Women* Designed Cities

In the face of rapid urban expansion, ecological volatility, and deepening inequality, Dreaming New Worlds 2025 asks a vital question: What would cities look and feel like if designed by women* artists, matriarchs, scientists, carers, engineers, storytellers?

This year’s edition, Women* Designed Cities, invites Nigerian women*-led collectives (we encourage those working outside Lagos or beyond its dominant narratives to apply) to propose creative, technological, and aesthetic explorations of urban space from a deeply organic Nigerian eye. Whether through memory, materiality, beauty, taste or sound, we seek practices that reimagine what is possible when women*’s voices, technologies, and spatial imaginations shape our shared environments.

• Narratives that emerge from cities and towns beyond Lagos, or peripheries where untold futures are being lived every day.
• Proposals that use new and creative technologies from mapping tools to sonic environments, XR, coding skills, robotics, digital fabrication, or AI as storytelling or world-building tools.
• Collectives that see beauty not as luxury, but as resistance, connection, and design logic.
• Feminist approaches that challenge extractive progress and open plural, intimate, and planetary ways of being in the world.

• Women*-led collectives or mixed-gender collectives where women* hold a central role in creative direction. (2-6 people)
• Must include at least one practicing artist or designer, and one new media or creative technologist (e.g., coder, AR/VR designer, data artist, sound engineer, bio-designer).
• Must be based in Nigeria, with preference for collectives actively engaged in inter-city knowledge sharing.
• Interdisciplinary collectives working across architecture, urbanism, agriculture, ecology, performance, tech, design, or activism are strongly encouraged to apply.

• Curatorial support and critical dialogue with theDreaming New Worldsteam.
• A production and exhibition stipend to support research, prototyping, and realization. (Up to NGN 4,000,000)
• Opportunities to present work in an exhibition, digital platform, and public program in Lagos.
• Participation in a gathering/lab in Lagos, where selected collectives will collaborate, workshop, and showcase their ideas.
• Documentation and publication in the Dreaming New Worlds platforms.

Each proposal should include:

1. Collective Statement (max 500 words): Describe your collective, talk about who you are, how you work together, and your shared values.
2. Project Proposal (max 700 words): Tell us what you want to do. Where will you work? What technologies will you use? What stories are you telling about cities and the future?
3. Visual Material: Sketches, maps, previous work, video links, storyboards, whatever best conveys your idea.
4. CVs/Bios of Members
5. Budget Outline (up to ₦4,000,000): How do you plan to use the funds for research, implementation and production at the exhibition?

All materials should be submitted as a PDF - One PDF (max 15MB) or via a Google Drive link to library-lagos@goethe.de