Urban Laboratory

Description

The UCL Urban Laboratory is a world-leading cross-disciplinary centre promoting critical, creative and collaborative inquiry into urgent urban problems, based at University College London Established in 2005, the Centre investigates, proposes, and disseminates critical solutions to a wide range of social, physical and technological urban and built environment issues, with a focus on the grand challenges of today.

Members draw on a wide range of urban expertise and research methodologies, based on exchange and collaboration between researchers from across the institution, including the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, and UCL's faculties of Social and Historical Sciences, Engineering, and Arts and Humanities. Urban Lab delivers the MASc Global Urbanism programme, a transdisciplinary degree that cuts radically across arts, humanities, social sciences and technology studies. Researchers actively promote participatory approaches to urban research, working in partnership with a range of different non-academic, business, and community-based organisations.

The Centre’s research explores a wide range of subject areas across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, using experimental, collaborative and participatory methods.

Its vision of an ‘engaged urbanism’ offers new approaches to urban problems, grounded in an understanding of everyday realities. In order to address the most challenging urban complexities, knowledge about cities, and methods of urban research, need to be produced collaboratively and publicly, with the participation of citizens, as well as those excluded from citizenship. Members provide a laboratory for the invention of new methods and innovative comparative frameworks in order to address conditions of globalisation, and challenge epistemological and geographical hierarchies in urban studies, because difficult urban challenges demand new modes of working.

Urban Lab comprises the Urban Lab department, part of the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, and the Urban Lab Collective, an extended network of cross-faculty academics working on urban issues.

Currently active

Yes

Offers funding

Yes, this infrastructure provides funding in the following categories:

Founding year

2005

Contact details

On the map

Go to larger version of this map

Categorisation

Type

Tags

University affiliation(s)

University College London (UCL)
London

Partner Infrastructures

Bertha DocHouse

Bertha DocHouse is a 55-seat dedicated documentary cinema housed within Curzon Bloomsbury in central London. Begun in 2002 as a weekly screening programme at cinemas across London, it opened its perma… read more about Bertha DocHouse

London

Partner Universities

Birkbeck, University of London

Brunel University, Uxbridge and London

Goldsmiths, University of London

King's College London (KCL)

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Loughborough University

Royal Holloway, University of London

The Open University

University of Leeds

University of Plymouth

Additional Partnerships

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London; Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London; School of Social Sciences, City, University of London; AECOM (EDAW); Approved(by)Pablo; Arcola Theatre; Arup Phase 2 Gallery; Arup Associates; The British Film Institute; Camden Arts Centre; CAMP-er-VAN; The Cinema Museum; Department for Housing, Communities & Local Government; Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport; Embassy of Brazil in London; Folkestone Triennial; Fringe!; Free Word; Gay's The Word; Hackney Picturehouse; Homes England (formerly Homes and Communities Agency); Hoxton Hall; I.B. Tauris; Italian Cultural Institute in London; Just Space; Liverpool Biennial; LIVINGMAPS; London Borough of Hackney; London Design Festival; London Short Film Festival; Lumen; MagCulture Shop; Museum of London; Omnibus Clapham; Open City Documentary Festival; Optimistic Productions; Passengerfilms; Peckham Festival; Polish Cultural Institute; Royal Institute of British Architects; Royal Norwegian Embassy; Reaktion Books; RESOLVE; Resonance FM; Roxy Bar and Screen; The Royal Academy of Arts; St John on Bethnal Green; Terry Farrell and Partners; UN Development Programme; Westminster Hub; Whitechapel Gallery; Whirled Cinema; African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland; Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies, India; KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; Paris Institute for Advanced Study, France; Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile; Università della Calabria, Italy; University of Gothenburg, Sweden; University of Nicosia, Cyprus; University of Tasmania, Australia; University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; UrbanGrad, TU Darmstadt, Germany; Technische Universität Berlin, Germany; Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar; SPARC, Mumbai, India; VAK, Mumbai, India