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.

The eight priority areas are:

• Feminist cities
• Globalising urbanisms
• Housing urbanism
• Queer infrastructure
• Urban heritage
• Urban nights
• Urban verticality
• Wasteland

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

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University affiliation(s)

University College London (UCL)
London