Planetary Urbanism

International Competition in the context of the conference UN-HABITAT III, awarded by the Journal ARCH+ with the support of the Federal Foreign Office, Germany and consulted by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU)

The exhibition presents a selection of outstanding entries from the competition Planetary Urbanism: Critique of the Present, hosted by ARCH+ with the support of the Federal Foreign Office.

Cities were always centres of innovation and the driving force of developments, throughout all epochs and cultures. The organisation of life in cities formed the starting point for the development of structures based on the division of labour and hence the release of creative potentials that benefited science, technology and the arts, for the accumulation of capital, increasing prosperity and the refinement of life. With few exceptions, cities were also the stages on which the struggles for more social equality and for societal progress played out. Cities are likely humankind’s greatest cultural achievement and, in this respect, a marker of the Anthropocene period, the geological age defined by human activity.