6 Cities Built Where Nobody Should Be Able to Live

Venice has no ground under it. The entire stone city stands on millions of wooden piles hammered into lagoon mud a thousand years ago — timber that never rotted, because there's no oxygen down there to rot it. Mexico City drained a lake and built twenty million people on the mud. It sinks tens of centimeters a year, and the old lakebed turns earthquakes hundreds of kilometers away into local catastrophes. Norilsk has 175,000 people in the Arctic and not a single road connecting it to the rest of Russia. Coober Pedy gave up on the surface entirely and moved into the rock. Kiruna is physically driving itself across the tundra — in August 2025 they lifted a 672-tonne church off its foundations and rolled it five kilometers to a new town center, because the mine underneath is eating the old one. And in Whittier, Alaska, almost the entire population lives in one building, behind a single-lane tunnel that closes at night. Six cities that shouldn't exist — and the engineering bill that never stops arriving. #Engineering #Cities #Documentary