This years theme of IABR is DOWN TO EARTH. It explores recognizable urgent climate challenges to design a transformation of our urban landscapes and societies. Water and Energy Transition were chosen as the two main themes.
How can designers tackle water issues – too much, too little, too polluted – in such a way that they also become a starting point for working on resilient cities? (How) can designers help realize the energy transition so that we can simultaneously use it as a leverage for socially inclusive urban planning? How can design driven responses to water and energy transition-related challenges help us to develop new approaches to inhabit the earth, in a much more balanced way?
The curator team consists of Rianne Makkink, Jurgen Bey en George Brugmans, curators Water as Leverage; and Thijs van Spaandonk and Robbert de Vrieze, curators Energy Transition as Leverage. The Curator Team is chaired by George Brugmans, president of the IABR.
In collaboration with the curator team and many other parties who are already active in the area, Studio Makkink & Bey will develop public programs, events and interventions in and connected to the future of the M4H+ Test Site. The curators want to present well-designed, well-substantiated and promising strategies and best practices in the fields of water management and energy transitions. Showing convincing projects that demonstrate how we can comprehensively transform the challenges our urban landscapes and living environments offer. Showing inspiring examples that stimulate the targeted realization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by telling the story of urban development from a new perspective, thus enhancing people’s ability to act – by offering them real perspectives, which even encourage concrete social activism.
Image by Fred Ernst