Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities

The Spanish initiative Inteligencias Colectivas participates in an exhibition where MoMA examines new architectural possibilities that address the rapid and unequal evolution of cities around the globe.

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 the same model as Rising Currents and Foreclosed, 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.

The Spanish initiative Inteligencias Colectivas participates in this international debate together with five 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.

Urban case study teams

• 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.
• Mumbai: URBZ: user-generated cities, Mumbai, and Ensamble Studio/MIT-POPlab, Madrid and Cambridge.
• Lagos: NLÉ, Lagos and Amsterdam, and Zoohaus/Inteligencias Colectivas, Madrid.
• Hong Kong: MAP Office, Hong Kong, and Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University, New York.
• Istanbul: Superpool, Istanbul, and Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris.