MUNICH.- Megacities and shrinking cities, »highspeed urbanism« and »slow cities« ¿ the cities of this world are changing. The difference between town and country vanishes, everything becomes town, only varying its spatial and structural character. New forms of cities, new urban landscapes, new global and local networks are emerging.

Multiple City shows current urban developments worldwide as mirrored in central urban concepts of the past 100 years. Their juxtaposition and inter-relationship with leading historical and contemporary ideas illustrate and explain the complex and multi-layered developments of urban planning.

The exhibition presents sixteen urbanistic terms, examining their transformation up to the present: From the garden city at the beginning of the 20th century via the city landscape concepts of the early post-war period to today¿s »Urban Landscapes« and from the »New Towns« of the 1960s to the current establishments of cities in China and the United Arab Emirates; from the leading ideas of a »mobile city« to the »Telepolis« of a digital era and from the »Pleasure City« of a global consumer landscape to the strategy of branding, the city as a trademark. New phenomena appear which, at the same time, can be a product of traditional strategies. These phenomena are heterogeneous, there is neither one manifestation nor one strategy in dealing with the city of today: Multple City.

The variety of city concepts is documented in the exhibition by means of original plans, models and photographs. Among the international examples are »La città analoga«, Archigram’s »Instant City«, a project by Rem Koolhaas for the international construction trade fair in Berlin 1980, original collages by Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown as well as sketches by Lucio Costa for the Brasilia masterplan, to be shown in Europe for the first time. Historical town concepts are compared with current changes of urban spaces in a photo documentation, showing pictures of Dubai, Shanghai and Istanbul among others..