The City Exhibition (2019)

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

São Paulo: A Graphic Biography
Felipe Correa

While the history of São Paulo dates back more than 450 years, most of its growth took place after World War II as the city’s major economic engine shifted from agriculture to industry. Today, as São Paulo evolves into a service economy hub, Felipe Correa argues, the city must carefully examine how to better integrate its extensive inner city post-industrial land into contemporary urban uses. In São Paulo: A Graphic Biography, Correa presents a comprehensive portrait of Brazil’s largest city, narrating its fast paced growth through archival material, photography, original drawings, and text. Additional essays from scholars in fields such as landscape architecture, ecology, governance, and public health offer a series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the city’s history and development.

Beyond presenting the first history of Paulista urban form and carefully detailing the formative processes that gave shape to this manufacturing capital, São Paulo shows how the city can transform its post-industrial lands into a series of inner city mixed-use affordable housing districts. By reorienting how we think about these spaces, the exhibition offers a compelling vision of a much needed urban restructuring that can help alleviate the extreme socioeconomic divide between city center and periphery. This twenty-first century urban blueprint thus constitutes an impressive work of research and presents a unique perspective on how cities can imagine their future.

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

The Big Equalizer
ORU (Oficina de Resiliencia Urbana), Edwina Portocarrero

The Big Equalizer explores the deep perceptual shift we undergo when subjected to the terror ensued by the unpredictability of an earthquake.

By examining our basic instinct for survival from a perceptual standpoint, we hope to bring awareness to the constructs we create that alienate us — the human as alien to the natural, the social as alien to the ecological and humans as aliens to each other.

KAOHSIUNG, TAIWAN

House of Citizens 2.0
studio HOU x LIN

House of Citizens 2.0 is an urban intervention that envisions a livable, entrepreneur-friendly, mixed-use urban regeneration along the old harbor of Kaohsiung. Being a tropical sustainable model, the challenge is to raise up the urban density to 15,000 people per km2, yet with the neighborhood’s original building typology.

Through the emerging immersive technology, House of Citizens 2.0 triggers the imagination by sharing pioneer projects and interactive models of the bottom-up movement. Instead of sprawl, Kaohsiung moves towards the 21st century with its own DNA.

GAESEONG, NORTH KOREA

Urban Pulsar
Doojin Hwang, Suyoung Hong, Hyunchul Youn, Kyeongsun Woo

Cities pulsate in combinations of different rhythms: heartbeats of the citizens, daily commute patterns, seasonal fluctuations of temperature, annual or longer-term changes in population, etc. Each city is like a pulsar, a star with a unique pattern of pulsed appearance of emissions.

The Gaeseong Industrial District (GID) is a subject of our case study to explore the theme of an urban pulsar for the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Located to the southeast of the ancient city of Gaeseong, the GID had approx. 55,000 North Korean workers and a few hundred South Korean managing staff by the time of its sudden but expected closure on February 2016.

All North Korean workers at the GID commuted to work from outside, since no residential facilities existed. The GID became an instant city, a city without residents, gaining and losing its population every day, like a pulsar with its repeating emission pattern. We hope to take this Biennale as an opportunity to show why cities should be planned to have more emphasis on the inner-city residential programs for higher quality of life of its citizens and also for more efficient investment initiative on urban infrastructure.

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA+DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANI

Two Markets
AC39-WO (Emanuel Admassu, Jen Wood)

Two Markets proposes an examination of two urban marketplaces in sub-Saharan Africa: Kariakoo in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Merkato in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Contemporary architectural discourse on the African continent tends to either celebrate mid-century European interventions or exoticize notions of ‘informality’ within rapidly transforming urban contexts. Two Markets, instead, proposes to analyze buildings and urban formations in their own mutable terms, giving equal importance to people, spaces, objects, and rituals.

KUWAIT CITY, KUWAIT

Foreign Architecture /Domestic Policy
Civil Architecture (Hamed Bukhamseen + Ali Ismail Karimi)

Kuwait owns and manages approximately five thousand gas stations across Europe. Under the not-so subtle company name ‘Q8’, these stations began as an investment to secure a market for the country’s oil export. The adoption of Q8 as a brand provided the perfect balance of corporate neutrality and nationalistic projection, a way of selling Kuwait without risking hostility or suspicion in light of a post-OPEC crisis world. This exhibition tells the story of the stations that act as embassies across Europe and their role in branding Kuwait abroad in the years to come.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES

Manila Improstructure
Dietmar Offenhuber, Katja Schechtner

Like many dynamic megacities of the Global South, Manila is struggling to provide adequate infrastructure and public services to its constituents. In this environment, many infrastructural issues are collaboratively resolved through personal interventions and collaborations involving council members, residents, and companies. The concept of improstructure describes infrastructure governance as an improvisational process of “call and response” among a diverse set of actors. We apply this perspective to ongoing modernization efforts by the city of Manila and its utility companies. Focusing on social practices in Manila’s
streetlight and electricity grid, the project investigates how actors shape the infrastructural system through an improvisational process.

Beyond the management of Manila’s streetlight infrastructure, improvisational governance can be found in every city of the world. The improstructure perspective becomes especially relevant in the context of smart city initiatives in the Global South: to move beyond generic solutions prescribed by IT companies, towards a nimbler approach that takes the local cultural, social, and environmental context into account.

MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA

The Air Between Us_Breath
Camilo Restrepo

Geographically, Medellin is located in a narrow valley with a river in the middle that receives all the watercourses of ravines. Frequently, the citizens are unaware of the ravines, making them only present in the rainy season when they cause floods and catastrophes. Medellin is struggling with many problems such as lack of public space, pollution, inequality, and poverty. What would happen if Medellin uses the ravines as collective space for local communities, as linear parks, and at the same time as climate equalizers? And the land is used for growing endemic species and plants to improve the air quality?

Our proposal overlaps photos of Medellin’s ravines to create a new landscape through pieces of semitransparent fabrics, hanging from the walls facades, as curtains. The external props complete the scene: wind and light. The wind between the fabrics will generate movement, an essential component to complete the experience of this installation. Remembering Us the quality of an invisible vital element: Air. The big picture of the installation conveys the topography of the city, the vegetation, and the mood of these types of spaces if they are thought of as an opportunity for a better city in the future.