective barricade Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann widened Paris’s streets in his 1853–70 renovation of the city, making barricading more difficult Credit: Old Books Images / Alamy ‘On one hand, [the authorities] wanted to favour the circulation of ideas,’ reactionary intellectual Louis Veuillot observed apropos the ambiguous liberalism of the latter period of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. ‘On the other, to ensure the circulation of regiments.’ But ‘anti‑insurgency hardware’, as Justinien Tribillon has called it, also served to chase the working class out of the city centre: Haussmann’s projects amounted to a gigantic form of real-estate speculation, and the 1871 Paris Commune that followed constituted not just a short‑lived anarchist experiment featuring enormous barricades; it also signalled the return of the workers to the centre and, arguably, revenge for their dispossession.    By the mid‑19th century, observers questioned whether barricades still had practical meaning. Gottfried Semper’s barricade, constructed for the 1849 Dresden uprising, had proved unconquerable, but Friedrich Engels, one‑time ‘inspector of barricades’ in the Elberfeld insurrection of the same year, already suggested that the barricades’ primary meaning was now moral rather than military – a point to be echoed by Leon Trotsky in the subsequent century. Barricades symbolised bravery and the will to hold out among insurrectionists, and, not least, determination rather to destroy one’s possessions – and one’s neighbourhood – than put up with further oppression.   Not only self‑declared revolutionaries viewed things this way: the reformist Social Democrat leader Eduard Bernstein observed that ‘the barricade fight as a political weapon of the people has been completely eliminated due to changes in weapon technology and cities’ structures’. Bernstein was also picking up on the fact that, in the era of industrialisation, contention happened at least as much on the factory floor as on the streets. The strike, not the food riot or the defence of workers’ quartiers, became the paradigmatic form of conflict. Joshua Clover has pointed out in his 2016 book Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings, that the price of labour, rather than the price of goods, caused people to confront the powerful. Blocking production grew more important than blocking the street. ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn’ Today, it is again blocking – not just people streaming along the streets in large marches – that is prominently associated with protests. Disrupting circulation is not only an important gesture in the face of climate emergency; blocking transport is a powerful form of protest in an economic system focused on logistics and just‑in‑time distribution. Members of Insulate Britain and Germany’s Last Generation super‑glue themselves to streets to stop car traffic to draw attention to the climate emergency; they have also attached themselves to airport runways. They form a human barricade of sorts, immobilising traffic by making themselves immovable.   Today’s protesters have made themselves consciously vulnerable. They in fact follow the advice of US civil rights’ Bayard Rustin who explained: ‘The only weapons we have are our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.’ Making oneself vulnerable might increase the chances of a majority of citizens seeing the importance of the cause which those engaged in civil disobedience are pursuing. Demonstrations – even large, unpredictable ones – are no longer sufficient. They draw too little attention and do not compel a reaction. Naomi Klein proposed the term ‘blockadia’ as ‘a roving transnational conflict zone’ in which people block extraction – be it open‑pit mines, fracking sites or tar sands pipelines – with their bodies. More often than not, these blockades are organised by local people opposing the fossil fuel industry, not environmental activists per se. Blockadia came to denote resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline as well as Canada’s First Nations‑led movement Idle No More. In cities, blocking can be accomplished with highly mobile structures. Like the barricade of the 19th century, they can be quickly assembled, yet are difficult to move; unlike old‑style barricades, they can also be quickly disassembled, removed and hidden (by those who have the engineering and architectural know‑how). Think of super tripods, intricate ‘protest beacons’ based on tensegrity principles, as well as inflatable cobblestones, pioneered by the artist‑activists of Tools for Action (and as analysed in Nick Newman’s recent volume Protest Architecture).   As recently as 1991, newly independent Latvia defended itself against Soviet tanks with the popular construction of barricades, in a series of confrontations that became known as the Barikādes Credit: Associated Press / Alamy Inversely, roadblocks can be used by police authorities to stop demonstrations and gatherings from taking place – protesters are seen removing such infrastructure in Dhaka during a general strike in 1999 Credit: REUTERS / Rafiqur Rahman / Bridgeman These inflatable objects are highly flexible, but can also be protective against police batons. They pose an awkward challenge to the authorities, who often end up looking ridiculous when dealing with them, and, as one of the inventors pointed out, they are guaranteed to create a media spectacle. This was also true of the 19th‑century barricade: people posed for pictures in front of them. As Wolfgang Scheppe, a curator of Architecture of the Barricade (currently on display at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation in Venice), explains, these images helped the police to find Communards and mete out punishments after the end of the anarchist experiment. Much simpler structures can also be highly effective. In 2019, protesters in Hong Kong filled streets with little archways made from just three ordinary bricks: two standing upright, one resting on top. When touched, the falling top one would buttress the other two, and effectively block traffic. In line with their imperative of ‘be water’, protesters would retreat when the police appeared, but the ‘mini‑Stonehenges’ would remain and slow down the authorities. Today, elaborate architectures of protest, such as Extinction Rebellion’s ‘tensegrity towers’, are used to blockade roads and distribution networks – in this instance, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK printworks in Broxbourne, for the media group’s failure to report the climate emergency accurately Credit: Extinction Rebellion In June 2025, protests erupted in Los Angeles against the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Demonstrators barricaded downtown streets using various objects, including the pink public furniture designed by design firm Rios for Gloria Molina Grand Park. LAPD are seen advancing through tear gas Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Roads which radicals might want to target are not just ones in major metropoles and fancy post‑industrial downtowns. Rather, they might block the arteries leading to ‘fulfilment centres’ and harbours with container shipping. The model is not only Occupy Wall Street, which had initially called for the erection of ‘peaceful barricades’, but also the Occupy that led to the Oakland port shutdown in 2011. In short, such roadblocks disrupt what Phil Neel has called a ‘hinterland’ that is often invisible, yet crucial for contemporary capitalism. More recently, Extinction Rebellion targeted Amazon distribution centres in three European countries in November 2021; in the UK, they aimed to disrupt half of all deliveries on a Black Friday.   Will such blockades just anger consumers who, after all, are not present but are impatiently waiting for packages at home? One of the hopes associated with the traditional barricade was always that they might create spaces where protesters, police and previously indifferent citizens get talking; French theorists even expected them to become ‘a machine to produce the people’. That could be why military technology has evolved so that the authorities do not have to get close to the barricade: tear gas was first deployed against those on barricades before it was used in the First World War; so‑called riot control vehicles can ever more easily crush barricades. The challenge, then, for anyone who wishes to block is also how to get in other people’s faces – in order to have a chance to convince them of their cause.        2025-06-11 Kristina Rapacki Share
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri 0 önizleme
  • How much does your road weigh?

    The ways roads are used, with ever larger and heavier vehicles, have dramatic consequences on the environment – and electric cars are not the answer
    Today, there is an average of 37 tonnes of road per inhabitant of the planet. The weight of the road network alone accounts for a third of all construction worldwide, and has grown exponentially in the 20th century. There is 10 times more bitumen, in mass, than there are living animals. Yet growth in the mass of roads does not automatically correspond to population growth, or translate into increased length of road networks. In wealthier countries, the number of metres of road per inhabitant has actually fallen over the last century. In the United States, for instance, between 1905 and 2015 the length of the network increased by a factor of 1.75 and the population by a factor of 3.8, compared with 21 for the mass of roads. Roads have become wider and, above all, much thicker. To understand the evolution of these parameters, and their environmental impact, it is helpful to trace the different stages in the life of the motorway. 
    Until the early 20th century, roads were used for various modes of transport, including horses, bicycles, pedestrians and trams; as a result of the construction of railways, road traffic even declined in some European countries in the 19th century. The main novelty brought by the motorway was that they would be reserved for motorised traffic. In several languages, the word itself – autostrada, autobahn, autoroute or motorway – speaks of this exclusivity. 
    Roman roads varied from simple corduroy roads, made by placing logs perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area, to paved roads, as this engraving from Jean Rondelet’s 19th‑century Traité Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de Bâtir shows. Using deep roadbeds of tamped rubble as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, major roads were often stone-paved, metalled, cambered for drainage and flanked by footpaths, bridleways and drainage ditches

    Like any major piece of infrastructure, motorways became the subject of ideological discourse, long before any shovel hit the ground; politicians underlined their role in the service of the nation, how they would contribute to progress, development, the economy, modernity and even civilisation. The inauguration ceremony for the construction of the first autostrada took place in March 1923, presided over by Italy’s prime minister Benito Mussolini. The second major motorway programme was announced by the Nazi government in 1933, with a national network planned to be around 7,000 kilometres long. In his 2017 book Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943, historian Massimo Moraglio shows how both programmes were used as propaganda tools by the regimes, most notably at the international road congresses in Milan in 1926 and Munich in 1934. In the European postwar era, the notion of the ‘civilising’ effect of roads persevered. In 1962, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then‑secretary of state for finances and later president of France, argued that expanded motorways would bring ‘progress, activity and life’.
    This discourse soon butted up against the realities of how motorways affected individuals and communities. In his 2011 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D Norton explores the history of resistance to the imposition of motorised traffic in North American cities. Until the 1920s, there was a perception that cars were dangerous newcomers, and that other street and road uses – especially walking – were more legitimate. Cars were associated with speed and danger; restrictions on motorists, especially speed limits, were routine. 
    Built between 1962 and 1970, the Westway was London’s first urban motorway, elevated above the city to use less land. Construction workers are seen stressing the longitudinal soffit cables inside the box section of the deck units to achieve the bearing capacity necessary to carry the weight of traffic
    Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy
    To gain domination over cities, motor vehicles had to win priority over other street uses. Rather than restricting the flow of vehicles to minimise the risk of road accidents, a specific infrastructure was dedicated to them: both inner‑city roads and motorways. Cutting through the landscape, the motorway had, by definition, to be inaccessible by any other means of transport than motorised vehicle. To guarantee the fluidity of traffic, the construction of imposing bridges, tunnels and interchanges is necessary, particularly at junctions with other roads, railways or canals. This prioritisation of one type of user inevitably impacts journeys for others; as space is fragmented, short journeys are lengthened for those trying to navigate space by foot or bicycle. 
    Enabling cars to drive at around 110–140km/h on motorways, as modern motorways do, directly impacts their design, with major environmental effects: the gradient has to be gentle, the curves longand the lanes wide, to allow vehicles to overtake each other safely. As much terrain around the world is not naturally suited to these requirements, the earthworks are considerable: in France, the construction of a metre of highway requires moving some 100m3 of earth, and when the soil is soft, full of clay or peat, it is made firmer with hydraulic lime and cement before the highway’s first sub‑layers are laid. This material cost reinforces the criticisms levelled in the 1960s, by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, at urban planning that prioritised the personal motor vehicle.
    When roads are widened to accommodate more traffic, buildings are sliced and demolished, as happened in Dhaka’s Bhasantek Road in 2021
    Credit: Dhaka Tribune
    Once built, the motorway is never inert. Motorway projects today generally anticipate future expansion, and include a large median strip of 12m between the lanes, with a view to adding new ones. Increases in speed and vehicle sizes have also translated into wider lanes, from 2.5m in 1945 to 3.5m today. The average contemporary motorway footprint is therefore 100 square metres per linear metre. Indeed, although the construction of a road is supposed to reduce congestion, it also generates new traffic and, therefore, new congestion. This is the principle of ‘induced traffic’: the provision of extra road capacity results in a greater volume of traffic.
    The Katy Freeway in Texas famously illustrates this dynamic. Built as a regular six‑lane highway in the 1960s, it was called the second worst bottleneck in the nation by 2004, wasting 25 million hours a year of commuter time. In 2011, the state of Texas invested USbillion to fix this problem, widening the road to a staggering total of 26 lanes. By 2014, the morning and afternoon traffic had both increased again. The vicious circle based on the induced traffic has been empirically demonstrated in most countries: traffic has continued to increase and congestion remains unresolved, leading to ever-increasing emissions. In the EU, transport is the only sector where greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past three decades, rising 33.5 per cent between 1990 and 2019. Transport accounts for around a fifth of global CO₂ emissions today, with three quarters of this figure linked to road transport.
    Houston’s Katy Freeway is one of the world’s widest motorways, with 26 lanes. Its last expansion, in 2008, was initially hailed as a success, but within five years, peak travel times were longer than before the expansion – a direct illustration of the principle of induced traffic
    Credit: Smiley N Pool / Houston Chronicle / Getty
    Like other large transport infrastructures such as ports and airports, motorways are designed for the largest and heaviest vehicles. Engineers, road administrations and politicians have known since the 1950s that one truck represents millions of cars: the impact of a vehicle on the roadway is exponential to its weight – an online ‘road damage calculator’ allows you to compare the damage done by different types of vehicles to the road. Over the years, heavier and heavier trucks have been authorised to operate on roads: from 8‑tonne trucks in 1945 to 44 tonnes nowadays. The European Parliament adopted a revised directive on 12 March 2024 authorising mega‑trucks to travel on European roads; they can measure up to 25 metres and weigh up to 60 tonnes, compared with the previous limits of 18.75 metres and 44 tonnes. This is a political and economic choice with considerable material effects: thickness, rigidity of sub‑bases and consolidation of soil and subsoil with lime and cement. Altogether, motorways are 10 times thicker than large roads from the late 19th century. In France, it takes an average of 30 tonnes of sand and aggregate to build one linear metre of motorway, 100 times more than cement and bitumen. 
    The material history of road networks is a history of quarrying and environmental damage. The traces of roads can also be seen in rivers emptied of their sediment, the notches of quarries in the hills and the furrows of dredgers extracting sand from the seabed. This material extraction, arguably the most significant in human history, has dramatic ecological consequences for rivers, groundwater tables, the rise of sea levels and saltwater in farmlands, as well as biodiversity. As sand is ubiquitous and very cheap, the history of roads is also the history of a local extractivism and environmental conflicts around the world. 
    Shoving and rutting is the bulging and rippling of the pavement surface. Once built, roads require extensive maintenance – the heavier the vehicles, the quicker the damage. From pothole repair to the full resurfacing of a road, maintenance contributes to keeping road users safe
    Credit: Yakov Oskanov / Alamy
    Once roads are built and extended, they need to be maintained to support the circulation of lorries and, by extension, commodities. This stage is becoming increasingly important as rail freight, which used to be important in countries such as France and the UK, is declining, accounting for no more than 10 per cent of the transport of commodities. Engineers might judge that a motorway is destined to last 20 years or so, but this prognosis will be significantly reduced with heavy traffic. The same applies to the thousands of motorway bridges: in the UK, nearly half of the 9,000 highway bridges are in poor condition; in France, 7 per cent of the 12,000 bridges are in danger of collapsing, as did Genoa’s Morandi bridge in 2018. If only light vehicles drove on it, this infrastructure would last much longer.
    This puts into perspective governments’ insistence on ‘greening’ the transport sector by targeting CO2 emissions alone, typically by promoting the use of electric vehicles. Public policies prioritising EVs do nothing to change the mass of roads or the issue of their maintenance – even if lorries were to run on clean air, massive quarrying would still be necessary. A similar argument plays out with regard to canals and ports, which have been constantly widened and deepened for decades to accommodate ever-larger oil tankers or container ships. The simple operation of these infrastructures, dimensioned for the circulation of commodities and not humans, requires permanent dredging of large volumes. The environmental problem of large transport infrastructure goes beyond the type of energy used: it is, at its root, free and globalised trade.
    ‘The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing’
    As both a material and ideological object, the motorway fixes certain political choices in the landscape. Millions of kilometres of road continue to be asphalted, widened and thickened around the world to favour cars and lorries. In France, more than 80 per cent of today’s sand and aggregate extraction is used for civil engineering works – the rest goes to buildings. Even if no more buildings, roads or other infrastructures were to be built, phenomenal quantities of sand and aggregates would still need to be extracted in order to maintain existing road networks. The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing, adding new structures such as wildlife crossings, more maintaining. 
    Rising traffic levels are always deemed positive by governments for a country’s economy and development. As Christopher Wells shows in his 2014 book Car Country: An Environmental History, car use becomes necessary in an environment where everything has been planned for the car, from the location of public services and supermarkets to residential and office areas. Similarly, when an entire economy is based on globalised trade and just‑in‑time logistics, the lorry and the container ship become vital. 
    The final stage in the life of a piece of motorway infrastructure is dismantling. Like the other stages, this one is not a natural outcome but the fruit of political choices – which should be democratic – regarding how we wish to use existing roads. Dismantling, which is essential if we are to put an end to the global extractivism of sand and aggregates, does not mean destruction: if bicycles and pedestrians were to use them instead, maintenance would be minimal. This final stage requires a paradigm shift away from the eternal adaptation to increasing traffic. Replacing cars and lorries with public transport and rail freight would be a first step. But above all, a different political and spatial organisation of economic activities is necessary, and ultimately, an end to globalised, just-in-time trade and logistics.
    In 1978, a row of cars parked at a shopping centre in Connecticut was buried under a thick layer of gooey asphalt. The Ghost Parking Lot, one of the first projects by James Wines’ practice SITE, became a playground for skateboarders until it was removed in 2003. Images of this lumpy landscape serve as allegories of the damage caused by reliance on the automobile
    Credit: Project by SITE

