Monday 27 January 2014

Exhibition: “Post-Oil City: The History of the City’s Future,” premieres at Goethe-Institut




There is no better time to showcase the post oil city than this period when the number of people migrating from the rural areas to urban cities has risen astronomically.
For example, shortly before the untimely demise of Gen. Murtala Muhammed, he announced the relocation of the seat of government from Lagos to Abuja in 1976. Despite the relocation of the seat of power to Abuja, Lagos has continued to be the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria. In fact, Lagos is more populous than 30 African countries. It is believed that she accounts for over 60% of Nigerian’s industrial and commercial activity and may hit 25 million people by 2015.
The pertinent question is: Since Lagos is the smallest state in Nigeria in terms of land mass but has the highest population in the country, what would her population be in 2025?
It is on this note that an exhibition designed to showcase both past and future pictures of a city has kicked off in Lagos.
It started at 2pm at Goethe-Institut, 4th Floor, Lagos City Hall, Lagos, and will end on Friday, February 21, 2014.
Titled “Post-Oil City: The History of the City’s Future,” it is organised by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), Stuttgart, in co-operation with ARCH+, Zeitschrift für Architektur und Städtebau, Berlin.
Introducing the Post-Oil City exhibition, Mareike Borgdstedt summarised the exhibition as a projection into the future through the past occurrence.
Its organisers further explained that: “At a time when more than half of the world’s population is living in cities, the effects of climate change on urban life can no longer be ignored. The exhibition “Post-Oil City: The History of the City’s Future,” presents innovative projects in Asia, Africa, and America that address urgent questions: How will the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy affect the process of urban planning and the city? How will the use of renewable energies affect urban metabolism and the politics of sustainability and mobility?

“Post-Oil City” is as much about the future as it is about the past. As indicated by the exhibition’s subtitle—“The History of the City’s Future”—every vision of the future is based on a vision of the past. By contrasting 11 current projects in the field of sustainable urban planning with nine from the past, the exhibition aims to show that many of today’s developments have their roots in the urban utopias of mid-20th-century modernism. Today, urban planners are returning to these concepts and adapting them to the challenges posed by climate change, a limited supply of fossil fuels, economic recession, and global systemic crisis.

“Urban planning provides a laboratory for social as well as ecological change. Some experiments discussed in “Post-Oil City” are Masdar City (Abu Dhabi), Xeriton (Dubai), and the NEST project in Ethiopia. Other examples of urban experimentation featured in the exhibition modify existing structures: creating a public transportation system in Curitiba’s inner city, re-naturalizing New York’s High Line, and building a network of electric cars with battery switch stations in Israel.


“Though different in method and scope, the projects presented in “Post-Oil City” all have something in common: they exemplify the combination of reason, innovation, and flexibility that we’ll need to make our cities and planet sustainable for the future,” they stated.
The exhibition also highlights many changes in different cities. For instance, the exhibition recorded that “In 1847, the City of New York authorised the installation of street level freight tracks on the West Side. Because of many accidents, railroads hired men – The West Side Cowboys to ride horses and wave red flags in front of the trains. In 1930, the city finally responded to the danger by building an elevated line from the Meatpacking District to the Hudson Stations.”
Majorly, other works at the exhibition among others include: Post Fossil Fuel Infrastructure Conversion, Bolton Urban Up Landscape, The participatory City, Suburbanisation-Philadelphia, Automated Transit Systems- Masdar City, The Radical Concentric City, for example, (Urban Acupuncture) Curitiba, Post-Fossil Fuel Mobility and Vernacular Principles.

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