The Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis has opened a new exhibition titled "Imagining Future Cities: Global and Minnesota Visions, Past and Present," running through September 14. Curated by Dingliang Yang, an urban designer and McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota, the show features architectural drawings, diagrams, and models that examine the history and meaning of cities over the past 150 years. Yang collaborated with faculty members Thomas Fisher and Jennifer Yoos, research fellow Michael Keller, and 17 student research assistants over three years to create the exhibition, which is organized into three galleries exploring theoretical, experimental, and perceptual approaches to urban design.
The exhibition matters because it brings critical questions about sustainability, equity, and efficiency in urban planning to a public audience, encouraging visitors to engage with city-making from a non-architectural perspective. By juxtaposing global case studies with local examples from the Twin Cities, the show emphasizes the need for continuous imagination in addressing contemporary urban challenges. Yang argues that citizens often take their built environment for granted, but cities are constantly being reinvented, and outdated solutions from a century ago cannot solve 21st-century problems. The exhibition aims to foster mutual dialogue between global and local contexts, inspiring more active public participation in shaping future cities.