Global Cities

More on cities as I've been at the Global Cities exhibition in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern today with my friend Alan Stewart.

Global Cities looks at the changing faces of ten dynamic international cities: Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo. Exploring each city through five thematic lenses – speed, size, density, diversity and form – the exhibition draws on data originally assembled for the 10th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2006 Venice Biennale and presents existing films, videos and photographs by more than 20 artists and architects to pose questions about sustainability, public space and social inclusion.

The exhibition demonstrates how vital visual imagery is for understanding both the macro and micro levels of city life. Graphic images and timber constructions were creatively utilised to clearly convey the macro picture of relative diversities and densities between cities in a way that raw statistics simply could not achieve. Andreas Gursky's photos took a wide angle look at the beauty of urban skylines with Los Angeles, in particular, revealing that beauty that Victoria Williams noted in her song Lights.

Video installations in this exhibition tended to focus on the micro. Francis Alÿs led us on a merry dance through the different streetscapes of Central London to the rhythm of the drum stick that he ran along railings, cars, walls etc. as he walked. Huseyin Alptekin focussed in on individual incidents in Istanbul and Bombay setting the diversities of this incidents into play alongside each other much as we could experience in moving from one street to another within a single city. In Peripheral Stories Hala Elkoussy laid the real-life stories of her interviewees over a boundary-blurring journey through their peripheral environments.

Both the expansive and the minute are necessary to our understanding of what cities are and how they develop and this exhibition doesn't just pose questions but provides perspectives from which cities can truly be seen.