    Lead image: Some road damage is beyond repair, as when a landslide caused a large chunk of the Gothenburg–Oslo motorway to collapse in 2023. Such dramatic events remind us of both the fragility of these seemingly robust infrastructures, and the damage that extensive construction does to the planet. Credit: Hanna Brunlöf Windell / TT / Shutterstock

    2025-06-03
    Reuben J Brown

    Share
    #how #much #does #your #road
    How much does your road weigh?
    The ways roads are used, with ever larger and heavier vehicles, have dramatic consequences on the environment – and electric cars are not the answer Today, there is an average of 37 tonnes of road per inhabitant of the planet. The weight of the road network alone accounts for a third of all construction worldwide, and has grown exponentially in the 20th century. There is 10 times more bitumen, in mass, than there are living animals. Yet growth in the mass of roads does not automatically correspond to population growth, or translate into increased length of road networks. In wealthier countries, the number of metres of road per inhabitant has actually fallen over the last century. In the United States, for instance, between 1905 and 2015 the length of the network increased by a factor of 1.75 and the population by a factor of 3.8, compared with 21 for the mass of roads. Roads have become wider and, above all, much thicker. To understand the evolution of these parameters, and their environmental impact, it is helpful to trace the different stages in the life of the motorway.  Until the early 20th century, roads were used for various modes of transport, including horses, bicycles, pedestrians and trams; as a result of the construction of railways, road traffic even declined in some European countries in the 19th century. The main novelty brought by the motorway was that they would be reserved for motorised traffic. In several languages, the word itself – autostrada, autobahn, autoroute or motorway – speaks of this exclusivity.  Roman roads varied from simple corduroy roads, made by placing logs perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area, to paved roads, as this engraving from Jean Rondelet’s 19th‑century Traité Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de Bâtir shows. Using deep roadbeds of tamped rubble as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, major roads were often stone-paved, metalled, cambered for drainage and flanked by footpaths, bridleways and drainage ditches Like any major piece of infrastructure, motorways became the subject of ideological discourse, long before any shovel hit the ground; politicians underlined their role in the service of the nation, how they would contribute to progress, development, the economy, modernity and even civilisation. The inauguration ceremony for the construction of the first autostrada took place in March 1923, presided over by Italy’s prime minister Benito Mussolini. The second major motorway programme was announced by the Nazi government in 1933, with a national network planned to be around 7,000 kilometres long. In his 2017 book Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943, historian Massimo Moraglio shows how both programmes were used as propaganda tools by the regimes, most notably at the international road congresses in Milan in 1926 and Munich in 1934. In the European postwar era, the notion of the ‘civilising’ effect of roads persevered. In 1962, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then‑secretary of state for finances and later president of France, argued that expanded motorways would bring ‘progress, activity and life’. This discourse soon butted up against the realities of how motorways affected individuals and communities. In his 2011 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D Norton explores the history of resistance to the imposition of motorised traffic in North American cities. Until the 1920s, there was a perception that cars were dangerous newcomers, and that other street and road uses – especially walking – were more legitimate. Cars were associated with speed and danger; restrictions on motorists, especially speed limits, were routine.  Built between 1962 and 1970, the Westway was London’s first urban motorway, elevated above the city to use less land. Construction workers are seen stressing the longitudinal soffit cables inside the box section of the deck units to achieve the bearing capacity necessary to carry the weight of traffic Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy To gain domination over cities, motor vehicles had to win priority over other street uses. Rather than restricting the flow of vehicles to minimise the risk of road accidents, a specific infrastructure was dedicated to them: both inner‑city roads and motorways. Cutting through the landscape, the motorway had, by definition, to be inaccessible by any other means of transport than motorised vehicle. To guarantee the fluidity of traffic, the construction of imposing bridges, tunnels and interchanges is necessary, particularly at junctions with other roads, railways or canals. This prioritisation of one type of user inevitably impacts journeys for others; as space is fragmented, short journeys are lengthened for those trying to navigate space by foot or bicycle.  Enabling cars to drive at around 110–140km/h on motorways, as modern motorways do, directly impacts their design, with major environmental effects: the gradient has to be gentle, the curves longand the lanes wide, to allow vehicles to overtake each other safely. As much terrain around the world is not naturally suited to these requirements, the earthworks are considerable: in France, the construction of a metre of highway requires moving some 100m3 of earth, and when the soil is soft, full of clay or peat, it is made firmer with hydraulic lime and cement before the highway’s first sub‑layers are laid. This material cost reinforces the criticisms levelled in the 1960s, by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, at urban planning that prioritised the personal motor vehicle. When roads are widened to accommodate more traffic, buildings are sliced and demolished, as happened in Dhaka’s Bhasantek Road in 2021 Credit: Dhaka Tribune Once built, the motorway is never inert. Motorway projects today generally anticipate future expansion, and include a large median strip of 12m between the lanes, with a view to adding new ones. Increases in speed and vehicle sizes have also translated into wider lanes, from 2.5m in 1945 to 3.5m today. The average contemporary motorway footprint is therefore 100 square metres per linear metre. Indeed, although the construction of a road is supposed to reduce congestion, it also generates new traffic and, therefore, new congestion. This is the principle of ‘induced traffic’: the provision of extra road capacity results in a greater volume of traffic. The Katy Freeway in Texas famously illustrates this dynamic. Built as a regular six‑lane highway in the 1960s, it was called the second worst bottleneck in the nation by 2004, wasting 25 million hours a year of commuter time. In 2011, the state of Texas invested USbillion to fix this problem, widening the road to a staggering total of 26 lanes. By 2014, the morning and afternoon traffic had both increased again. The vicious circle based on the induced traffic has been empirically demonstrated in most countries: traffic has continued to increase and congestion remains unresolved, leading to ever-increasing emissions. In the EU, transport is the only sector where greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past three decades, rising 33.5 per cent between 1990 and 2019. Transport accounts for around a fifth of global CO₂ emissions today, with three quarters of this figure linked to road transport. Houston’s Katy Freeway is one of the world’s widest motorways, with 26 lanes. Its last expansion, in 2008, was initially hailed as a success, but within five years, peak travel times were longer than before the expansion – a direct illustration of the principle of induced traffic Credit: Smiley N Pool / Houston Chronicle / Getty Like other large transport infrastructures such as ports and airports, motorways are designed for the largest and heaviest vehicles. Engineers, road administrations and politicians have known since the 1950s that one truck represents millions of cars: the impact of a vehicle on the roadway is exponential to its weight – an online ‘road damage calculator’ allows you to compare the damage done by different types of vehicles to the road. Over the years, heavier and heavier trucks have been authorised to operate on roads: from 8‑tonne trucks in 1945 to 44 tonnes nowadays. The European Parliament adopted a revised directive on 12 March 2024 authorising mega‑trucks to travel on European roads; they can measure up to 25 metres and weigh up to 60 tonnes, compared with the previous limits of 18.75 metres and 44 tonnes. This is a political and economic choice with considerable material effects: thickness, rigidity of sub‑bases and consolidation of soil and subsoil with lime and cement. Altogether, motorways are 10 times thicker than large roads from the late 19th century. In France, it takes an average of 30 tonnes of sand and aggregate to build one linear metre of motorway, 100 times more than cement and bitumen.  The material history of road networks is a history of quarrying and environmental damage. The traces of roads can also be seen in rivers emptied of their sediment, the notches of quarries in the hills and the furrows of dredgers extracting sand from the seabed. This material extraction, arguably the most significant in human history, has dramatic ecological consequences for rivers, groundwater tables, the rise of sea levels and saltwater in farmlands, as well as biodiversity. As sand is ubiquitous and very cheap, the history of roads is also the history of a local extractivism and environmental conflicts around the world.  