Countryside, The Future
year:
2020
In June of 2014, the UN released World Urbanization Prospects, a report that announced that half of all humankind now lived in cities. Countryside, The Future contests the assumption that ever increasing urbanization is inevitable, exploring radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as ‘‘countryside’’, or the 98% of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities.
Our current form of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction, and automation of the countryside at an unprecedented scale. Data storage, fulfillment centers, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotic automation, economic innovation, worker migration, and the private purchase of land for ecological preservation are in many cases more actively explored and experimented with in the countryside than the city.
location:
New York, USAteam:
AMO – Rem Koolhaas, Samir Bantal, Aleksandr Zinovev, Anne Schneider, Yotam Ben-Hur, Sebastian Bernardyyear:
2020commissioner:
GuggenheimIn June of 2014, the UN released World Urbanization Prospects, a report that announced that half of all humankind now lived in cities. Countryside, The Future contests the assumption that ever increasing urbanization is inevitable, exploring radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as ‘‘countryside’’, or the 98% of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities.
Our current form of urban life has necessitated the organization, abstraction, and automation of the countryside at an unprecedented scale. Data storage, fulfillment centers, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, robotic automation, economic innovation, worker migration, and the private purchase of land for ecological preservation are in many cases more actively explored and experimented with in the countryside than the city.
photography: Laurian Ghinitoiu