When architect Dingliang YangYang moved to the Twin Cities three years ago, he envisioned a project that would help residents reimagine their city. 

The result is on display this summer as the Weisman Art Museum’s first-ever architectural exhibit, “Imagining Future Cities,” which features more than 160 pieces across three rooms to ignite visitors' interest in how Minneapolis can be improved through urban design.

Running until Sept. 14, the exhibit includes dioramas of riverside spaces and cityscapes, photographs of a Ford Motor Co. highway model and the project that was eventually built, and drawings of utopian cities from 20th-century artists. 

The Mississippi River unifies the exhibit’s vision. The river, Yang said, is the Twin Cities' “urban spine” where third spaces like museums and libraries could be distributed in an accessible and impactful way. 

The floor of the exhibit's largest room is decorated with a visual of the Mississippi in the Twin Cities area. As visitors survey the space, they are led by the river through dioramas of real riverside urban areas situated around their actual location along its curvature. The flow of the walkway mirrors the idea that the river connects them all. 

Yang said that the Twin Cities are fragmented in their development largely because Minneapolis and St. Paul resist working in tandem on urban design projects. Regardless of their resistance to act as a unit, he said, the Mississippi naturally ties them together. 

“We are in the Twin Cities,” Yang said, addressing the two cities as if they were listening. “Why are you competing? You should work together.”

To display new urban design possibilities for the Twin Cities, the exhibit uses other cities' river development projects as examples. Those include the Hudson River in New York, the Huangpu River in Shanghai and the Seine in Paris.

Yang said riverside urban developments should have a balanced system of housing, parks and public institutions. Private developments that steer profits into the hands of a few are not in the public’s interest, he said.  

Developers and a city's residents can both benefit from imaginative urban design projects that take into account public interest as well as financial gain, Yang said. 

Thomas Fisher, the director of the University of Minnesota Design Center, said this comparative approach is useful because it’s often difficult for people to imagine a city design other than what they know. 

The Mississippi River once served as an industrial dump that institutions like the university avoided, but now that the river is cleaner, there's a growing urge for reconnection, Fisher said

With a large portion of the Twin Cities’ industry tied to knowledge work like education and health care, the area would benefit from more urban design developments around the river, Fisher said. 

“Thinking about how we leverage that asset as an amenity that people would be attracted to is an important part of the economic future of this region,” Fisher said.