FRANKFURT.- As cities around the world confront housing shortages, rising rents, climate pressure and the challenge of building more inclusive communities, Kunststiftung DZ BANK has opened an exhibition that begins with a simple but urgent question: How do we want to live?

Presented in Frankfurt as part of World Design Capital 2026, the exhibition looks at urban life through the lens of art, architecture, nature and social imagination. Rather than treating the city only as a built environment, the show asks how streets, housing complexes, courtyards, green spaces and everyday meeting points shape the way people live together.

At the center of the exhibition are four installation-based works that examine major models of urban development in Europe. Together, they show that architecture is never neutral. Buildings and neighborhoods carry political ideas, social ambitions and economic realities. They influence not only where people live, but how they encounter one another.

Astrid Busch turns to Neues Frankfurt, the influential modernist housing and urban planning program that marked its 100th anniversary in 2025. Her work reflects on a historical moment when design, housing and social reform were closely connected. The project becomes a way to revisit the promises and limits of modern urban planning.

Karina Nimmerfall focuses on the courtyards of “Red Vienna,” the ambitious municipal housing program developed between 1919 and 1934. These residential complexes remain important today as examples of how architecture, public policy and collective life can work together to support affordable housing and social stability.

Heike Baranowsky looks at Paris from another angle, moving between the dense historic center and the city’s outer districts. Her contribution considers the shifting relationship between urban core and periphery, and the ways cities expand, divide and connect.

Andrea Pichl brings together prefabricated housing blocks, including but not limited to those associated with the former East Germany. Her work reconsiders structures that have often been dismissed or stigmatized, asking what they reveal about social planning, memory and everyday life.

The exhibition’s broader question feels especially timely. In many cities, the conversation around housing is dominated by scarcity and cost. But the show insists that livability is about more than shelter. It is also about belonging, access, shared responsibility and the ability to participate in shaping one’s environment.

Cooperative housing models appear as one possible answer. By organizing living and management collectively, they suggest alternatives to purely market-driven development and open conversations about affordability, participation and long-term community.

Climate change adds another layer to the discussion. The exhibition asks how urban centers can make room for nature not as decoration, but as infrastructure for survival and well-being. Green spaces can cool overheated neighborhoods, support animals and biodiversity, and create places where people can rest, gather and feel part of a shared environment.

Several artists expand the exhibition’s focus beyond housing and architecture. Lilly Lulay creates a moving collage of Istanbul, forming a new image of the city from fragments of movement, memory and perception. Klaus Merkel and Olivo Barbieri consider how stones and built structures carry traces of growth, history and accumulated time.

Dieter Huber contributes constructed plants, while Beate Gütschow, Peter Hutchinson and Talisa Lallai bring attention to imagined or desired landscapes — places where nature, memory and longing intersect. Eyal Weizman, Christian Nicolas and Jitka Hanzlová address how human beings and animals move through urban spaces, suggesting that the city is shared not only among people, but across species.

The result is an exhibition that treats the city as a living system: built, inhabited, contested and constantly changing. It does not offer one answer to the question “How do we want to live?” Instead, it opens a space for reflection on what cities could become when housing, nature, community and design are thought together.