Shoving and rutting is the bulging and rippling of the pavement surface. Once built, roads require extensive maintenance – the heavier the vehicles, the quicker the damage. From pothole repair to the full resurfacing of a road, maintenance contributes to keeping road users safe Credit: Yakov Oskanov / Alamy Once roads are built and extended, they need to be maintained to support the circulation of lorries and, by extension, commodities. This stage is becoming increasingly important as rail freight, which used to be important in countries such as France and the UK, is declining, accounting for no more than 10 per cent of the transport of commodities. Engineers might judge that a motorway is destined to last 20 years or so, but this prognosis will be significantly reduced with heavy traffic. The same applies to the thousands of motorway bridges: in the UK, nearly half of the 9,000 highway bridges are in poor condition; in France, 7 per cent of the 12,000 bridges are in danger of collapsing, as did Genoa’s Morandi bridge in 2018. If only light vehicles drove on it, this infrastructure would last much longer. This puts into perspective governments’ insistence on ‘greening’ the transport sector by targeting CO2 emissions alone, typically by promoting the use of electric vehicles. Public policies prioritising EVs do nothing to change the mass of roads or the issue of their maintenance – even if lorries were to run on clean air, massive quarrying would still be necessary. A similar argument plays out with regard to canals and ports, which have been constantly widened and deepened for decades to accommodate ever-larger oil tankers or container ships. The simple operation of these infrastructures, dimensioned for the circulation of commodities and not humans, requires permanent dredging of large volumes. The environmental problem of large transport infrastructure goes beyond the type of energy used: it is, at its root, free and globalised trade. ‘The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing’ As both a material and ideological object, the motorway fixes certain political choices in the landscape. Millions of kilometres of road continue to be asphalted, widened and thickened around the world to favour cars and lorries. In France, more than 80 per cent of today’s sand and aggregate extraction is used for civil engineering works – the rest goes to buildings. Even if no more buildings, roads or other infrastructures were to be built, phenomenal quantities of sand and aggregates would still need to be extracted in order to maintain existing road networks. The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing, adding new structures such as wildlife crossings, more maintaining.  Rising traffic levels are always deemed positive by governments for a country’s economy and development. As Christopher Wells shows in his 2014 book Car Country: An Environmental History, car use becomes necessary in an environment where everything has been planned for the car, from the location of public services and supermarkets to residential and office areas. Similarly, when an entire economy is based on globalised trade and just‑in‑time logistics, the lorry and the container ship become vital.  The final stage in the life of a piece of motorway infrastructure is dismantling. Like the other stages, this one is not a natural outcome but the fruit of political choices – which should be democratic – regarding how we wish to use existing roads. Dismantling, which is essential if we are to put an end to the global extractivism of sand and aggregates, does not mean destruction: if bicycles and pedestrians were to use them instead, maintenance would be minimal. This final stage requires a paradigm shift away from the eternal adaptation to increasing traffic. Replacing cars and lorries with public transport and rail freight would be a first step. But above all, a different political and spatial organisation of economic activities is necessary, and ultimately, an end to globalised, just-in-time trade and logistics. In 1978, a row of cars parked at a shopping centre in Connecticut was buried under a thick layer of gooey asphalt. The Ghost Parking Lot, one of the first projects by James Wines’ practice SITE, became a playground for skateboarders until it was removed in 2003. Images of this lumpy landscape serve as allegories of the damage caused by reliance on the automobile Credit: Project by SITE Lead image: Some road damage is beyond repair, as when a landslide caused a large chunk of the Gothenburg–Oslo motorway to collapse in 2023. Such dramatic events remind us of both the fragility of these seemingly robust infrastructures, and the damage that extensive construction does to the planet. Credit: Hanna Brunlöf Windell / TT / Shutterstock 2025-06-03 Reuben J Brown Share #how #much #does #your #road
    WWW.ARCHITECTURAL-REVIEW.COM
    How much does your road weigh?
    The ways roads are used, with ever larger and heavier vehicles, have dramatic consequences on the environment – and electric cars are not the answer Today, there is an average of 37 tonnes of road per inhabitant of the planet. The weight of the road network alone accounts for a third of all construction worldwide, and has grown exponentially in the 20th century. There is 10 times more bitumen, in mass, than there are living animals. Yet growth in the mass of roads does not automatically correspond to population growth, or translate into increased length of road networks. In wealthier countries, the number of metres of road per inhabitant has actually fallen over the last century. In the United States, for instance, between 1905 and 2015 the length of the network increased by a factor of 1.75 and the population by a factor of 3.8, compared with 21 for the mass of roads. Roads have become wider and, above all, much thicker. To understand the evolution of these parameters, and their environmental impact, it is helpful to trace the different stages in the life of the motorway.  Until the early 20th century, roads were used for various modes of transport, including horses, bicycles, pedestrians and trams; as a result of the construction of railways, road traffic even declined in some European countries in the 19th century. The main novelty brought by the motorway was that they would be reserved for motorised traffic. In several languages, the word itself – autostrada, autobahn, autoroute or motorway – speaks of this exclusivity.  Roman roads varied from simple corduroy roads, made by placing logs perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area, to paved roads, as this engraving from Jean Rondelet’s 19th‑century Traité Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de Bâtir shows. Using deep roadbeds of tamped rubble as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, major roads were often stone-paved, metalled, cambered for drainage and flanked by footpaths, bridleways and drainage ditches Like any major piece of infrastructure, motorways became the subject of ideological discourse, long before any shovel hit the ground; politicians underlined their role in the service of the nation, how they would contribute to progress, development, the economy, modernity and even civilisation. The inauguration ceremony for the construction of the first autostrada took place in March 1923, presided over by Italy’s prime minister Benito Mussolini. The second major motorway programme was announced by the Nazi government in 1933, with a national network planned to be around 7,000 kilometres long. In his 2017 book Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943, historian Massimo Moraglio shows how both programmes were used as propaganda tools by the regimes, most notably at the international road congresses in Milan in 1926 and Munich in 1934. In the European postwar era, the notion of the ‘civilising’ effect of roads persevered. In 1962, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then‑secretary of state for finances and later president of France, argued that expanded motorways would bring ‘progress, activity and life’. This discourse soon butted up against the realities of how motorways affected individuals and communities. In his 2011 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D Norton explores the history of resistance to the imposition of motorised traffic in North American cities. Until the 1920s, there was a perception that cars were dangerous newcomers, and that other street and road uses – especially walking – were more legitimate. Cars were associated with speed and danger; restrictions on motorists, especially speed limits, were routine.  Built between 1962 and 1970, the Westway was London’s first urban motorway, elevated above the city to use less land. Construction workers are seen stressing the longitudinal soffit cables inside the box section of the deck units to achieve the bearing capacity necessary to carry the weight of traffic Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy To gain domination over cities, motor vehicles had to win priority over other street uses. Rather than restricting the flow of vehicles to minimise the risk of road accidents, a specific infrastructure was dedicated to them: both inner‑city roads and motorways. Cutting through the landscape, the motorway had, by definition, to be inaccessible by any other means of transport than motorised vehicle. To guarantee the fluidity of traffic, the construction of imposing bridges, tunnels and interchanges is necessary, particularly at junctions with other roads, railways or canals. This prioritisation of one type of user inevitably impacts journeys for others; as space is fragmented, short journeys are lengthened for those trying to navigate space by foot or bicycle.  