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:
