“Participatory City: 100 Urban Trends from the BMW Guggenheim Lab”, an exhibition summing up the experiences and concepts generated during the two-year run of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, will be open until January 5, 2014, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The exhibition is the culmination of the Lab—an urban think tank, community center, and public gathering space that traveled to New York, Berlin, and Mumbai to inspire innovative ideas about urban life and new ways of thinking about cities. Tens of thousands of participants engaged with the Lab’s free public programs, urban projects, and research initiatives, both on site and online, which informed and helped shape the exhibition.

“With the BMW Guggenheim Lab, we have extended our mission beyond the walls of the museum, providing the Guggenheim with new ways to engage directly with the public and demonstrate our commitment to innovation in the fields of architecture and urbanism,” said Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation. “The Lab ignited an important conversation about the differences and commonalities of urban environments and the power of cities as idea-makers. The ‘Participatory City’ exhibition brings together the ideas found along the way, celebrating this journey and showcasing the extraordinary people and places we encountered.”

The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a co-initiative of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the BMW Group. “Participatory City” is organized by Maria Nicanor, Curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab, and Associate Curator, Architecture and Urbanism.

“Participatory City” examines a wide variety of trends that address how we interact with cities, including:
Participatory Urbanism: a concept integral to the programs in New York, Berlin, and Mumbai, in which citizens are empowered to collect data and contribute ideas to urban decision-makers; Ostrich Effect: a topic discussed in Mumbai that describes how individuals convey their indifference to the harsh conditions of everyday street life; Collaborative Urban Mapping: an example of a small-scale intervention in an urban environment, which was produced through collaboration and open-source data in Berlin to map elements of the food supply chain; Suburban Sprawl: representing outward urban growth;
and the concept of Happy City and psychological well-being in urban environments.

Other trends include the 3-D Printer revolution that has led to increased Customization; Arduino, hardware developed for operating robots; and urban concepts such as 10,000 Honks, Bottom-Up Urban Engagement, Collective Memory, The New Architect, Eviction, Food Distribution, Gentrification, Infrastructure of Waste and Non-Iconic Architecture, among others.

“Cities are concentrations of buildings, streets, transportation systems, and physical infrastructure, but it is people who are at the center of urban discourse and it is people who, through participation and interaction, continue to make cities vibrant centers for the generation of ideas that shape our world,” said Nicanor. “It is this sense of participation that continues to empower urban progress one idea at a time. ‘Participatory City’ documents the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s journey to identify some of the most urgent challenges for cities today and the ideas that could help improve them.”

The exhibition also features prototypes of the Water Bench, a project developed during the Mumbai Lab by Lab Team member and architect Neville Mars. Created to address water scarcity and the need for leisure space in Mumbai, the Water Bench collects rainfall for re-use in irrigation and provides public seating. A prototype of the Water Bench is planned for First Park in New York, the site of the New York Lab, and six more are currently installed throughout Mumbai.