Enabling cars to drive at around 110–140km/h on motorways, as modern motorways do, directly impacts their design, with major environmental effects: the gradient has to be gentle (4 per cent), the curves long (1.5km in radius) and the lanes wide, to allow vehicles to overtake each other safely. As much terrain around the world is not naturally suited to these requirements, the earthworks are considerable: in France, the construction of a metre of highway requires moving some 100m3 of earth, and when the soil is soft, full of clay or peat, it is made firmer with hydraulic lime and cement before the highway’s first sub‑layers are laid. This material cost reinforces the criticisms levelled in the 1960s, by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, at urban planning that prioritised the personal motor vehicle. When roads are widened to accommodate more traffic, buildings are sliced and demolished, as happened in Dhaka’s Bhasantek Road in 2021 Credit: Dhaka Tribune Once built, the motorway is never inert. Motorway projects today generally anticipate future expansion (from 2×2 to 2×3 to 2×4 lanes), and include a large median strip of 12m between the lanes, with a view to adding new ones. Increases in speed and vehicle sizes have also translated into wider lanes, from 2.5m in 1945 to 3.5m today. The average contemporary motorway footprint is therefore 100 square metres per linear metre. Indeed, although the construction of a road is supposed to reduce congestion, it also generates new traffic and, therefore, new congestion. This is the principle of ‘induced traffic’: the provision of extra road capacity results in a greater volume of traffic. The Katy Freeway in Texas famously illustrates this dynamic. Built as a regular six‑lane highway in the 1960s, it was called the second worst bottleneck in the nation by 2004, wasting 25 million hours a year of commuter time. In 2011, the state of Texas invested US$2.8 billion to fix this problem, widening the road to a staggering total of 26 lanes. By 2014, the morning and afternoon traffic had both increased again. The vicious circle based on the induced traffic has been empirically demonstrated in most countries: traffic has continued to increase and congestion remains unresolved, leading to ever-increasing emissions. In the EU, transport is the only sector where greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past three decades, rising 33.5 per cent between 1990 and 2019. Transport accounts for around a fifth of global CO₂ emissions today, with three quarters of this figure linked to road transport. Houston’s Katy Freeway is one of the world’s widest motorways, with 26 lanes. Its last expansion, in 2008, was initially hailed as a success, but within five years, peak travel times were longer than before the expansion – a direct illustration of the principle of induced traffic Credit: Smiley N Pool / Houston Chronicle / Getty Like other large transport infrastructures such as ports and airports, motorways are designed for the largest and heaviest vehicles. Engineers, road administrations and politicians have known since the 1950s that one truck represents millions of cars: the impact of a vehicle on the roadway is exponential to its weight – an online ‘road damage calculator’ allows you to compare the damage done by different types of vehicles to the road. Over the years, heavier and heavier trucks have been authorised to operate on roads: from 8‑tonne trucks in 1945 to 44 tonnes nowadays. The European Parliament adopted a revised directive on 12 March 2024 authorising mega‑trucks to travel on European roads; they can measure up to 25 metres and weigh up to 60 tonnes, compared with the previous limits of 18.75 metres and 44 tonnes. This is a political and economic choice with considerable material effects: thickness, rigidity of sub‑bases and consolidation of soil and subsoil with lime and cement. Altogether, motorways are 10 times thicker than large roads from the late 19th century. In France, it takes an average of 30 tonnes of sand and aggregate to build one linear metre of motorway, 100 times more than cement and bitumen.  The material history of road networks is a history of quarrying and environmental damage. The traces of roads can also be seen in rivers emptied of their sediment, the notches of quarries in the hills and the furrows of dredgers extracting sand from the seabed. This material extraction, arguably the most significant in human history, has dramatic ecological consequences for rivers, groundwater tables, the rise of sea levels and saltwater in farmlands, as well as biodiversity. As sand is ubiquitous and very cheap, the history of roads is also the history of a local extractivism and environmental conflicts around the world.  Shoving and rutting is the bulging and rippling of the pavement surface. Once built, roads require extensive maintenance – the heavier the vehicles, the quicker the damage. From pothole repair to the full resurfacing of a road, maintenance contributes to keeping road users safe Credit: Yakov Oskanov / Alamy Once roads are built and extended, they need to be maintained to support the circulation of lorries and, by extension, commodities. This stage is becoming increasingly important as rail freight, which used to be important in countries such as France and the UK, is declining, accounting for no more than 10 per cent of the transport of commodities. Engineers might judge that a motorway is destined to last 20 years or so, but this prognosis will be significantly reduced with heavy traffic. The same applies to the thousands of motorway bridges: in the UK, nearly half of the 9,000 highway bridges are in poor condition; in France, 7 per cent of the 12,000 bridges are in danger of collapsing, as did Genoa’s Morandi bridge in 2018. If only light vehicles drove on it, this infrastructure would last much longer. This puts into perspective governments’ insistence on ‘greening’ the transport sector by targeting CO2 emissions alone, typically by promoting the use of electric vehicles (EVs). Public policies prioritising EVs do nothing to change the mass of roads or the issue of their maintenance – even if lorries were to run on clean air, massive quarrying would still be necessary. A similar argument plays out with regard to canals and ports, which have been constantly widened and deepened for decades to accommodate ever-larger oil tankers or container ships. The simple operation of these infrastructures, dimensioned for the circulation of commodities and not humans, requires permanent dredging of large volumes. The environmental problem of large transport infrastructure goes beyond the type of energy used: it is, at its root, free and globalised trade. ‘The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing’ As both a material and ideological object, the motorway fixes certain political choices in the landscape. Millions of kilometres of road continue to be asphalted, widened and thickened around the world to favour cars and lorries. In France, more than 80 per cent of today’s sand and aggregate extraction is used for civil engineering works – the rest goes to buildings. Even if no more buildings, roads or other infrastructures were to be built, phenomenal quantities of sand and aggregates would still need to be extracted in order to maintain existing road networks. The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing, adding new structures such as wildlife crossings, more maintaining.  Rising traffic levels are always deemed positive by governments for a country’s economy and development. As Christopher Wells shows in his 2014 book Car Country: An Environmental History, car use becomes necessary in an environment where everything has been planned for the car, from the location of public services and supermarkets to residential and office areas. Similarly, when an entire economy is based on globalised trade and just‑in‑time logistics (to the point that many service economies could not produce their own personal protective equipment in the midst of a pandemic), the lorry and the container ship become vital.  The final stage in the life of a piece of motorway infrastructure is dismantling. Like the other stages, this one is not a natural outcome but the fruit of political choices – which should be democratic – regarding how we wish to use existing roads. Dismantling, which is essential if we are to put an end to the global extractivism of sand and aggregates, does not mean destruction: if bicycles and pedestrians were to use them instead, maintenance would be minimal. This final stage requires a paradigm shift away from the eternal adaptation to increasing traffic. Replacing cars and lorries with public transport and rail freight would be a first step. But above all, a different political and spatial organisation of economic activities is necessary, and ultimately, an end to globalised, just-in-time trade and logistics. In 1978, a row of cars parked at a shopping centre in Connecticut was buried under a thick layer of gooey asphalt. The Ghost Parking Lot, one of the first projects by James Wines’ practice SITE, became a playground for skateboarders until it was removed in 2003. Images of this lumpy landscape serve as allegories of the damage caused by reliance on the automobile Credit: Project by SITE Lead image: Some road damage is beyond repair, as when a landslide caused a large chunk of the Gothenburg–Oslo motorway to collapse in 2023. Such dramatic events remind us of both the fragility of these seemingly robust infrastructures, and the damage that extensive construction does to the planet. Credit: Hanna Brunlöf Windell / TT / Shutterstock 2025-06-03 Reuben J Brown Share
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  • Prelude To Summer (June 2025 Wallpapers Edition)

