Chișinăuafter dark
One night over the city, from ten in the evening to the first trolleybus. Every line of light is a real street. Scroll, and the hours pass.
The centre still runs on its old grid.
Ștefan cel Mare, Grigore Vieru, the long straight streets laid out in the nineteenth century. White streaks are cars coming one way, red streaks are cars going the other. The pale blue lines are the trolleybus routes, a network that has run since 1949.
Towards midnight the city thins to its bones.
The side streets go dark first. What stays lit are the boulevards that tie the districts together, a few taxis, a delivery van, someone driving home from a late shift.
Botanica, from closer.
A district of nine and sixteen floor panel blocks south-east of the centre, along bulevardul Dacia. From up here it is a grid of streets. Down there it is thousands of windows.
One block, nine floors, 144 flats.
Four entrances, four flats to a landing. Every lit window is someone still up: a night shift, an exam, a baby, a television nobody is watching. Keep scrolling and the hours pass over it.
The stairwell bulbs burn all night, and a few have gone. The yellow pipe along the front is the gas main, as on most blocks in Moldova.
Four in the morning is the quietest hour.
- Flats with a light on
- 10 of 144
- Traffic, against ten in the evening
- 10%
- Streets drawn
- 6,909
The streets are real, from OpenStreetMap. The traffic and the windows are a model of a night, not a measurement. How it is made