Overhaul: The 2013–2014 Transportation Series, is an expansive series of design exhibitions, lectures, and other programs offering the region’s most comprehensive look at urban-transportation visioning, with Traffic Advisory, a speaker series focused on opportunities and challenges for Greater Boston; and Rights of Way: Mobility and the City, a design exhibition focusing on the past, present, and future of transportation.

The Traffic Advisory speaker series, sponsored by the Barr Foundation and organized by the Boston Society of Architects, the BSA Foundation and Boston’s Green Ribbon Commission, brought together leaders from across North America and Europe to talk to us about the role that 21st century transportation can and should play in adapting to a new period of transformative change. The 9-part series finished during the summer of 2014 and, as the series progressed, clear messages emerged: we need to plan now and with great ambition; 21st century transportation can help us address significant social, economic, and environmental challenges; and in an era of steadily diminishing public resources, we must do more than talk about the significant economic payback associated with strategic transit investments; we must find innovative ways to actually pay for them.

Rights of Way: Mobility and the City was a global exploration of mobility and transportation in cities. The exhibition featured dozens of examples of visionary urban thinking, showing how the city is shaped by the ways people move through it.

Curated by James Graham and Meredith Miller of MILLIGRAM-office, Rights of Way demonstrated that our urban environment is the result of constant negotiation among designers, policy makers, the private sector, and individual residents. By claiming that access to mobility is access to opportunity and that everyone has his or her own “right of way,” this future-oriented show revealed how those public rights are always at play in the shared commons of the city. The exhibition examined large-scale urban futures, contemporary examples of innovative design for transit and public space, historical attempts at remaking the city, and individual adaptations of mobility systems. Rights of Way also included three projects from the 2012 Audi Urban Future Award, focusing on three megaregions: the Pearl River Delta in China’s Guangdong Province; São Paulo; and the Boston–Washington, DC (BosWash) Corridor. Displays included renderings, drawings, photography, videos, infographics, and a media library that allowed visitors to delve further into the issues raised by the exhibition content.

Mobility and the City: Six Ideas

To indicate the extraordinary breadth of sites, systems, and approaches that the problems of commuting, travel, and migration have brought to the fields of architecture and urban design, this speaker series proposed new ways of thinking about the complex ecology of objects, networks, and populations that we call “mobility.” Each lecture corresponded to a video interview incorporated into the exhibition Rights of Way: Mobility and the City, on view at BSA Space.

Curators: MILLIGRAM-office
Designers: Höweler + Yoon Architecture and MILLIGRAM-office
Content partner: Stylepark
Exhibition graphics: MGMT. design

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