New Cities Future Ruins

Meadows Prize

New Cities, Future Ruins is a curatorial initiative inviting artists, designers, and thinkers to re-imagine the extreme urbanism of the Western Sun Belt.

The new cities of the Western Sun Belt represent an ascendant paradigm and an emerging crisis.

Fast-growing symbols of opportunity and entrepreneurialism, these cities are sprawling agglomerations in delicate ecosystems, marked by resource overuse, dramatic demographic change, and political struggle. They both particularize and illuminate global crises of rapid urbanization. Suburban in texture, these cities are twenty-first century spaces that resist creative traditions inherited from the industrial city.

Bringing critical and innovative practices from around the world to bear on this urban landscape, New Cities, Future Ruins seeks to foster visionary thought and artistic experimentation at these urgent sites.