Reclaiming Futures:
Planetary Urbanisms
We live in an urban era. There is no shortage of statistics on rural to urban migration, urban population explosions, and urban resource shortages and inequalities. Mushrooming megacities have become harbingers of impending scarcity crises or wellsprings of hope for those who see opportunities for economic growth in young populations and the formalization of informal economic activity. have become battlegrounds for visions
Redevelopment plans (with a long history) that clear the living areas of the poor to make way for unaffordable, orderly developments and new greenfield projects that desert established regions in favor of smart for a brave new future for the rich. Bottom up urban development planning led by community-based organizations and politically invested architecture studios. Facades of plans that reveal other realities in their seams.
The creative projects in this exhibition explore different visions of planetary urban futures, unpack their politics, and propose alternative possibilities.
Planetary Urbanisms is the second of three installments of the online exhibition Reclaiming Futures, which showcases seven works by creative practitioners from around the world commissioned by the Against Catastrophe project; these practitioners critically examine how design, architecture, and technology are imbricated in producing catastrophic eco-social realities but also present tools with which to imagine and build more equitable, democratic, and sustainable worlds. Commissioned practitioners include Solveig Qu Suess, Antonia Hernández, Dele Adeyemo, Michaela Büsse, Paulo Tavares, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Yelta Köm and Agit Özdemir from the collective Arazi Assembly. Following an invitation to submit project proposals, the chosen works were developed over the last year and a half and in conversation with the curators and other commissioned practitioners.
Based on extensive research, the works run along thematic threads that interrogate resource management regimes and how neoliberal operations violently remake ecosystems and lifeworlds; planetary urbanization and urban lived realities; and contemporary state-led development and settlement policies, and activism and activist solidarities in response. Through a wide range of approaches—from design research and science fiction to forensic architecture and political organizing—these works not only witness and document such phenomena but also raise critical questions about urbanisms, developmentalisms, and environmentalisms from below. They foreground situated ecological knowledge and relations; contest official regimes for apprehending and managing nature; and reimagine value, the commons, and forms of social organization. The resulting projects are forward-looking in their engagement with futures, while centering the necessity of reckoning with inherited and ongoing injustices; they are socially committed while embracing the multiplicity of more-than-human ecologies and planetary futures.
Each exhibition installment, which focuses on a distinct theme, features a selection of projects from among the commissions; these are accompanied by essays by guest contributors, whose writing the creative practitioners felt resonated with their work. The essays shed further light on the topics, geographies, and questions broached in the projects presented.
Planetary Urbanisms features commissions by Michaela Büsse and Dele Adeyemo. Büsse’s short film Overcast explores the eco-smart Forest City, a real estate project developed on artificial islands in the southern tip of Malaysia that became the flagship of a special development zone associated with the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative. Against the eerie backdrop of the abandoned cityscape, which has been scaled back since its announcement, the film juxtaposes to …. Life that emerges in the cracks. Adeyemo’s two film project Between Megacity and Delta and and reflects on the interlinkages between the rise of Lagos as a megacity and the ‘underdevelopment’ of the larger Niger Delta. Adeyemo is concerned with how megacity strategies often come at the expense of indigenous practices of subsistence, and paradoxically, how these very practices, such as fishing, farming, and housing, enable precariously situated communities to survive in the urban environment. Through his journey with a migrant fishing community, Dele complicates the question of what constitutes and contributes to urbanism. Both projects demonstrate how the processes of accumulation and dispossession engender diverse fluid practices that are drawn on to navigate capitalist economies and reshape our notions of urban design and planning.
The accompanying texts by Gökçe Günel, May Ee Wong, Oda expand the conversations and questions that Büsse’s and Adeyemo’s creative projects open up. … May Ee Wong writes of the paradigm , …
Gökçe Günel challenges the presumed linearity of modernization by honing in on
What’s at stake is the Global North-Global South orders.
Taibat Lawanson