Freeze - H20: Humans to Oceans

Dynamic City Foundation
Neville Mars with Hou Xiu (animation), Li Xin Lu (animation), Rain Xue (animation), Adrian Hornsby (text), and Hou Xui (text)

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In 2003, the Dynamic City Foundation started the Urban China 2020 project; an in-depth study what the effects of China's flash-urbanization are and how designers can respond to this process. To achieve this, an online collaboration platform has been established (www.BURB.tv) for open-source research and design. The objective to build four hundred new cities by the year 2020, as formulated by the former Chinese Minister of Civil Affairs, provides the project with its research framework and its name: UC2020.

The work of the Dynamic City Foundation mainly revolves around presenting utopian models, cut-free from their very real and difficult political context, which nonetheless present ideal design solutions. The central question is how to benefit from the dynamic forces at hand?

Freeze is a response to the rising need to achieve a non-political space. A space that can absorb the lives and ideas of an evolved humanity. A space that is highly utopian yet painfully necessary at a time of increased global tension, diminished democracy and intensified censorship. A space void of territorial concerns. A futuristic Noah’s Ark of ideas roaming freely as the world’s sea levels are rising.

- First exhibited at the Millennium Art Museum, Beijing 2006 - Zhang Ga (Curator).

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Contributor:

Dynamic City Foundation is an international, not-for-profit organisation whose goal it is to promote, widen and stimulate knowledge and research on architecture and urban design with a special focus on rapidly changing environments. Furthermore, the foundation stimulates innovative projects, research and activities that contribute to the understanding of and develop proposals that can respond to dynamic urban conditions. A central objective of the Dynamic City Foundation is to investigate the processes that can facilitate a dynamic density. This is an urban environment that can maintain its proportions and ideal compactness as it grows or diminishes.

Associated Links:

http://www.dynamiccity.org/