The exhibition is realized by MoMA in collaboration with the MAK

In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. To initiate this international debate, Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities brings together six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners to examine new architectural possibilities for six global metropolises. The resulting design scenarios seek 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 play vis-à-vis the increasing inequality of current urban development.

  • Curator: Pedro Gadanho, Curator of Contemporary Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
  • Curatorial Coordination: Bärbel Vischer, Curator of the MAK Contemporary Art Collection
MUMBAI by URBZ + Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab - MoMA’s Schemes for Fixing Urban Problems Are Either Too Dainty or Too Sweeping
MUMBAI by URBZ + Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab - MoMA’s Schemes for Fixing Urban Problems Are Either Too Dainty or Too Sweeping - Here, too, of course, the inevitable questions of implementation loom on the immediate horizon. How can this vision of the commons (and of commoningpractices) be realized when the dominant class interests and political alliances in each megacity continue to promote a profit-oriented, speculation-driven growth model? Where are the social forces and political coalitions that could counteract that model, and would they really opt for the level of collective coordination and communal sharing proposed by these design teams? ... Just as importantly, given the remit of the MoMA curatorial team, their proposals also articulate a more socially engaged, politically combative vision of what the design disciplines have to offer the urban public sphere in an era of deepening inequality and highly polarized visions of our global urban future. Given the difficulties that some of the design teams appear to have had with the tactical urbanism framework, one cannot help but wonder whether it offered them too narrow a terrain, or too limited a tool kit, for confronting the vast, variegated challenges that are currently emerging in the world’s megacities. In his preface to the exhibition catalogue, MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll anticipates this conundrum, noting the gap between the “modest scale of some [tactical] interventions” and the “dimensions of the worldwide urban and economic crisis that so urgently needs to be addressed.”19 In the face of these challenges, one can hardly reproach the teams that opted to venture forth with big, ambitious proposals rather than restricting themselves to mere “tactics.”