Cartographies of Planetary Urbanisation

Abstract

Today, urbanisation has become planetary. The boundaries of the urban have been exploded to encompass vast territories far beyond the limits of even the largest megacity regions. Meanwhile, novel patterns of urbanisation are crystallising, which challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded, universal settlement type. Cartographies of Planetary Urbanisation is an exhibition proposing a radical rethinking of inherited cartographies of the urban. The popular claim that we now live in an “urban age” because the majority of the world’s population live in “cities,” is a deeply misleading basis for understanding the contemporary “urban revolution,” theorised by Henri Lefebvre. Cities are not isolated manifestations or universally replicated expressions of the urban condition, but are embedded within wider, territorially uneven and restlessly evolving processes of urbanisation at all spatial scales. Encompassing both built and unbuilt spaces, across earth, water, sea and atmosphere.