Design Scenarios for six cities: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, Rio de Janeiro

Leading to a major exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in collaboration with MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna, the last workshop and a major conference related to Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities will take place in Vienna, 10–14 June 2014.

“In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities. Most will be poor. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. Over the next years, city authorities, urban planners, and designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to avoid major social and economical catastrophes, working together to ensure these expanding megacities will remain habitable,” says Pedro Gadanho, MoMa Curator.
To engage this international debate, Uneven Growth brings together six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners to examine new architectural possibilities for six global metropolises: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro.

Uneven Growth seeks to challenge current assumptions about the relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up, and top-down urban development, and to address potential changes in the roles architects and urban designers might assume vis-à-vis the increasing inequality of current urban development. The resulting proposals, which will be presented at MoMA in November 2014, will consider how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can respond to alterations in the nature of public space, housing, mobility, spatial justice, environmental conditions, and other major issues in near-future urban contexts.

Urban Case Study Teams

  • New York: Situ Studio, New York (USA), and Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), New York (USA) and Rotterdam (Netherlands)
  • Rio de Janeiro: RUA Arquitetos, Rio de Janeiro (Brasil) and MAS ETH Urban Design, Zurich (Switzerland)
  • Mumbai: URBZ, Mumbai (India) and POPlab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge (USA)
  • Lagos: NLÉ Architects, Lagos (Nigeria), and Inteligencias Colectivas, Madrid (Spain)
  • Hong Kong: MAP Office, Hong Kong (China), and Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University, New York (USA)
  • Istanbul: Superpool, Istanbul (Turkey), and Atelier D’Architecture Autogérée, Paris (France)

 MoMA, in collaboration with MAK announces the final workshop of Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. The resulting proposals will be presented at MoMA in November 2014, and at MAK in June 2015.

The six interdisciplinary teams will prepare exhibition design content at MAK in a workshop open to student participation. A public presentation of the results will be held on 14 June 2014 with a keynote lecture by Ricky Burdett, LSE Cities, London.

The workshop will be accompanied by a conference and discussion with the curator Pedro Gadanho, MoMA and international respondents Alice Rawsthorn, International New York Times, London; Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, MAK; Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; and Hani Rashid, Asymptote Architecture, New York, held on 11 June 2014.

Interested architects, as well as architecture and urban design students, are invited to apply to a weeklong workshop at the MAK, Vienna for the exhibition Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities.