Struggling Cities – a travelling exhibition
From 9 July to 17 August, the Faculty of Architecture and Design will host the influential travelling exhibition Struggling Cities: from Japanese Urban Projects in the 1960s, in collaboration with the Embassy of Japan.
Struggling Cities explores a seemingly simple question: What is a city?
“There can be no single answer to this,” says Naohiko Hino, architect and supervisor of the exhibition. “For over 5,000 years cities have developed all over the world. In each, a unique material culture and lifestyle has formed to reflect local conditions and history.”
The exhibition presents the many ways architects have designed cities, focusing particularly on ways they have managed pressures caused by increasing urbanisation. It showcases models, photographs, and animations of various cities in Japan and around the world, looking particularly at design proposals from Japanese architects during the Metabolist movement of the 1960’s, when Japan saw a flourishing of ideas about architecture and the development of cities. This movement was partly inspired by the rapid increase in urbanisation after the Second World War.
These themes of urbanisation remain relevant today.
“Far from becoming a thing of the past, the problem of urbanisation has grown more pressing with the passage of time,” says Mr Hino. “The need to grapple with the unprecedented problems of rapid urbanisation is most definitely still with us.”
Mr Hino says proposals that were put forward for the design and development of Tokyo, a city that confronted issues of urbanisation early on, highlight a range of challenges and difficulties facing contemporary cities.
“The exhibition is designed to raise key issues that, while centring on Tokyo, the world’s most populous urban agglomeration, also apply to the specific realities of each of the various countries where the exhibition will be held.”
Struggling Cities has been travelling the globe since 2010, and will also be stopping in Auckland and Christchurch before heading to Brunei.
More information is available on the Embassy of Japan's website.