Our Cities Ourselves matches ten of the world’s leading architects with ten of the world’s most fascinating cities. It helps us imagine those cities in 2030, when 60 percent of the global population – or five billion people – will live in urban areas, mostly in the developing world.
In the middle of the 20th century, cities across the United States were redesigned to accommodate the car. As people flocked to the suburbs, cities were retrofitted with highways and parking lots. Roads expanded, public transit declined and so did our cities. In the decades that followed, cities around the world imported this auto-dominant urban design and began to suffer from its devastating impact.
Our Cities Ourselves proposes an exciting alternative path. Underpinning the images on show are ten principles developed with Jan Gehl, the noted Danish urbanist. With these as foundations, the architects produced visions of iconic sites projected to experience at least a doubling of residents by 2030.
Our Cities Ourselves is a program of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. The exhibition marks 25 years of progress by ITDP. It is designed to attract interest and stimulate debate, enabling ITDP to maximize its impact in cities throughout the world. The aim is to think about what sort of cities we want to live in, the sort of street we want to walk along, and the sort of future we want for ourselves and our children. Looking ahead, how will each of us help create our cities for ourselves?