About

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019 plans on opening a site of communication for the citizens to diligently participate for the understanding and creation of cities, and develop a new collective format that heightens the quality of residents’ life and enhance the city’s reputation. Also, it will become a global platform that exchanges and discusses answers with global cities about information regarding urban issues.

Details

Cities are contested territories, by their very nature spaces of negotiation, of multiple and complex subjects, divergent rights, values, claims and conditions. To understand the city one needs to understand this contradictory nature and to recognize it as a physical and political construct complicit, in the right to housing, access to natural and social resources, transportation, political freedoms and social justice simultaneously pressured by the challenges of internal and global migration, climate change and increasing inequity.

The contemporary city operates as a speculative apparatus, shaped by the logic of efficiency and profit; public resources and spaces are increasingly being privatized and conceived of as commodities. Emerging models are based on a managerial model that privileges corporate and/or technocratic visions that undermine the collective nature of the city, and challenge both our political and environmental survival. In this process, architecture has become progressively marginalized from the city’s form and processes, increasingly relinquishing its disciplinary scope.

The urgent challenge is to develop new tools, methods and forms of intervention at multiple scales from the domestic to the territorial scale, from public space to infrastructural networks, from activism to institutional roles, redefining architecture’s disciplinary territories as a system of knowledge production and action. The Seoul Architecture and Urbanism Biennale (SBAU) 2019 claims architecture as an active participant in the construction of the city and as an agent in realizing a political and cultural project for the city.