TOKİ criticized at MoMA exhibition

New York’s MoMA examines uneven urban development in Turkey in a new exhibition, addressing six cities, including Istanbul As the result of a 14-month initiative to examine new architectural responses to rapid urban growth, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is currently presenting an exhibition that addresses the increasingly inequitable urban development in six world cities, including Istanbul.

In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering 8 billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities. Most will be poor. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. Over the next years, city authorities, urban planners, designers, economists and many others will have to join forces to ensure these expanding urban enclaves remain habitable.

In the scope of the exhibition, six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners have been brought together to examine new architectural possibilities for six megacities: Istanbul, Hong Kong, Lagos, Mumbai, New York City and Rio de Janeiro.

Challenging assumed relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up and top-down urban development, the resulting design scenarios, developed over a 14-month initiative, consider how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can respond to alterations in the nature of public space, housing, mobility, the environment and other major issues of near-future urbanization.

KÄ°TO vs. TOKÄ°

For Istanbul, the proposals of Paris-based Atelier d’Architecture Autogeree and Istanbul-based Superpool are being exhibited. The Housing Development Agency of Turkey (TOKİ) is heavily criticized in the exhibition, and a project called...