Criticism
Vinci is involved in construction of the first 43 km of the Moscow-St.Petersburg toll road through the valuable Khimki Forest. This construction has raised many protests in Russia, 75% of the local community – about 208,000 citizens of Khimki – oppose the project. There have also been numerous human rights abuses surrounding the project, with journalists and activists arrested, assaulted, and even killed.
Furthermore, Vinci has caused protests surrounding its project to build an airport near Nantes "Notre Dame des Landes" that is supposed to become the third biggest airport of France on 2000 hectares of bocage and humid areas with an acknowledged social and ecological value. This project which is considered to be a 'useless imposed mega-project' is financed through a public-private partnership with profits going to Vinci. As of November 2012, protests are ongoing to prevent the expulsion of mostly villagers and farmers who struggle to protect their environment and are supported both on a national and international level.
Read more about this topic: Vinci (construction)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)