From September 7th to November 10th 2019, Seoul (South Korea) will welcome the second edition of the Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism where will gather various international stakeholders working for change and innovation to showcase pioneering projects of architecture and urbanism. At this occasion, the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) together with the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Área Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB) will present the work of Ildefons Cerdà, a Spanish urbanist who wrote the pioneering General Theory of Urbanisation in 1867, as precursor of urban Big Data, making it dialogue with our current urban realities. The installation will also include some projects evidencing the potential of urban Big Data in the current development of Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the SENSEable City Lab of the MIT, Habidatum, the AMB, 300.000 km/s, Shukhov Lab of Moscow or the work done for the development of the Urban Agenda of Catalonia aiming to enhancing a more sustainable development for the territory and the construction of more social cities, which was at the origins of Idelfons Cerda’s work on urbanism.

Seul welcomes this year, from September 7th onwards, the second edition of the Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism with as a main theme “The Collective City”. This event proposes to the public a platform to interact and share information while enhancing debates around the topic of city creation and transformation. As current cities thrive to be more and more unequal and segregated, this Biennale asks the question: can they still be perceived by those living in them as spaces for collectivity? To tackle this issue, the event has been organised into four different sections:

  • A thematic exhibition
  • An exhibition of cities
  • Global studies
  • Projects

In the Dongdaemon History and Cultural Park zone, IAAC, AMB and the Generalitat de Catalunya will present the work of Ildefons Cerda as a precursor of modern urbanism through his statistic research and studies about the city and its urban organisation to make it dialogue with our current reality; the contemporary city, the use of new information and communication technologies (ICT) and of Big Data to design and manage our cities. In this installation will be presented the General Theory of Urbanisation (Ildefons Cerda, 1867) and its projection on visual maps published online on urbanization.org, developed by the 300.000 km/s team.

Together with this will be presented various other contemporary examples of the use and impact of the information and data in the design and management of numerous cities worldwide as well as its impact on people’s quality of life.

The installation will display:

  • The work of the MIT Senseable City Lab about Hub Cab in New-York.
  • The work on data done by the Área metropolitana de Barcelona in the redaction of the PDU.
  • The work of Shukhov Lab of Moscow dealing with the organisation of urban equipment in the city of Kazan.
  • The work realized by Bestairio in the Observatory of Urban Mobility for various cities of Latin America.
  • The investigation led by the company Habidatu,
  • The study of uses in Barcelona Eixample led by 300.000 km/s.
  • The work of BSC.
  • The urban Agenda of Catalonia developed by the Generalitat de Cataluña.