This book tells the story of Eyes of the City—an international exhibition on technology and urbanism held in Shenzhen during the winter of 2019 and 2020, with a curation process that unfolded between summer 2018 and spring 2020. Conceived as a cultural event exploring future scenarios in architecture and design, Eyes of the City found itself in an extraordinary, if unstable, position, enmeshed within a series of powerfully contingent events—the political turmoil in Hong Kong, the first outbreak of COVID-19 in China—that impacted not only the scope of the project, but also the global debate around society and urban space.
Eyes of the City was one of the two main sections of the eighth edition of the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled Urban Interactions. Jointly curated by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Politecnico di Torino and South China University of Technology, it focused on the various relationships between the built environment and increasingly pervasive digital technologies—from artificial intelligence to facial recognition, drones to self-driving vehicles—in a city that is one of the world’s leading centers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. [1]
