For Cities

for Cities is an international collective of urban practitioners and thinkers working in Asian cities. We provide an urban "repository" — an online idea bank — where emerging practitioners in the field of urbanism (architects, urban planners, civil activists, policy makers, researchers, artists, journalists, and more) can showcase their practices and ideas. From our repository, people can find inspiration, useful tools, happenings related to architecture and urbanism, and even future collaborators for their local projects. We select the finest ideas from the platform and introduce them to established, high-profile companies as well as local governess and other related institutions who are looking for new inspiration in their projects and new practitioners to help them achieve their goals. We also host an annual city festival & exhibition in multiple Asian cities to share, test, and learn from these ideas- We are an urban experience design studio based in Tokyo, Kyoto and Amsterdam. Our work started from our own frustration towards Japanese cities, where we were born and raised. After years of working to build communities and plan interventions, we found ourselves somehow lost in the rapidly changing cities that have an irreversible inclination towards money, towards commerce, towards exchange, towards products. We believe that a city could be a work of art — something we can make and change with our own hands. We've also seen that there are so many interesting stories, such a rich body of knowledge rooted in cities in Asia, even though we often follow the Westernized,"modern" way of making a city. Our mission is to celebrate this uniqueness and to build an international collective of emerging urbanists who act together to intervene in the existing paradigms.