Museum of London
Museum of London

 

THE FUTURE CITY

Driverless cars, or flooded streets? Citizen democracy, or surveillance capitalism? Utopia? Or uncertainty? These exhibitions and events explored the future of London and cities around the world, and asked what we can do to prepare for it.

Keep in touch to learn what we’re planning as we move towards the new Museum of London in West Smithfield.

 

 

London Visions

January – April 2018

Inside the London Visions display.

 

What will the future look like? This exhibition featured artworks, films, and new commissions depicting a London of the future. The works on display were all radical, all different: architectural drawings, designs for video games, award-winning films.

The City is Ours was all about the present: how cities around the world are adapting to the real challenges facing them today. So for London Visions, we embraced the fantastic: art and design to explore extraordinary dreams for the city, including:

  • New commissions by Squint/Opera exploring everything from a city transformed by self-driving cars to a flooded London.
  • An infinitely tall skyscraper designed by SURE Architecture to accommodate London’s growing population for all time.
  • In The Robot Skies, a ground-breaking short film about teenagers who hack the state surveillance drones that patrol their estate to carry messages of love.

 

See our visions of London’s future >

 

Museum of London

 

Lawrence Lek: Bonus Levels

7 October 2017 – 17 January 2018

 

What would your version of a utopian city look like? Green, open space? A perfect transport system? Housing for everyone? These playable, virtual artworks by visual artist Lawrence Lek  explored radical futuristic versions of London.

In the first display of its kind at Museum of London, these three video games gave visitors a chance to explore a dramatic, virtual landscape built around London’s most recognisable landmarks. Gamers were confronted with a transformed city, brought to life by Lek’s unique mix of art, architecture and sound.

We featured:

Sky Line (Tube Strike Edition): a 3D animated virtual environment that serves as an interactive map of independent art spaces around London. Travellers are given unlimited access to a floating railway line, which snakes between idealised galleries, hovering skyscrapers, mountain tops and other fragments of a make believe city in the sky.

Delirious New Wick: 3D animated virtual environment of the zone surrounding London’s 2012 Olympic Park. As regeneration strategies and commercial property developments spread over East London, the player is invited to witness the conflict between the areas past and its future.

Europa, Mon Amour (2016 Brexit Edition): a site-specific 3D simulation that brings together multiple histories of the area around Dalston into a single zone. Based on the physical maps of the area, the level brings together three histories into a single zone: primordial forests, deluxe architecture, and artist-run colonies.

See the Bonus Levels >



Imagined Futures

October 2017 – April 2018

What have writers predicted for the future of the city? What can we tell from their imaginings? This outdoor display greeted visitors to the second half of our season with quotations from novelists old and modern, exploring fantastic, and science-fictional London. 

Find out more >

 



Museum of London


City Now City Future

London’s population could reach 10 million by 2029



Museum of London

Futureshocks

January – March 2018

This series of talks, held in partnership with The Guardian, brought leading thinkers, writers and experts together to talk about technology and how it is transforming our cities and ourselves.

Human: discussing how our interactions with technologies are transforming our bodies, identities and the relationships we have with each other in our changing cities.

Systems: charting the role of technologies – from historical innovations to future speculations – in transforming and disrupting the city and the lived experience of our urban environments.

Civic: exploring the changing nature of the civic – from power and truth to creating new spaces, and forms of action and agency, in the future city.

Find out more >

Museum of London

 

“We walk these old streets
Sit on dirty tube seats
Don’t know where we’re going but we know where we’ve been

A new generation
The future salvation
But look at the mess we’ve been left to clean”

From Concrete Hope, co-written at Our Future City festival

Our Future City Festival

17 March 2018

Curated by an enthusiastic volunteer team of young Londoners, this event was planned and delivered so other young people could join the conversation about London’s future.

Working over a period of 5 months, the volunteer team designed, planned and delivered an event that would appeal to Londoners between the ages of 14-25 years old. They designed activities around our Fatberg! display, they focused on the identity of London and crowd-sourced your views on what the London of the future will be like.

How will we make Our Future City? >

 

Young people attend the Our Future City festival at the Museum of London Young people attend the Our Future City festival at the Museum of London

London’s future… articles

Articles from the London's future series

 

Where will we live? How will we travel? What will we breathe?

We asked journalists, academics and policy-makers to share their thoughts on what will happen with some of the most important issues facing Londoners, from pollution to public space. Then we got our curators to write about how Londoners overcame those problems in the past, to give us inspiration for the future.

London’s future… transport >
London’s future… housing >
London’s future… public space >
London’s future… air >
London’s future… nightlife >