Uneternal City is a specific section dedicated to the city of Rome. Thirty years after “Roma interrotta” (”Rome interrupted”), Aaron Betsky has asked twelve Italian and international design studios to re-imagine the City of Rome.

The projects in Uneternal City propose to verify the general theme underlying the whole Biennale by applying it to the capital: what is town planning today? How is being transformed and how we can transform the contemporary city? But above all: on what does the quality of life of its inhabitants depend? On what does the quality of public spaces depend? The quality of meeting places? In summary, what can make our cities more pleasant to live in and attractive?

The exhibition therefore intends to verify new instruments for the transformation of the contemporary city, looking for a different urban planning that does not start from an abstract plan on the table, but is able to grow and develop like a benevolent virus, deforming what already exists in an unpredictable manner; a town planning capable of feeding from the life and energy in that selfsame city.

The projects will explore the reality of the city of Rome; they will not necessarily be real projects. They will mainly focus on peripheral areas, in that not clearly defined space between city and countryside; far from the historic, so-called eternal centre. Territories without form, intermediate lands: places where unplanned huts alternate with voids in the urban fabric; residues of natural landscape interrupting dense physical and human fabrics: places in which social and spatial relations are unusual, indefinable or simply difficult to categorize.

The projects will take note of the confused and vital character of these areas, not to deny their existence, but to try to make them explicit and aware. In this sense, Uneternal City sets itself apart from its historic precedent: while the projects drawn up in 1978 for the Roma interrotta exhibition concentrated on the problem of the design of the historic City, proposing utopian and elitist urban visions starting from the form of the 18th-century City, Uneternal City, starting from the same basis, proposes a very different interpretation; no longer linked to the fixity of the constructed City but profoundly interested in the transformation of the contemporary City and its relationship with history and memory.

What is happening to the Eternal city? Within this scenario, every design studio has chosen an area or theme to explore. No project offers a global or all-comprehensive vision, but rather ‘contagious’ and ‘overflowing’ projects that follow as yet untrodden roads, and which exploit and represent new spaces and urban fabrics. The intended image is that of a Rome of the future, in which architects open new observation points on the landscape, changing reality with its own ideas and vision, with an often critical but sometimes enchanted eye.

Participation in the initiative will also be extended to figures from the film industry, and from the fields of sociology and literature, in search of another strong sensitivity to broaden the perspective of the research.

Projects by (in alphabetical order): BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group (Copenhagen); Centola&Associati (Salerno - Rome); Clark Stevens - New West Land (Topanga, California); Delogu Associati (Rome); Giammetta&Giammetta (Rome); Koning Eizenberg Architecture (Santa Monica, California); Labics (Rome); MAD (Beijing - Tokyo); n!studio (Rome); Nemesi (Rome); t-studio (Rome); West 8 (Rotterdam - Brussels).