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 economic catastrophes, working together to ensure these expanding megacities will remain habitable.
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. Following on the same model of the MoMA exhibitions Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront and Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, each team will develop proposals for a specific city in a series of workshops that occur over the course of a 14-month initiative.
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:
Hong Kong: MAP Office, Hong Kong, and Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University, New York
Istanbul: Superpool, Istanbul, and Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris
Lagos: NLÉ, Lagos and Amsterdam, and Zoohaus/Inteligencias Colectivas, Madrid
Mumbai: URBZ: user-generated cities, Mumbai, and Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab, Madrid and Cambridge
New York: SITU Studio, New York, and Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), Rotterdam and New York
Rio de Janeiro: RUA Arquitetos, Rio de Janeiro, and MAS Urban Design, ETH Zurich
View reflections on the Uneven Growth curatorial process at post, the online platform of MoMA’s research initiative Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age (C-MAP).
Related Programming
Vienna Workshop and Conference
MoMA, in collaboration with the MAK — Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna, announces the final workshop of Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. 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 June 14, 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.
Conference
Mahatma Gandhi Road in Dharavi, Mumbai. 2009. Photo © URBZ MAK Lecture Hall
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
7:00–9.00 p.m.
Workshop Results Presentation
MAK Lecture Hall
Saturday, June 14, 2014
2:00–6:00 p.m.
Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art.
The exhibition at MoMA is organized by Pedro Gadanho, Curator, and Phoebe Springstubb, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
