Building Cities Today?

Developing innovative urban neighbourhoods is a challenge many German cities face today. In the process, aspects such as climate protection, mobility, social integration and demographic change all have to be considered. One hundred years ago, in the framework of the “Neues Frankfurt” housing program, new housing estates arose that were prime examples of innovative, social construction. The housing estates were located like satellites on the city limits but were monofunctional in thrust. Homes and work were separated into distinct zones, which meant development of transport infrastructure became ever more important.
For decades, this model which required a large amount of land on the city’s limits shaped urban planning, up to and including the large housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s. A turning point in the direction of the internal development of the existing city commenced in the mid-1980s, with a prime example being the IBA International Building Exhibition in West Berlin. This gave rise to strategies for repurposing wasteland and to participatory practices. Today, mixed-use neighbourhoods are back on the drawing board, uniting homes, work, and commerce, whereby the central challenges are to create sustainable and socially mixed structures that provide a high quality of life despite the dearth of free land.

“Building Cities Today?” showcases not only Frankfurt’s “Römerstadt” of 1928, but also eight other neighbourhoods in Germany, all of which were planned between 1990 and the 2020s. They range from Munich’s “Messestadt Riem” to the “WarnowQuartier” in Rostock, and they all visualize the development strategies used in sustainable planning, with two of the projects highlighting the limits to such undertakings and why they can fail. A city is never a definitive plan, once and for all. Creating structures that are flexible and open in order to accommodate change is likewise one of the major challenges of planning sustainable neighbourhoods today.  The exhibition is accompanied by the release of the game “Plan.Spiel.Stadt”, published by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and developed by its Education Department in collaboration with Lookout GmbH.

Curators of the exhibition are Yorck Förster (kuratorenwerkstatt) and Mathias Schnell (studio central).

The project is being kindly supported by the German Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development, and Building as part of its National Urban Development Policy.

Opening: June 27, 2025, 7 p.m.

Lectures:
Architects for Social Housing: July 9, 2025, 7 p.m.
Urban Kibbutz: September 17, 2025, 7 p.m.
New Neighborhoods in Frankfurt?!: September 30, 2025, 7 p.m.
Urban Reproduction: October 7, 2025, 7 p.m.