Imminent Commons: Commoning Cities: Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017

Description

Imminent Commons: Commoning Cities presents questions and answers concerning the current state and near future of cities of the world through the lens of public initiatives, projects, and urban narratives. Cities are searching for new possibilities that will help them survive and thrive within new systems of municipal governance. The strategies of cities with regard to rapid urbanization, scarcity of public resources, and privatization of commons will be examined through the diverse spectrum of focused projects. It also discusses the present and future of cities as commons in the 21st century through examining various ways the cities use to deliberate, operate, imagine and execute their policies for the city.

Since 2010, Helen Hejung Choi has been an assistant professor of architecture at Kookmin University. After studying architecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Columbia Graduate School and working in New York for six years, Helen Hejung Choi moved to Seoul, Korea and started to work on architecture projects and work as a professor. She was a curator of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale and responsible for researching, planning and exhibiting architecture collections of the Culture Information Service at Gwangju Asia Culture Center and is now curator for Cities Exhibition at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

"Reflecting the "Commoning Cities" exhibition at the Biennale, accordingly the book is structured as an alphabetical list of cities rather than via the nine commons. How cities will fare in a future of climate change is the idea behind the public initiatives, projects, and urban narratives presented here. With Alexandria, Egypt, for instance, Melina Nicolaides of Bibliotheca Alexandrina describes the challenges the city faces, such as seawater flooding during high-intensity storms. In her entry, solutions are still to be determined - one of many cases where more questions exist than answers." --A Daily Dose of Architecture