Leading to a major exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in collaboration with the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, the last workshop and a major conference related to Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities was in Vienna, 10-14 June, 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 and designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to avoid major social and economical 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.

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 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
New York: Situ Studio, New York, and Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), Rotterdam
Rio de Janeiro: RUA Arquitetos, Rio de Janeiro, and MAS ETH Urban Design, Zurich
Mumbai: URBZ, Mumbai, and Pop Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge
Lagos: NLÉ Architects, Lagos, and 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

MoMA, in collaboration with the MAK announced the final workshop of Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. The resulting proposals will be presented at MoMA in November 2014, and at MAK in June 2015.

The six interdisciplinary teams prepared exhibition design content at the MAK in a workshop open to student participation. A public presentation of the results was held on 14 June, 2014 with a keynote lecture by Ricky Burdett, LSE Cities, London.

The workshop was 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, held on 11 June, 2014.

Participants collaborated with the six exhibition teams in preparing the final design content for the exhibition’s urban case studies—Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, Rio de Janeiro. The workshop was held 10–14 June, 2014.

The Lagos Team and the students that joined the group worked all together to apply different systems and detail the application of different structure and materials learnt from Lagos urban and social context related to three main topics: WATER, ENERGY and TRANSPORTATION.

Thanks to all collaborators in the workshop, special thanks to Vienna MAK workshop participants Anna, Ehsan, Marlene, Leila and Hsiang Max.