The way we live, consume, and produce is overtaxing our planet’s capacity. This fact calls for a fundamental socioeconomic transition that can only ‘take place’ if we quite literally ‘make place’ for it at the same time. There can be no transition to renewable energy, no resilient ecosystem, and no caring and solidary living environment without the actual transformation of our urban landscapes.

Creating Space means Sharing Space
Changes as fundamental as these require substantial political and social choices. But they come with a design challenge: to facilitate behavioral change, we have to be able to couple social, spatial, and ecological problems on the scale of the building, the neighborhood, the city, and the entire planet. Creating space means sharing space!

The Missing Link
With design as its premise, the Research Agenda of IABR–2018+2020–THE MISSING LINK focuses on the vital need to scale up and accelerate our transition to a resilient future. This is an urgent matter and we all know the whys and the wherefores. The question is no longer whether we need to change, but how we are going to adjust. Nobody really knows, and exactly this is The Missing Link. How can we get from agendas, knowledge, and plans to truly effective spatial transformation? How do we realize change fast enough, in enough places at a time, both affordably and socially inclusively? And what does the new design practice we need to meet that objective look like?

One Program, Two Biennales
The IABR is organizing its next two editions as a single continuous cycle: two biennales, one program. The biennale in 2018 is a ‘work biennale’, its goal is to translate existing knowledge, design power, and initiatives into new hypotheses, approaches, and partnerships for spatial transformation. The period between the 2018 and 2020 editions is bridged by research by design on matters ranging from going from agenda setting to the evidence-based, from research to result, from plan to implementation. In 2020 we will share the results: realistic and concrete, appealing and convincing. A prospect for action and the practice related to it.

Call for Practices
The curators of IABR–2018+2020 call on practices from various domains and continents to participate in The Missing Link to jointly explore and test how we can make a qualitative leap towards a more resilient future. The Call for Practices focuses on practices that actually close the gap between good plans and ambitious goals on the one hand, and their concrete implementation on the other.

The IABR invites those who want to answer its Call for Practices and actually join us in materializing The Missing Link to closely read all documents, including the Selection Criteria and Guidelines and subsequently complete the Application Form.

All documents are published on www.iabr.nl
For the Curator Statement and the Research Agenda, click here
For the Call for Practices and the Application Form, click here