My Ideal City

The MIC (My Ideal City) project aims to encourage a European dimension in the communication of science and technology through museums events targeting the public. More specifically, it supports the networking around the development of a coordinated exhibition in different museums that is using a “virtual worlds” dimension in order to connect urban planning choices and the awareness of citizens about them, as well as an International Conference that will bring together academics and science centres experts to discuss the relationships among urban planning, cyberspace and science events.

The virtual exhibition, focus of the demonstration, provides visitors of each science centre and on the Web with a “virtual worlds” environment that reproduces in alternative and different ways their own city. The visitors have then the opportunity to visit also the different virtual ideal cities of the other partner countries involved in the project. The new cities, the “ideal” ones, enables citizens to re-think their urban environments and the choices done in order to make them as they appear in the virtual environment. The project not only provides citizens with an exhibition able to raise socio-cultural awareness in relation to the urban choices, but also involves them in the planning of the “ideal cities”, giving another contribution to the spread of an open and transparent process of communicating among science (sustainable urban planning), technology (the “virtual” environment), institutions (science centres), and people.
The demonstration focus on detailing how the final result, the virtual exhibition, reflects the project aims, methods, and topics, with particular attention toward the role of different curatorial practices in giving shape to the different ideal cities.

We kindly ask the committee to evaluate the exhibition as it can be downloaded from the website, because it is going to be the focus of the presentation