Struggling Cities: from Japanese Urban Projects in the 1960s

What is a city? This international travelling exhibition seeks to answer this question, exploring themes of urbanisation and cities.

Exhibitions

The Atrium, Faculty of Architecture and Design
139 Vivian Street, Te Aro Campus, Wellington


Description

There can be no single answer to the question of what a city is. 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.

Taking as its point of departure the various experimental ideas on the city that flourished in Japan in the 1960s, Struggling Cities examines circumstances of Japanese and other cities up to the present day. It focuses particularly on ways of managing pressures from 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.