La Biennale di Venezia, How will we live together?
The exhibition Worlds of Planetary Urbanization at the Biennale di Venezia, central pavilion, Giardini. Image: Bas Princen
Worlds of Planetary Urbanization
The boundaries of the urban have been exploded. Novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing not only through the expansion of metropolitan regions, but in agrarian and extractive hinterlands, in zones of apparent wilderness and even in the oceans. These developments challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement type. Urbanization has become planetary.
This exhibit proposes a radical rethinking of our understanding of the contemporary urban world. The perception that we now live in an 'urban age' because the world's majority population lives in ‘cities’ is misleading: metropolitan agglomerations occupy no more than 3% of the earth’s surface, but they are linked to wide-ranging planetary transformations. The interdependencies between urban areas and the metabolism of planetary life lie at the heart of contemporary urbanization. This project explores such interdependencies—between agglomerations and hinterlands, political-economic and biogeophysical processes, and local, national and global scales—in order to stimulate reflection on ‘living together’ not simply within a world of cities, but under conditions of planetary urbanization.
One stream of the exhibition explores how different conceptions of the urban yield divergent visualizations, and ultimately disparate visions, of an urbanizing world. It juxtaposes city-centric representations to those that connect the world’s urban regions to the broader operational landscapes that support the metabolism of urbanization. A second stream explores six territories of extended urbanization, from the Peloponnese, the Amazon and the US Cornbelt to the North Sea, the Pearl River Delta, West Bengal and West Africa. These investigations illuminate the variegated patterns and pathways through which a planetary fabric of urbanization is being woven.
The exhibit results from an interdisciplinary collaboration between urban theorists, social scientists and architects. It highlights the urgency of formulating new theoretical and cartographic perspectives on urbanization, fueled by the goal of envisioning better urban worlds.