Photo competition “Visions of the Urban Future”

adelphi, the independent think tank and leading public policy consultancy on climate, environment and development, invites you to take part in a photo competition on the theme of “Visions of the urban future”.

The world of tomorrow will be an urban one. Urbanisation is one of the defining trends of our time. The urban population is growing steadily, and its need for natural resources is increasing. By 2050, more than three quarters of the world’s population will live in cities.

When it comes to today’s economic, social and environmental challenges, cities are regarded as both a cause and solution. In the last two years, the international community has adopted a global roadmap for sustainable cities, the New Urban Agenda. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on climate change likewise treat cities as important actors in the transformation towards a sustainable future. adelphi is addressing visions of future urban development, and is working on a global empirical project on urban visions and utopias.

We want to show what ideas about the future of urban development and cities exist in a variety of places around the world in the minds of a broad range of people. This project is focused not so much on technological innovations for future mobility, sustainable construction and networked infrastructure, but rather on people – the city as a social space. People shape their lives in very different ways, which is also reflected at the spatial level. Public places can be used by various social milieus at different times; urban society is made up of a variety of social spaces.

Formulating a positive, radically rethought, environmentally sound and above all social vision of the future city and redesigning democratic participation are paramount in this competition.

We invite photographers to engage creatively with this theme, and to submit their photographs by 30 June 2018. adelphi will announce the results of the international competition on its website in late July, and will inform the winners by email.
An international jury will judge the submitted works. The winning photographs will be presented to the public at adelphi’s premises at an opening event, and will appear in the “Urban Visions” publication as well as on the Urban Futures global platform. The winner will be invited to the opening event in Berlin.

What are the prizes?
1st place: 1000 EUR
2nd place: 500 EUR
3rd place: 300 EUR

Conditions for participation:
• The photographs must have been taken within the past year.
• The photographs should initially be submitted by email or CD/USB stick as full-size JPEG files at the highest quality level. Photographers whose works are selected to appear in the exhibition will be contacted by email, and should then submit their photographs in TIFF file format.
• The submitted works must be in colour.
• It is also possible to submit a series of 3-5 photographs.
• The title of digital image files must be comprised of the photographer’s name, the picture title, the location where the picture was taken, and the picture number (e.g. BobSmith_FutureVisions_Mumbai_1).

Rights of use and copyrights:

The winning photographs will be used as illustrations in the “Urban Visions” publication, which is expected to be published at the end of 2018. The submitted photographs may be used for publications, websites and printed matter with the inclusion of the photographer’s name. Through their submissions, the authors make a binding declaration that they are the originators of the works and that the photographer holds the rights of use. In every publication of the picture, the photographer will be named alongside their picture as the work’s author.
The authors grant adelphi the non-exclusive and transferrable right of reproduction and dissemination of the photographs; this right is unlimited temporally, spatially, and in terms of content. adelphi may transfer the rights conferred on it in part or in whole to third parties without requiring the author’s consent.
The author insofar exempts adelphi completely from all claims made by third parties, including the costs of legal defence and legal proceedings. The author shall guarantee and ensure that all necessary declarations of consent for the use of the illustration are present for all persons depicted in the illustrations and that the photographs do not infringe upon any rights of privacy.

Please submit your entries by 30 June 2018 to:

adelphi, Anna Maria Link
E-Mail: photocontest@adelphi.de, Subject: urban future photo competition
Address: adelphi research gemeinnützige GmbH, Alt-Moabit 91, 10559 Berlin