First International Photography Competition “Cities without Architecture” has already started receiving entries from all over the world! We are happy to announce that Fernando will be a member of the jury, together with the photographer Alexandra Kononchenko, architect Changfang Luo and Ben Murphy. Below we copy a brief description of the competition and the idea behind it.

According to the Un-Habitat (United Nations) Urban Observatory, it is estimated that fifty million people will move from rural areas to the cities in western Africa over the next ten years. In Mumbay, the population has recorded a four-fold increase. Half of the population live in slums, 700.000 spend the night on the streets, 100 million people in the world, mostly kids, have no permanent home.

More than half a century has passed already since Bernard Rudofsky exhibited at the New York MOMA a collection of pictures he took during his trips. The exhibition would be named: Architecture Without Architect. This exhibition was shown in more than 80 cities during the following 11 years, and its catalogue has become a true referent in what has been called vernacular architecture.

A question arises nowadays: what have architects learned from this famous Architecture Without Architects? But these days there is an even more important question: how much aware are we in the developed countries of the existence of cities without architecture?

The universal access to a proper city and housing, makes more urgent the need to intervene in these cities in risk in order to improve their condition. Raising awareness is a necessary first step towards the obtention of resources for the improvement of the habitat. And this is the main reason why we launch this initiative.

We have a jury with five members, each of them is an outstanding personality within their field. This is, either Photography, Architecture and Cooperation. We will anounce their names throughout the next month.

The winner in this competition will receive an amount of up to 3.000€ to develop a photographic project in any of the international sites where Arquitectura Sin Fronteras is carrying out their actions, in order to show the existing reality.

Besides, the winning picture will be used as image for a nationwide publicity campaign of sensibilization.

Submission deadline: March 24, 2017, 23h59 (GMT+1)

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