At the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Journey partnered with the MIT Senseable City Lab to reframe one of the most often overlooked questions in global urbanism: how do we understand, design for, and represent the billions of people living in informal settlements?
‘Data Clouds’ is an immersive exhibition that challenges the dominant narratives of urban development — and reveals the ingenuity, resilience, and spatial complexity of the world’s most self-organised environments.
Every week, informal settlements grow by the equivalent of a city the size of Milan. Yet they remain largely invisible in the architectural and planning discourse. Curated by Carlo Ratti, the 2025 Biennale in Venice asks what the future of architecture looks like — and ‘Data Clouds’ responds with a radical act of recognition.
In collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of designers, urbanists and technologists at MIT, Journey brings these hidden geographies into view. At the heart of the experience is an innovative use of terrestrial LiDAR scanning technology, deployed in Vidigal — a favela in Rio de Janeiro — to capture its topography, structures, and social density in three-dimensional, navigable form.
Visitors step into a modular installation that dissolves boundaries between digital and physical. The exhibition space unfolds as a series of immersive environments — where city streets become data landscapes, and spatial stories are told through light, form, and movement.
Real-scale walkthroughs allow audiences to explore the intricate spatial organisation of Vidigal as if they were there — not a simulation, but a translation of place, rendered through the lens of technology. The experience is accompanied by a tactile architectural model that maps the neighbourhood’s physical features and highlights the areas featured in the immersive film.
Accessibility shaped every decision — not as an afterthought, but as a core design principle. Complex ideas were translated into everyday language, removing technical jargon to make the experience open and understandable to all.
Visual storytelling was paired with immersive audio at every step — from spatial soundscapes in the immersion room to a narrated bilingual audio guide in the opening gallery. A custom-designed app supported this dual experience, offering intuitive navigation and features for visually impaired users. The result: an experience designed to welcome everyone in.
‘Data Clouds’ invites audiences to engage with urbanism not as a finished product, but as an evolving process — one that can no longer ignore the voices and visions of communities that have shaped cities from the ground up.
The exhibition is designed as an encounter with an urban reality too often left outside the frame — brought into focus through storytelling, technology and collaborative research. For architects, policymakers, and everyday citizens alike, ‘Data Clouds’ redefines what architecture can represent — and who it must include.
