BWW Reviews: Imagining the Cities of Tomorrow in MoMA's UNEVEN GROWTH

The premise of Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities is an item of common sense with a host of ingenious consequences. Because they were born of different conditions and built up from according to different contingencies, the cities of the twenty-first century cannot address housing, sustainability, and income equality using one-size-fits-all methods. Any grammar school social studies teacher could tell you that. But it team upon team of architects and urban planners--with institutional support from the Museum of Modern Art--to tell you how it all plays out. Curated by Pedro Gadanho, Uneven Growth draws in the results of fourteen months of inquiry and offers urban planning solutions for six gargantuan cities--Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro.

What results is an odd amalgam of the thought-provoking and the underwhelming. Set up in a single room and dependent mostly on wall texts and transferred graphics, Uneven Growth can start to feel like an advertisement for its (mostly good) exhibition catalog. The exhibition space is (in the words of more than one MoMA floor guide) "really easy to miss." Multimedia and dioramas are almost nowhere to be seen. And as an entry in MoMA's Issues in Contemporary Architecture series, the entire show has trouble mustering either the accessibility or the pathos of the earlier segments, Projects for New York's Waterfront and Rehousing the American Dream.

It is necessary, though, to weigh the show's thoroughgoing earnestness and spurts of insightfulness against all these complaints. Beyond the catalog, Uneven Growth can also feel like an advertisement for an academic field--tactical urbanism, a branch of study that proposes ground-level and often incremental solutions for city communities. It is better to see this exhibition as an advertisement for thinking more and thinking harder about the spaces we live in, get used to, and cease to reflect on. We have New York at our disposal, and perhaps some of us have been to Hong Kong or Rio-but how many of us have really stopped and thought about the fates these cities will have, and the fates they should have, in the decades to come? Gadanho and his experts force you to think, to be more conscientious and--in classic MoMA fashion--more cosmopolitan

As populations boom, cities will need new architecture and new infrastructure to accommodate upwardly-mobile residents--or simply residents who want better homes and better lives. Istanbul, for instance, must deal with a hardworking but debt-ridden middle class; according to Uneven Growth, new apartment complexes and an emphasis on shared resources would help this group to thrive. Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro are trickier, since these cities are infamously stratified. Rather than collapsing the distinctions between rich and poor--and rather than obliterating the least desirable neighborhoods outright--tactical urbanism would incrementally improve the lives of these cities' disadvantaged citizens. For Rio, the MoMA team has focused on a line of products and housing additions that would promote healthy living while increasing community spirit; for Mumbai, the best bet may actually be to build up the city's slums. Sleek, airy, light-admitting housing additions would improve quality of life without disorienting the residents or disrupting their local bonds.

Other challenges will be matters of geography. Two of the cities under consideration--Hong Kong and Lagos--are very much dominated by water. Common topography, but different solutions. To sustain population growth and generate new tourist hubs, Hong Kong would add artificial islands under the auspices of the program Hong Kong Is Land. In contrast, the main requirement for the Nigerian metropolis is better infrastructure: elevated highways, modernized boat transport, and vastly improved utilities. Right now, the city gets by using electric generator upon electric generator; the Lagos of the future would be the home of "renewable energy production islands," structures that would integrate solar, wind, and biomass energy.

After guiding its visitors through this international future, Uneven Growth addresses the next stages for New York itself. We get videos, and diagrams, and a lot of talk about cooperative housing trusts and unused excess space--which is all another way of saying that the future of Manhattan, as this show presents it, rings of anticlimax. Yes, part of me was hoping that Gadanho and company would regale us New Yorkers with a few new skyscrapers, or maybe our own new island. Instead, by avoiding anything of the sort, MoMA's team has reminded us that the urban future is not a matter of building higher and higher, but of lifting up the people who are already here.

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