15-03-24 // CONFLICT-DRIVEN URBANISM

Study of Perspective, Tiananmen Square, 1998, Ai Weiwei

Bernd Upmeyer defined a new topic for MONU‘s coming issue on “Conflict-driven Urbanism”:

When recently we initiated a debate on the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic on cities that led to MONU’s issue #33, we had the hope that the crisis would make people and governments cooperate more strongly with each other and thus enable them to tackle major problems of all sorts making our cities more habitable and affordable than ever. That expectation was supported by the fact that city governments were very capable, when they wanted to, to swiftly establish new policies, like the ones for the lockdowns during the pandemic, revealing an effectiveness and power that one would usually not expect, which convinced us that they could do much more than they actually do.

However, retrospectively it becomes ever clearer that the pandemic, due to its power to reveal the massive economic and social inequities in our cities, triggered first of all an enormous number of conflicts culminating in mass protests in cities around the world, as we demonstrated in MONU #34. But today we know that this was just the start of our troubles and “you’ll see your problems multiplied” as Depeche Mode once sang in the “Policy of Truth”…

… continue reading here and propose ideas for this coming issue before March 31, 2024 via MONU’s website.