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NLÉ and CohStra in MoMA Uneven Growth initiative on expanding megacities

Amsterdam based NLÉ and Rotterdam based CohStra participate in MoMA’s Uneven Growth initiative, starting November 22.

Sat, Nov 22 - Sat, May 10  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, designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to ensure these expanding urban enclaves remain habitable.

Amsterdam based NLÉ and Rotterdam based CohStra are two of six interdisciplinary teams involved in the Museum of Modern Art’s Uneven Growth initiative, starting November 22, which will examine new architectural possibilities for six global metropolises: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York and Rio De Janeiro. The project runs through May 10, 2015.

Uneven Growth, the latest exhibition in MoMA’s Issues in Contemporary Architecture series (which also includes Foreclosed and Rising Currents), addresses this increasingly inequitable urban development.

In conjunction with the exhibition, this online platform welcomes the public around the world to submit examples of “tactical urbanisms”—temporary, bottom-up interventions that aim to make cities more livable and participatory.

In the scope of the exhibition, six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners were brought together to examine new architectural possibilities for six megacities: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York City, and Rio de Janeiro. Challenging assumed relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up and top-down urban development, the resulting design scenarios, developed over a 14-month initiative, consider how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can respond to alterations in the nature of public space, housing, mobility, the environment, and other major issues of near-future urbanization.

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

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