City Lab

Description

The City Lab aims to develop research that will:

• build new forms of citizenship based on creativity and social responsibility
• help re-imagine current uses of architecture, art, design, fashion and urbanism within and across the fields of culture, health, housing and commerce within the context of the city
• develop new forms of hybrid and transdisciplinary practices that are capable of having positive, real world and sustainable impact on the social, political, economic and cultural infrastructure of the city

This process would involve a drive to reshape the pedagogic delivery and professional practice of architecture, art and design within the context of the city. This can be achieved by working across a range of socially oriented projects and practices that call for social change within the city context. As well as respecting and examining existing disciplinary specificities, this will also mean working with more comprehensive, expanded constituencies, reaching and building new audiences and developing models of city-based architecture, art, fashion and design practices that are valued more widely, beyond the current conventions of economic and personal impact. The City Lab’s research expertise combines:

• Application: practice-led and practice-based approaches to knowledge production
• Usership: the uses of architecture, art and design as creative tools for educational development and social change
• Constituencies: the uses of art and design in developing collaborative forms of social and ecological change
• History and critical theory: rethinking the story of how art can be used in society

The research conducted by the City Lab demonstrates synergy between architecture, art and design practice and theory. It is distinctive through its diversity. At its core are discourses of the city and the network of practices upon which it impacts.

The long-term Research aim of the City Lab will be to develop a local, national and international programme of activities and collaborations built around the key themes of:

• The uses of art and design
• Socially engaged/transdisciplinary practice
• Architecture
• Fashion
• Design
• Brand and identity
• Communication design
• Place making
• Regeneration and sustainable cities
• Academic/cultural organisation partnerships
• Pedagogy
• Art, design, health and wellbeing
• Alternative economies
• Regeneration

City Lab will seek to innovate and promote enterprise-based teaching and learning practices within its research context via the development of a student-led and entrepreneurial pedagogy.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

Liverpool John Moores University
Merseyside