About MovingCities

MovingCities is a Shanghai-based think-thank investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city.
Established in 2007 by Bert de Muynck [BE] and Mónica Carriço [PT], MovingCities publishes, collaborates, talks and walks, and operate as embedded architects.

After operating from Beijing [2007-2009], MovingCities moved in October 2009 to Shanghai.

Burj Dubai | Dubai, 2007
Burj Dubai | Dubai, 2007

For MovingCities studio studies are less challenging than work in the open urban air, where from minute to minute people, space, architecture and society vibrates and transforms. Attending to the ephemeral layers interacting between men and architecture, society and the city, MovingCities is about capturing the movements of time and vision about to be lost and to be emerging.

To understand the contemporary complexity and reality of cities we have to engage with them in a different way; not as fixed entities, stable places, but as organisms that can grow, shrink, think, perform and act accordingly to influences from the inside as well as from the outside.

MovingCities is not as interested in conditions of transition as such, but rather in processes of intensification, circulation, accumulation, formation and standardisation that this time of transition is provoking.

MovingCities is about understanding the role that architecture and urbanism are playing in shaping the future of the contemporary city.

movingcitiesmini-manifesto

(full of interesting observations, theories and comments on the state of urbanism)

via via

spatial agency:
Established in 2007 by Bert de Muynck and Mónica Carriço, movingcities is a think tank based in Beijing Shanghai whose work focuses on how the practices of architecture and urbanism affect the city.

Their name is a reaction to the influential 'Shrinking Cities' project, which they critiqued for an over emphasis on just one part of a larger phenomenon. In contrast they see contemporary urbanity as being in constant flux and speak of city-regions that incorporate shrinking and expanding, rural and urban.

Their work takes the form of projects, writings and collaborations as well as interviews. (...)

Their projects take the form of embedded research on the city, usually carried out in collaboration with other architects."

creative cities:
Mov­ing­Cit­ies is an inde­pend­ent research organ­iz­a­tion based in China

archiblog:
MovingCities is a blog investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city. MovingCities features urban research, critical architectural investigations and publications. MovingCities operates from Beijing Shanghai, China.

snowball architecture:
Bert de Muynck is the other half of MovingCities, a Shanghai based duo of “shrinks in the urban debate” as him and his partner Mónica Carriço like to describe their practice. MovingCities are also the curators of Snowball Shanghai – Event on Finnish Architecture to be organised in Shanghai this March.