On 27 November, the 15th International Architecture Exhibition – ‘Reporting From the Front’ – organised by La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta and curated by Alejandro Aravena concluded in Venice, Italy. The exhibition, which lasted 6 months and registered 260,000 visitors, featured LSE Cities’ Special Project “Conflicts of an Urban Age”, which explored the trends and implications of the past twenty-five years of global urban growth. It outlined global urban trends from 1990-2015, including comparison of how Los Angeles, Johannesburg, London, Manila, Kolkata, Accra, Madrid, Kinshasa, Singapore, Bogotá, Quito, Dhaka, Kabul, and Hong Kong have grown. A projection of future growth highlighted how accommodating the world’s urban population by 2030 at Los Angeles’ density would cover almost half of the European Union; at Hong Kong’s density, the global urban population would take up less than half of Italy.

Conflicts of an Urban Age also included seven case study cities – Shanghai, Addis Ababa, London, Istanbul, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Mumbai – to provide an in-depth understanding of the major changes that have impacted on equality and access to open space since 1990. Film-based animations provided analytical texture to the case study cities, while comparable statistics and analysis of spatial, social and environmental data provided insight into the consequences of planning decisions on the social and physical fabric of these cities. Two other sections – Solutions from Above and Solutions from Below – contrasted top-down interventions with smaller, community-led initiatives supported by urbanXchanger.

The Special Project was jointly organised by the London School of Economics and Political Science and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft. All of the photographs and data from Conflicts of an Urban Age can be accessed here.

Julia King, a Research Officer at LSE Cities, will be speaking at the Women’s Equality Party Conference 2016 on Saturday, 26 November at Victoria Warehouse, Manchester. She’ll be on a panel entitled ‘Building a man’s world: how WE can shift the balance’, which will include proposals on how to reform infrastructure that is often built with only men in consideration. Julia will also present ‘City, street and citizen: inequality in an urban age’, which includes insights of  her experience working as a researcher on LSE Cities’ Super-Diverse Streets research project.

LSE Cities’ Julia King will tonight present at the Central St. Martins campus in King’s Cross, London, as part of the Spatial Practice Autumn Lecture Series. The presentation, Architecture as a process not a thing, takes place at 630pm, and will discuss a variety of questions surrounding housing, sanitation infrastructure, urban planning, and participatory design processes. More information about the presentation and the lecture series is available here.

On December 1, LSE Executive Director Philipp Rode will give a keynote address at the 2016 Cosmobilities Conference in Bad Boll, near Stuttgart, Germany. His presentation, Towards New Urban Mobility: The role of urban form, will draw on LSE Cities’ work on New Urban Mobility in Berlin and London, while addressing the conference theme of “Shared Mobilities: New perspectives for societies on the move.” This will be the 12th Conference of the Cosmobilities Network, and will focus on the social, cultural, spatial, ecological and socio-economic consequences of new sharing concepts.

Professor Richard Sennett gave the keynote address at London’s social integration conference (#LondonIsOpen) on the need for cities to be open. The conference, which took place at London’s City Hall on 14 November, was attended by city leaders and mayors from across Europe who discussed how to build better, more unified communities. It was opened by London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Decarbonising Transport: Smart Mobility Innovation for Sustainable Cities, which is co-organised by LSE Cities,  will take place in Berlin at the EUREF-Campus on 15 November 2016. Philipp Rode, Executive Director of LSE Cities and Urban Age, will present the summary of the day in the Closing Session.