Accelerate the City: Designing Resilient Urban Futures

Time moves slowly in architecture. While the technological, financial, transport, and commercial industries of the world evolve at an unprecedented, exponential rate, the evolution of cities themselves is not keeping pace. While everyday commodities, from phones to cars to banking systems, change before our eyes, we continue to live and work in buildings designed for a past era, and depend on urban infrastructures long past their capacities.

Somehow, architectural time must accelerate. The design and construction of cities and places must evolve to meet the growing demands of population, energy, and space. Designers and architects around the world are required to use their creative skills to re-imagine not only how the cities of the future should look, but how they will be built, how they can adapt, and how they can evolve in a sustainable, stable, equitable way.

Founded on the belief that design can be a vehicle for positive change, Bubble Futures Platform asks you what designers can do to design more resilient urban futures.

The “Accelerate the City” competition provides you a public platform to tackle the need for a more responsive architecture in a city of your choice. We challenge you to set your imagination alight, and consider the systems, spaces, and interactions that could result in more resilient, adaptable urban environments.

We ask you to follow a three step process:

1: Select any city around the world

2: Select a fundamental issue in that city

3: Design a more resilient future for that city

Whether this be on the individual or collective, micro or macro, digital or tangible, product or space, is entirely up to you. Following the ethos of Bubble, we ask you to operate across multiple spheres, reaching beyond convention to tackle the issue of urban resilience through a creative, design-led solution.

Let your ideas be smart, bold, and beautiful. Be provocative. Design the world as you believe it should be.

Find out more at the official website here

Accelerate the City: Designing Resilient Urban Futures