Under the title ‘The Vertical Village – Individual, Informal, Intense Taipei’ the exhibition explores the rapid urban transformation of East Asia, the qualities of urban villages, and the potential to develop much denser, vertical settlements as a radical alternative to the identical block-like architecture of standardised units and their effect on city life. The exhibition includes newly commissioned films, interviews, and public works of art, centred around the City of Taipei’s urban regeneration scheme ‘Urban Regeneration Station’ (URS) which has successfully redeveloped seven disused properties into a wide variety of public facilities, cultural programs and spaces for artists and entrepreneurs. The open-source software The HouseMaker© and the VillageMaker© are also included in the exhibition. Visitors can design their ideal house and compose their own Vertical Village with these parametric packages. In the main courtyard of the historic Hamburg Museum an interactive sculpture of the Vertical Village is exhibited.

Can we imagine a new model for the development of East Asian cities? Can these areas be densified in such a way that the qualities of the traditional village are preserved and enriched? The Vertical Village exhibition offers an alternative to the ‘Block Attack’, a contemporary Vertical Village designed by MVRDV – a three-dimensional community that brings personal freedom, diversity, flexibility and neighbourhood life back into East Asian cities. This theory is tested with a case study on a site in Taipei's ZhongShan District.

And what could the Vertical Village concept – in principle developed as proposal for the future development of Asian cities – contribute to the discussion in a European context? Could exhibiting the Vertical Village concept in Hamburg thus help to liberate our sometimes limited European cities, to add more diversity, programmatic richness and flexibility to our cities, and to allow for more individual and collective initiatives and creative development models?