Ready for action? “Shaping Human Cities” in Graz

Human Cities_Challenging the City Scale 2014-2018 – a research project led by Cité du Design in Saint-Etienne and co-funded by the Creative European Programme of the EU that aims to activate and improve the quality of public spaces by involving cultural and associative stakeholders and citizens – presents “Shaping Human Cities”, an interactive exhibition showing a collection of ten urban experiments developed during the last four years in eleven European cities.

What makes a city livable? How can we take action, get organized, and collaborate with creative professionals to prototype more livable cities? Human Cities believe that the success of urban environments lies in their human values, shared creativity, and design experimentation, so much so that their multidisciplinary network consisting of 12 organizations (including Politecnico di Milano, one of the most outstanding European universities in the fields of Engineering, Architecture and Design) met up regularly to discuss these questions collaboratively and share ideas and solutions for a better quality of life in urban areas.

On view at GrazMuseum, Austria until June 24, “Shaping Human Cities” was designed by students of the Master’s program Exhibition Design of the University of Applied Sciences FH JOANNEUM in Graz. Like in a sort of exhibition-lab, visitors can experience a series of urban experiments in a playful way through interactive stations installed in the museum and workshops. Guests are invited to taste the experiments through an eleven-course menu (“Wanna taste?”), but they can also conquer the city center of Graz by interacting with ten intriguing installations (“Wanna travel?”), or play with eleven mini-golf lanes which symbolize the ten different experiments, each one incorporating the spatial and creative circumstances of a specific city (“Wanna play?”).