"Countryside, The Future," an exhibit at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for innovative art and architecture in New York City, features a prominent wall-size display of interactive maps that visualize how humans have transformed the countryside—the surface of Earth not occupied by urban growth. Many of the maps are based on data from NASA's Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) operated by Columbia University's Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), as well as other remote-sensing datasets from NASA and other sources.
The installation was created by urban architect Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, director of AMO, the think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Also contributing were students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Wageningen University, Netherlands; and the University of Nairobi. The exhibit originally opened in February 2020 for three weeks, but closed due to the pandemic along with the Guggenheim, until its reopening in October 2020. The exhibit has been extended through February 15, 2021.