    There’s an artist in everyone. Some bring their ideas to life with digital tools, others capture the perfect moment with a camera or love to grab pen and paper to create little doodles or pieces of lettering. And even if you think you’re far from being an artist, well, why not explore it? It might just be hidden somewhere deep inside of you.

    For more than 14 years already our monthly wallpapers series has been the perfect opportunity to do just that: to break out of your daily routine and get fully immersed in a creative little project. This month is no exception, of course.

    For this post, artists and designers from across the globe once again put their creative skills to the test and designed beautiful, unique, and inspiring desktop wallpapers to accompany you through the new month. You’ll find their artworks compiled below, along with a selection of June favorites from our wallpapers archives that are just too good to be forgotten. A huge thank-you to everyone who shared their designs with us this time around — you’re smashing!

    If you, too, would like to get featured in one of our next wallpapers posts, please don’t hesitate to submit your design. We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with!

    You can click on every image to see a larger preview.
    We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

    June Is For Nature
    “In this illustration, Earth is planting a little tree — taking care, smiling, doing its part. It’s a reminder that even small acts make a difference. Since World Environment Day falls in June, there’s no better time to give back to the planet.” — Designed by Ginger IT Solutions from Serbia.

    preview
    with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1020, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1020, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Tastes Of June
    “A vibrant June wallpaper featuring strawberries and fresh oranges, capturing the essence of early summer with bright colors and seasonal charm.” — Designed by Libra Fire from Serbia.

    preview
    with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    A Bibliophile’s Shelf
    “Some of my favorite things to do are reading and listening to music. I know that there are a lot of people that also enjoy these hobbies, so I thought it would be a perfect thing to represent in my wallpaper.” — Designed by Cecelia Otis from the United States.

    preview
    with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Solana
    “Spanish origin, meaning ‘sunshine’.” — Designed by Bhabna Basak from India.

    preview
    with calendar: 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Here Comes The Sun
    Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

    preview
    with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160
    without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160

    Nature’s Melody
    “With eyes closed and music on, she blends into the rhythm of the earth, where every note breathes nature.” — Designed by Design Studio from India.

    preview
    with calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Silent Glimmer
    “In the hush of shadows, a single amber eye pierces the dark — silent, watchful, eternal.” — Designed by Kasturi Palmal from India.

    preview
    with calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Ice Cream
    “To me, ice cream is one of the most iconic symbols of summer. So, what better way to represent the first month of summer than through an iconic summer snack.” — Designed by Danielle May from Pennsylvania, United States.

    preview
    with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Silly Cats
    “I really loved the fun content aware effect and wanted to play around with it for this wallpaper with some cute cats.” — Designed by Italia Storey from the United States.

    preview
    with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    In Case Of Nothing To Do
    Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

    preview
    with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160
    without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160

    Pink Hours
    “With long-lasting days, it is pleasant to spend hours walking at dusk. This photo was taken in an illuminated garden.” — Designed by Philippe Brouard from France.

    preview
    with calendar: 1024x768, 1366x768, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 2880x1800
    without calendar: 1024x768, 1366x768, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 2880x1800

    What’s The Best That Could Happen?
    Designed by Grace DiNella from Doylestown, PA, United States.

    preview
    with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x900, 1400x1050, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x900, 1400x1050, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Purrsuit
    “Recently I have been indulging in fishing as a means of a hobby, and the combined peace and thrill of the activity inspires me. I also love cats, so I thought combining the two subjects would make a stellar wallpaper, especially considering that these two topics already fall hand in hand with each other!” — Designed by Lilianna Damian from Scranton, PA, United States.

    preview
    with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Happy Best Friends Day!
    “Today’s all about celebrating the ones who laugh with us, cry with us, and always have our backs — our best friends. Whether it’s been years or just a few months, every moment with them means something special. Tag your ride-or-die, your soul sibling, your partner in crime - and let them know just how much they mean to you.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

    preview
    with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Travel Time
    “June is our favorite time of the year because the keenly anticipated sunny weather inspires us to travel. Stuck at the airport, waiting for our flight but still excited about wayfaring, we often start dreaming about the new places we are going to visit. Where will you travel to this summer? Wherever you go, we wish you a pleasant journey!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Summer Coziness
    “I’ve waited for this summer more than I waited for any other summer since I was a kid. I dream of watermelon, strawberries, and lots of colors.” — Designed by Kate Jameson from the United States.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 1024x1024, 1280x720, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 2560x1440

    Deep Dive
    “Summer rains, sunny days, and a whole month to enjoy. Dive deep inside your passions and let them guide you.” — Designed by Ana Masnikosa from Belgrade, Serbia.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    All-Seeing Eye
    Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

    preview
    without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160

    Join The Wave
    “The month of warmth and nice weather is finally here. We found inspiration in the World Oceans Day which occurs on June 8th and celebrates the wave of change worldwide. Join the wave and dive in!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Create Your Own Path
    “Nice weather has arrived! Clean the dust off your bike and explore your hometown from a different angle! Invite a friend or loved one and share the joy of cycling. Whether you decide to go for a city ride or a ride in nature, the time spent on a bicycle will make you feel free and happy. So don’t wait, take your bike and call your loved one because happiness is greater only when it is shared. Happy World Bike Day!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Oh, The Places You Will Go!
    “In celebration of high school and college graduates ready to make their way in the world!” — Designed by Bri Loesch from the United States.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Merry-Go-Round
    Designed by Xenia Latii from Germany.

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    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Summer Surf
    “Summer vibes…” — Designed by Antun Hirsman from Croatia.

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    without calendar: 640x480, 1152x864, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1440, 2650x1440

    Expand Your Horizons
    “It’s summer! Go out, explore, expand your horizons!” — Designed by Dorvan Davoudi from Canada.

    preview
    without calendar: 800x480, 800x600, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Gravity
    Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium.

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    without calendar: 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Yoga Is A Light, Which Once Lit, Will Never Dim
    “You cannot always control what goes on outside. You can always control what goes on inside. Breathe free, live and let your body feel the vibrations and positiveness that you possess inside you. Yoga can rejuvenate and refresh you and ensure that you are on the journey from self to the self. Happy International Yoga Day!” — Designed by Acodez IT Solutions from India.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Evolution
    “We’ve all grown to know the month of June through different life stages. From toddlers to adults with children, we’ve enjoyed the weather with rides on our bikes. As we evolve, so do our wheels!” — Designed by Jason Keist from the United States.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 800x600, 768x1024, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1920x1080, 2560x1440

    Summer Party
    Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

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    Splash
    Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

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    without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160

    Reef Days
    “June brings the start of summer full of bright colors, happy memories, and traveling. What better way to portray the goodness of summer than through an ocean folk art themed wallpaper. This statement wallpaper gives me feelings of summer and I hope to share that same feeling with others.” — Designed by Taylor Davidson from Kentucky.

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    without calendar: 480x800, 1024x1024, 1242x2208, 1280x1024

    Solstice Sunset
    “June 21 marks the longest day of the year for the Northern Hemisphere — and sunsets like these will be getting earlier and earlier after that!” — Designed by James Mitchell from the United Kingdom.

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    without calendar: 1280x720, 1280x800, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800

    Wildlife Revival
    “This planet is the home that we share with all other forms of life and it is our obligation and sacred duty to protect it.” — Designed by LibraFire from Serbia.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Pineapple Summer Pop
    “I love creating fun and feminine illustrations and designs. I was inspired by juicy tropical pineapples to celebrate the start of summer.” — Designed by Brooke Glaser from Honolulu, Hawaii.

    preview
    without calendar: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x720, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Handmade Pony Gone Wild
    “This piece was inspired by the My Little Pony cartoon series. Because those ponies irritated me so much as a kid, I always wanted to create a bad-ass pony.” — Designed by Zaheed Manuel from South Africa.

