Future Cities 3: Abundance

Much of our current urban view is characterised by a swingeing human fall-back position that values sophism, tardiness and economic stringency. This view is predicated on a concern, and a commercialisation of this concern, that we have finite resources and runs hand in hand with a distrust of exuberance, creativity, for its own sake and “out of the box” thinking. This Future Cities 3 conference is themed “Abundance”. It will posit new ways to find abundance in the city, whether through synthetic technology, augmented reality, Utopian thinking or the digitally fabricated Baroque.
The conference will be an antidote to architectural urban Methodist-ism and worthy nothingness. It will be a tsunami of ideas, images and speculations facilitated by a timely optimism – an optimism founded on new materials, new ways of thinking, new tactics and protocols of space, and finally the syncretic opportunities of architecture in the 21st Century.
An accompanying exhibition is open from Monday 7th April – Friday 11th April 2014 in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Queen Anne Building, Greenwich Maritime Campus. Two main concept drawings were exhibited.