URBZ
ART & TERRITORY
residency period from July to October 2023
The urbz collective specialises in governance and participatory urban planning. Our collective works in Mumbai, Geneva, Paris and Bogota with citizens, organisations and governments. Our approach combines anthropology with urban planning and design. We pay particular attention to the relationship between culture and spatial planning. In Geneva, we apply our participatory methods to neighbourhood, landscape and campus projects. Our clients and partners include the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the PAV Directorate, and the cities of Geneva and Lausanne.
Commissioned in 2019 and 2021 by the State of Geneva and the association of communes, Urbz has carried out two studies on the place of culture in PAV. The first involved consulting the artistic and cultural community on the creation of a cultural centre in PAV. The study revealed that the people and institutions questioned preferred the presence of a constellation of players, both existing and future, spread across the PAV. Following this initial survey, URBZ was commissioned to devise and develop a concept for an artistic and cultural programme in the Etoile district of the PAV, where the Maison Baron is located.
Project: As the second study was never published, EOFA invited URBZ to present the important work carried out as part of this study. The idea is also to imagine the future of the Maison Baron in the PAV, taking into account the political, economic and cultural forces at work.
urbz’s projects have been presented at a number of museums and biennials, including the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre de Culture Contemporaine in Bordeaux, Maxxi in Rome, the MAK in Vienna, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Centro Cultural in São Paulo and, more recently, in the permanent exhibition at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, co-founders of urbz, have written extensively about urbz’s projects and approach in publications such as Domus (Milan), The New York Times, The Hindu, Times of India, the Oxford Encyclopaedia for Urban Planning and Economics, Oxford University Press Reader on Urban Planning and Economic Development, Strelka Press (Moscow) and, most recently, the Routledge Handbook of Asian Cities.
Year