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    without calendar: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800

    Window Of Opportunity
    “‘Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better,’ A.E.” — Designed by Antun Hiršman from Croatia.

    preview
    without calendar: 1024x768, 1280x960, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1440, 2560x1440

    Viking Meat War
    Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain.

    preview
    without calendar: 320x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1050, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 2880x1800
    #prelude #summer #june #wallpapers #edition
    Prelude To Summer (June 2025 Wallpapers Edition)
    There’s an artist in everyone. Some bring their ideas to life with digital tools, others capture the perfect moment with a camera or love to grab pen and paper to create little doodles or pieces of lettering. And even if you think you’re far from being an artist, well, why not explore it? It might just be hidden somewhere deep inside of you. For more than 14 years already our monthly wallpapers series has been the perfect opportunity to do just that: to break out of your daily routine and get fully immersed in a creative little project. This month is no exception, of course. For this post, artists and designers from across the globe once again put their creative skills to the test and designed beautiful, unique, and inspiring desktop wallpapers to accompany you through the new month. You’ll find their artworks compiled below, along with a selection of June favorites from our wallpapers archives that are just too good to be forgotten. A huge thank-you to everyone who shared their designs with us this time around — you’re smashing! If you, too, would like to get featured in one of our next wallpapers posts, please don’t hesitate to submit your design. We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with! You can click on every image to see a larger preview. We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. June Is For Nature “In this illustration, Earth is planting a little tree — taking care, smiling, doing its part. It’s a reminder that even small acts make a difference. Since World Environment Day falls in June, there’s no better time to give back to the planet.” — Designed by Ginger IT Solutions from Serbia. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1020, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1020, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Tastes Of June “A vibrant June wallpaper featuring strawberries and fresh oranges, capturing the essence of early summer with bright colors and seasonal charm.” — Designed by Libra Fire from Serbia. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 A Bibliophile’s Shelf “Some of my favorite things to do are reading and listening to music. I know that there are a lot of people that also enjoy these hobbies, so I thought it would be a perfect thing to represent in my wallpaper.” — Designed by Cecelia Otis from the United States. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Solana “Spanish origin, meaning ‘sunshine’.” — Designed by Bhabna Basak from India. preview with calendar: 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Here Comes The Sun Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Nature’s Melody “With eyes closed and music on, she blends into the rhythm of the earth, where every note breathes nature.” — Designed by Design Studio from India. preview with calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Silent Glimmer “In the hush of shadows, a single amber eye pierces the dark — silent, watchful, eternal.” — Designed by Kasturi Palmal from India. preview with calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Ice Cream “To me, ice cream is one of the most iconic symbols of summer. So, what better way to represent the first month of summer than through an iconic summer snack.” — Designed by Danielle May from Pennsylvania, United States. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Silly Cats “I really loved the fun content aware effect and wanted to play around with it for this wallpaper with some cute cats.” — Designed by Italia Storey from the United States. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 In Case Of Nothing To Do Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Pink Hours “With long-lasting days, it is pleasant to spend hours walking at dusk. This photo was taken in an illuminated garden.” — Designed by Philippe Brouard from France. preview with calendar: 1024x768, 1366x768, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 2880x1800 without calendar: 1024x768, 1366x768, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 2880x1800 What’s The Best That Could Happen? Designed by Grace DiNella from Doylestown, PA, United States. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x900, 1400x1050, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x900, 1400x1050, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Purrsuit “Recently I have been indulging in fishing as a means of a hobby, and the combined peace and thrill of the activity inspires me. I also love cats, so I thought combining the two subjects would make a stellar wallpaper, especially considering that these two topics already fall hand in hand with each other!” — Designed by Lilianna Damian from Scranton, PA, United States. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Happy Best Friends Day! “Today’s all about celebrating the ones who laugh with us, cry with us, and always have our backs — our best friends. Whether it’s been years or just a few months, every moment with them means something special. Tag your ride-or-die, your soul sibling, your partner in crime - and let them know just how much they mean to you.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Travel Time “June is our favorite time of the year because the keenly anticipated sunny weather inspires us to travel. Stuck at the airport, waiting for our flight but still excited about wayfaring, we often start dreaming about the new places we are going to visit. Where will you travel to this summer? Wherever you go, we wish you a pleasant journey!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Summer Coziness “I’ve waited for this summer more than I waited for any other summer since I was a kid. I dream of watermelon, strawberries, and lots of colors.” — Designed by Kate Jameson from the United States. preview without calendar: 320x480, 1024x1024, 1280x720, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 2560x1440 Deep Dive “Summer rains, sunny days, and a whole month to enjoy. Dive deep inside your passions and let them guide you.” — Designed by Ana Masnikosa from Belgrade, Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 All-Seeing Eye Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Join The Wave “The month of warmth and nice weather is finally here. We found inspiration in the World Oceans Day which occurs on June 8th and celebrates the wave of change worldwide. Join the wave and dive in!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Create Your Own Path “Nice weather has arrived! Clean the dust off your bike and explore your hometown from a different angle! Invite a friend or loved one and share the joy of cycling. Whether you decide to go for a city ride or a ride in nature, the time spent on a bicycle will make you feel free and happy. So don’t wait, take your bike and call your loved one because happiness is greater only when it is shared. Happy World Bike Day!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Oh, The Places You Will Go! “In celebration of high school and college graduates ready to make their way in the world!” — Designed by Bri Loesch from the United States. preview without calendar: 320x480, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Merry-Go-Round Designed by Xenia Latii from Germany. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Summer Surf “Summer vibes…” — Designed by Antun Hirsman from Croatia. preview without calendar: 640x480, 1152x864, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1440, 2650x1440 Expand Your Horizons “It’s summer! Go out, explore, expand your horizons!” — Designed by Dorvan Davoudi from Canada. preview without calendar: 800x480, 800x600, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Gravity Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium. preview without calendar: 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Yoga Is A Light, Which Once Lit, Will Never Dim “You cannot always control what goes on outside. You can always control what goes on inside. Breathe free, live and let your body feel the vibrations and positiveness that you possess inside you. Yoga can rejuvenate and refresh you and ensure that you are on the journey from self to the self. Happy International Yoga Day!” — Designed by Acodez IT Solutions from India. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Evolution “We’ve all grown to know the month of June through different life stages. From toddlers to adults with children, we’ve enjoyed the weather with rides on our bikes. As we evolve, so do our wheels!” — Designed by Jason Keist from the United States. preview without calendar: 320x480, 800x600, 768x1024, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1920x1080, 2560x1440 Summer Party Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Splash Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Reef Days “June brings the start of summer full of bright colors, happy memories, and traveling. What better way to portray the goodness of summer than through an ocean folk art themed wallpaper. This statement wallpaper gives me feelings of summer and I hope to share that same feeling with others.” — Designed by Taylor Davidson from Kentucky. preview without calendar: 480x800, 1024x1024, 1242x2208, 1280x1024 Solstice Sunset “June 21 marks the longest day of the year for the Northern Hemisphere — and sunsets like these will be getting earlier and earlier after that!” — Designed by James Mitchell from the United Kingdom. preview without calendar: 1280x720, 1280x800, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800 Wildlife Revival “This planet is the home that we share with all other forms of life and it is our obligation and sacred duty to protect it.” — Designed by LibraFire from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Pineapple Summer Pop “I love creating fun and feminine illustrations and designs. I was inspired by juicy tropical pineapples to celebrate the start of summer.” — Designed by Brooke Glaser from Honolulu, Hawaii. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x720, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Handmade Pony Gone Wild “This piece was inspired by the My Little Pony cartoon series. Because those ponies irritated me so much as a kid, I always wanted to create a bad-ass pony.” — Designed by Zaheed Manuel from South Africa. preview without calendar: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800 Window Of Opportunity “‘Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better,’ A.E.” — Designed by Antun Hiršman from Croatia. preview without calendar: 1024x768, 1280x960, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Viking Meat War Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 320x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1050, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 2880x1800 #prelude #summer #june #wallpapers #edition
