For the past two years the BMW Guggenheim Lab has been offering programs in New York City, Berlin, and Mumbai surrounding urban trends that contextualize life in cities. Centered around the concept of cities as “idea makers,” the Lab provides forums where “people come together, share their thoughts and common interests, and generate the ideas that shape our world.” One of the Lab’s recent initiatives is Participatory City: 100 Urban Trends which BMW Guggenheim asserts can help exemplify the future of cities as centers for populations to collaborate and grow. We’ve covered a good number of these urban trends, elaborated below.
The idea behind the collection of these “urban trends” is to reflect the urban exchange that can be possible in cities. The topics are “new and old, classic and ephemerally fashionable. Among them are some of urbanism’s ‘usual suspects,’ which interestingly, keep reappearing in the urban discourse of the early twenty-first century.” Ultimately, by studying these terms, urbanists, architects and other forward-thinkers can engage in the primary goal of cities, which BMW Guggenheim claims to be “the well-being of the people that inhabit them”:
“Cluster,” “concentrate,” and “collaborate” seem to have become the three big Cs of urban thinking of late — but that story is not new. Clustering, searching for a concentration of people, and finding ways to collaborate have been part of the human experience since prehistoric times. Then, as now, people gathered in search of protection, conviviality, and exchange.
By focusing on these Urban Trends the BMW Guggenheim Lab has aimed to draw awareness to aspects of urban life that have the most potential to bring our cities into the future. As the programming continues through 2013 at the Guggenheim Museum, curator Maria Nicanor has organized Participatory City, which is the conclusion of the 100 Urban Trends labs, showcasing all the contributors and programs that made the Lab successful on three continents. The exhibition will be accompanied by public programs exploring architecture, urbanism, and the ways in which people interact with cities and public space.
Here is the full list of Urban Trends, and links to related Untapped Cities articles where we explore the topic further:
- 3-D Printer
- The 99 Percent: Occupy Wall Street
- Accessibility
- Accessible Health Care
- Affordable Housing: Reforming Zoning and Development for the Next New York
- Aging Population
- Altruism
- Bailout
- Bike Politics
- Bottom-Up Urban Engagement
- Carbon Fiber
- Chameleonic Citizenship
- Changemaking
- City Manifesto
- Cityness
- Climate Change: “Climate change will define the future of cities.” – 2013 MAS Summit for NYC
- Collective Memory
- Combined Sewer System: The Poo Poo Choo Choo, Looking at Sewage Treatment in NYC
- Community Garden: The 6BC Gardenin Alphabet City
- Community-Led Development
- Community Supported Agriculture: Queens County Farm Museum – NYC’s Oldest Working Historical Farm
- Commuting: Transportation
- Complaint
- Confronting Comfort
- Container Architecture: 6 Innovative Uses for Shipping Containers
- Cooperatives
- Corporate Sponsorship
- Data Visualization: Fun Maps
- De Dépendance
- Department of Listening
- Design Barriers: Urban Design
- Dumpster Design: How about Dumpster Houses?
- Emotional Cityness
- Empathy
- Environmental Justice: Municipal Art Society Conference on Hurricane Sandy
- Environmental Psychology
- Everyday Democracy
- Eviction
- Evolutionary Infrastructure: Transit Space Race – Mapping every Transit Project in the US
- Fear
- Food Distribution
- Genius Hub: The Brooklyn Tech Hub Strategic Plan
- Gentrification
- Glocalism
- Grassroots Movement
- Greenspace: Looking at Urban Sustainability
- Hacking The City: Cities 101
- Happy City
- Inclusive Design: Urban Design
- Infrastructure of Waste
- Local Food
- Local Knowledge
- Micro Architecture – Micro-Apartments
- Mortgage Crisis
- Multicultural Cities
- Neighborhood Icon
- Neighborhood Loyalty
- Neo-Localism
- Non-Iconic Architecture
- Occupy Wall Street
- Oxytocin
- Participatory Budgeting
- Participatory Urbanism
- Peak Oil
- Person Accountability
- Protest
- Public-Private Tension
- Public Space
- Resilience
- Segrification
- Share Culture: What We Can Learn from Bike Share Programs in Beijing and China
- Slowing Down
- Social Design: Social Media and Designing the City: A Talk with FourSquare and Sonar
- Squatter
- Storytelling
- Stranger Interaction
- Street Facade: When a facade is just a facade
- Surburban Retrofitting
- Suburban Sprawl: What Melbourne can learn from Farmingdale
- Toxic Neighborhoods: Cleaning up the Gowanus Canal
- Transportation Psychology: Transportation
- Trash Mapping: Waste
- Trauma
- Trust
- Unconscious Perception
- Urban Beauty
- Urban Data: Our partnership with Gehl Architects on the series “On Data and Cities”
- Urban Foraging
- Urban Games: SimCity “Cities of Tomorrow” / SimCity Urban Planning Beta Tournament
- Urban Inequality
- Urban Intervention
- Urban Livability: Melbourne – The World’s Most “Livable” City
- Urban Mediation
- Urban Mobility
- Urban Psychology
- Urban Salons
- Urban Sensory Experience: Times Square Sound Installation by Max Neuhaus
- Urban Sound: Did NYC Really Roar in the Roaring 20’s?
- Urban Spontaneity
- Urban Systems
To read more about the topics we have yet to write about, check out the awesome interactive site at BMW Guggenheim Lab’s website.