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One Architecture & Urbanism

One Architecture & Urbanism

Amsterdam, NL and New York

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'Data Mining the Urban Village' Installation Premieres at UABB 2017

By One Architecture
Jan 24, '18 11:24 AM EST

One Architecture partnered with Columbia GSAPP's Studio X and the URBANUS curatorial team to create a signature installation for the 2017 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) in Nantou Old Town, China. The exhibit, titled Data Mining the Urban Village, draws data from 17 years of public thinking on the concept of urban villages–formerly rural fishing and farming communities engulfed by rapid urbanization–of which Nantou itself is a prime example. 

Students from a Columbia GSAPP summer workshop used data-scraping technologies to create a massive database of written material on urban villages from social media, journalistic, and academic sources from 2001–2017. This collection was channeled by the project team into a series of meta-analyses as well as a 3-dimensional timeline composed of over 400,000 printed pages of textual data. Data Mining the Urban Village prompts viewers to examine the distribution networks and actors behind urban discourse. It is currently on display through March 2018 in the main hall of the Biennale in Shenzhen, as part of the "Urban Village Archive"