    SMASHINGMAGAZINE.COM
    Prelude To Summer (June 2025 Wallpapers Edition)
    There’s an artist in everyone. Some bring their ideas to life with digital tools, others capture the perfect moment with a camera or love to grab pen and paper to create little doodles or pieces of lettering. And even if you think you’re far from being an artist, well, why not explore it? It might just be hidden somewhere deep inside of you. For more than 14 years already our monthly wallpapers series has been the perfect opportunity to do just that: to break out of your daily routine and get fully immersed in a creative little project. This month is no exception, of course. For this post, artists and designers from across the globe once again put their creative skills to the test and designed beautiful, unique, and inspiring desktop wallpapers to accompany you through the new month. You’ll find their artworks compiled below, along with a selection of June favorites from our wallpapers archives that are just too good to be forgotten. A huge thank-you to everyone who shared their designs with us this time around — you’re smashing! If you, too, would like to get featured in one of our next wallpapers posts, please don’t hesitate to submit your design. We can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with! You can click on every image to see a larger preview. We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. June Is For Nature “In this illustration, Earth is planting a little tree — taking care, smiling, doing its part. It’s a reminder that even small acts make a difference. Since World Environment Day falls in June, there’s no better time to give back to the planet.” — Designed by Ginger IT Solutions from Serbia. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1020, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1020, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Tastes Of June “A vibrant June wallpaper featuring strawberries and fresh oranges, capturing the essence of early summer with bright colors and seasonal charm.” — Designed by Libra Fire from Serbia. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 A Bibliophile’s Shelf “Some of my favorite things to do are reading and listening to music. I know that there are a lot of people that also enjoy these hobbies, so I thought it would be a perfect thing to represent in my wallpaper.” — Designed by Cecelia Otis from the United States. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Solana “Spanish origin, meaning ‘sunshine’.” — Designed by Bhabna Basak from India. preview with calendar: 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Here Comes The Sun Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Nature’s Melody “With eyes closed and music on, she blends into the rhythm of the earth, where every note breathes nature.” — Designed by Design Studio from India. preview with calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Silent Glimmer “In the hush of shadows, a single amber eye pierces the dark — silent, watchful, eternal.” — Designed by Kasturi Palmal from India. preview with calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 800x600, 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Ice Cream “To me, ice cream is one of the most iconic symbols of summer. So, what better way to represent the first month of summer than through an iconic summer snack.” — Designed by Danielle May from Pennsylvania, United States. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Silly Cats “I really loved the fun content aware effect and wanted to play around with it for this wallpaper with some cute cats.” — Designed by Italia Storey from the United States. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 In Case Of Nothing To Do Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Pink Hours “With long-lasting days, it is pleasant to spend hours walking at dusk. This photo was taken in an illuminated garden.” — Designed by Philippe Brouard from France. preview with calendar: 1024x768, 1366x768, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 2880x1800 without calendar: 1024x768, 1366x768, 1600x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2560x1600, 2880x1800 What’s The Best That Could Happen? Designed by Grace DiNella from Doylestown, PA, United States. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x900, 1400x1050, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x900, 1400x1050, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Purrsuit “Recently I have been indulging in fishing as a means of a hobby, and the combined peace and thrill of the activity inspires me. I also love cats, so I thought combining the two subjects would make a stellar wallpaper, especially considering that these two topics already fall hand in hand with each other!” — Designed by Lilianna Damian from Scranton, PA, United States. preview with calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Happy Best Friends Day! “Today’s all about celebrating the ones who laugh with us, cry with us, and always have our backs — our best friends. Whether it’s been years or just a few months, every moment with them means something special. Tag your ride-or-die, your soul sibling, your partner in crime - and let them know just how much they mean to you.” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview with calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Travel Time “June is our favorite time of the year because the keenly anticipated sunny weather inspires us to travel. Stuck at the airport, waiting for our flight but still excited about wayfaring, we often start dreaming about the new places we are going to visit. Where will you travel to this summer? Wherever you go, we wish you a pleasant journey!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Summer Coziness “I’ve waited for this summer more than I waited for any other summer since I was a kid. I dream of watermelon, strawberries, and lots of colors.” — Designed by Kate Jameson from the United States. preview without calendar: 320x480, 1024x1024, 1280x720, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 2560x1440 Deep Dive “Summer rains, sunny days, and a whole month to enjoy. Dive deep inside your passions and let them guide you.” — Designed by Ana Masnikosa from Belgrade, Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 All-Seeing Eye Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Join The Wave “The month of warmth and nice weather is finally here. We found inspiration in the World Oceans Day which occurs on June 8th and celebrates the wave of change worldwide. Join the wave and dive in!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Create Your Own Path “Nice weather has arrived! Clean the dust off your bike and explore your hometown from a different angle! Invite a friend or loved one and share the joy of cycling. Whether you decide to go for a city ride or a ride in nature, the time spent on a bicycle will make you feel free and happy. So don’t wait, take your bike and call your loved one because happiness is greater only when it is shared. Happy World Bike Day!” — Designed by PopArt Studio from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Oh, The Places You Will Go! “In celebration of high school and college graduates ready to make their way in the world!” — Designed by Bri Loesch from the United States. preview without calendar: 320x480, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Merry-Go-Round Designed by Xenia Latii from Germany. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Summer Surf “Summer vibes…” — Designed by Antun Hirsman from Croatia. preview without calendar: 640x480, 1152x864, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1440, 2650x1440 Expand Your Horizons “It’s summer! Go out, explore, expand your horizons!” — Designed by Dorvan Davoudi from Canada. preview without calendar: 800x480, 800x600, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Gravity Designed by Elise Vanoorbeek from Belgium. preview without calendar: 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Yoga Is A Light, Which Once Lit, Will Never Dim “You cannot always control what goes on outside. You can always control what goes on inside. Breathe free, live and let your body feel the vibrations and positiveness that you possess inside you. Yoga can rejuvenate and refresh you and ensure that you are on the journey from self to the self. Happy International Yoga Day!” — Designed by Acodez IT Solutions from India. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Evolution “We’ve all grown to know the month of June through different life stages. From toddlers to adults with children, we’ve enjoyed the weather with rides on our bikes. As we evolve, so do our wheels!” — Designed by Jason Keist from the United States. preview without calendar: 320x480, 800x600, 768x1024, 1280x800, 1280x1024, 1440x900, 1920x1080, 2560x1440 Summer Party Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Splash Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 3840x2160 Reef Days “June brings the start of summer full of bright colors, happy memories, and traveling. What better way to portray the goodness of summer than through an ocean folk art themed wallpaper. This statement wallpaper gives me feelings of summer and I hope to share that same feeling with others.” — Designed by Taylor Davidson from Kentucky. preview without calendar: 480x800, 1024x1024, 1242x2208, 1280x1024 Solstice Sunset “June 21 marks the longest day of the year for the Northern Hemisphere — and sunsets like these will be getting earlier and earlier after that!” — Designed by James Mitchell from the United Kingdom. preview without calendar: 1280x720, 1280x800, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800 Wildlife Revival “This planet is the home that we share with all other forms of life and it is our obligation and sacred duty to protect it.” — Designed by LibraFire from Serbia. preview without calendar: 320x480, 640x480, 800x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1152x864, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Pineapple Summer Pop “I love creating fun and feminine illustrations and designs. I was inspired by juicy tropical pineapples to celebrate the start of summer.” — Designed by Brooke Glaser from Honolulu, Hawaii. preview without calendar: 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x720, 1280x720, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Handmade Pony Gone Wild “This piece was inspired by the My Little Pony cartoon series. Because those ponies irritated me so much as a kid, I always wanted to create a bad-ass pony.” — Designed by Zaheed Manuel from South Africa. preview without calendar: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1200, 2560x1440, 2880x1800 Window Of Opportunity “‘Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better,’ A.E.” — Designed by Antun Hiršman from Croatia. preview without calendar: 1024x768, 1280x960, 1366x768, 1440x900, 1600x1200, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1440, 2560x1440 Viking Meat War Designed by Ricardo Gimenes from Spain. preview without calendar: 320x480, 1024x768, 1024x1024, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1366x768, 1400x1050, 1440x900, 1600x1050, 1600x1200, 1680x1050, 1680x1200, 1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2560x1440, 2880x1800
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