Urban ring, urban development, urban legend, ex-urban…are these urban phenomena still visible as we begin the twenty-first century? Today’s world is omniurban: urban rings absorb urban centers; ex-urbanism overlaps with the inner city; urban legends are built on suburban banalities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, approximately 10% of the world’s population lived in cities; today, more than 75% of the world’s citizens live in urbanized areas. Urbanization is not only a global phenomenon of physical and cultural restructuring—it has itself become a spatial effect of the distributed networks of communication, resources, finance and migration that characterize contemporary life. The city today is everywhere and nowhere.

Context
New Jersey, which has no major city, is the most densely populated state in the union. Nicknamed “The Garden State,” 20% of its land area is devoted to productive farming: it ranks fourth in the nation in the production of cranberries, yields a quarter of the nation’s blueberries. New Jersey’s greatest single industry is chemicals; its second is tourism. It boasts the oldest seashore resort (Cape May) as well as the nation’s densest highway and railway system. No longer anomalous, such urban paradoxes are central to the new century’s omniurban condition.

Ambition
Located in the center of this state of paradoxical juxtapositions, Princeton has established a research center to collect the interdisciplinary urban research that is currently dispersed across the campus. As reflected in the University’s course offerings, Princeton has long recognized that cities (including metropolitan regions, and the suburban landscape) offer a critical, cohesive tableau for researching anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art, civil engineering, economics, history, literature, politics, religion, sociology, and the environment.

The goal of the Center for Architecture, Urbanism, and Infrastructure is to offer a focused platform for sharing and expanding this collective research. Dedicated to research, the Center will gather resources in order to sponsor independent and collective projects, a recurrent urban colloquium, and exhibitions. Biannual themes will provide intersections for collective research.