UCL Urban Laboratory

Urban Laboratory Research Assistant Laura Marshall has written an article for the UCL Events blog about the workshop she co-organised at the Peckham Festival on 10 September as part of our ongoing research in to London's LGBTQI nightlife since 1986.

UCL Urban Laboratory have launched a new blogging platform on Medium with an article by Dr Rodrigo Firmino on his research sabattical in London.

UCL Urban Laboratory is pleased to announce a partnership with Resolve - a student-led interdisciplinary collective - during the London Design Festival 2016.

Equal By Design, a short documentary exploring how the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza can help us think about economic equality, housing design, and the crisis in affordable housing today, is availble to watch online for free.

In June 2016, UCL Urban Laboratory will collaborate on an experimental pedagogy with artist collective Fourthland, using performance as research to unpick narratives of regeneration. Taking place as part of the UTOPIA season at Somerset House and the London Festival of Architecture on 29 June, The Storm: A Utopian Forecast for London? emerges from Fourthland’s social practice on various London estates and two years of research attendance at public enquiry and developer led consultations. The work has also developed in response to enquiries within the Urban Laboratory, including questions on education for the future city, the cultural representations of urban life through Cities Imaginaries, and concepts emerging from Cities Methodologies.

UCL Urban Laboratory in collaboration with Queer Spaces London are undertaking research on nightlife spaces that are important to London’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI) communities.  We are seeking information from individuals, businesses, performers and promoters who contribute to London's LGBTQI nightlife spaces via an online survey. By gathering community knowledge from people with a range of perspectives, identities and experiences we hope to capture the diversity, complexity and value of LGBTQI nightlife spaces.

Dr. Rodrigo Firmino, Honorary Senior Research Associate in UCL Urban Laboratory, has published a paper in the new issue of LA+ Journal, a landscape architectural magazine.

UCL Urban Laboratory is exhibiting at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, as part of the URBAN LAB+ network's Turning Tables project. The website for the project is now online at www.turning-tables.it.

A new Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) is being launched at UCL in collaboration with the University of Gothenburg, with UCL Urban Laboratory joining as a key partner.

Venturing Beyond: Graffiti and the Everyday Utopias of the Street, supported by UCL Urban Laboratory and hosted at Somerset House, closes on the Early May bank holiday (2 May 2016).

Michael Edwards, a member of UCL Urban Laboratory’s International Advisory Group and Teaching Fellow in The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, has published two open access papers that seek to address the problems arising from London’s current housing crisis.

Matthew Beaumont (Co-Director, UCL Urban Laboratory) spoke to BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed about the notion of London as a 24-hour city and urban walking at night.

Research conducted at the UCL Urban Laboratory features in the April 2016 issue of influentual South Korean architectural and cultural magazine SPACE, currently celebrating it's 50th anniversary. The essays, guest edited by former Urban Laboratory visiting researcher Jeong Hye Kim, features work by Max Colson and Ollie Palmer, David Roberts, and Rodrigo Firmino.

Applications are open for the sixth year of the Development Planning Unit's (DPU) summerLab series.

Dr Clare Melhuish (Urban Laboratory Co-Director and Senior Research Associate) will present her university-led urban regeneration research conducted at UCL Urban Laboratory in a panel at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) conference in San Francisco on 30 March 2016.

There is a very active debate in urban studies at the moment, exploring the limits of universalist theorisations of the urban while at the same time seeking to engage with the globalisation of urban processes. Drawing on many different strands of theoretical inspiration, urban scholars are concerned to build wider knowledges about the urban across the very great diversity of urban outcomes around the world. It is a time of some theoretical ferment in the field, and UCL Urban Laboratory has hosted a series of events to address these themes; it is evident that there are many UCL urban scholars contributing to these debates.

Proposals for papers are invited for this year’s Cities After Hours colloquium from researchers working on any aspect of the city after hours. The colloquium will be held at UCL on 25 May 2016.

UCL Urban Laboratory is pleased to announce a collaboration with arts organisation A(by)P and Somerset House to curate the cultural programme for the upcoming Venturing Beyond: Graffiti and the Everyday Utopias of the Street exhibition, which opens on Thursday 3 March as part of the ‘UTOPIA 2016’ season.

UCL Urban Laboratory has today launched a limited print edition of case studies detailing different approaches to university and community-led urban regeneration, conducted by Senior Research Associate and Co-Director Dr Clare Melhuish.

UCL's interdisciplinary Urban Studies course is one of the disciplinary pathways for the UCL Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Soho is often envisioned, at both a national and an international level, as London's gay district. Its role as a space where gay identities and communities were made has shaped the urban experience of many LGBT people in London. However, with the advent of online spaces, the increasing inclusion of LGBT people in British society, and the rise in popularity of different urban areas, Soho's role for the LGBT community of London must now be reconsidered. This one day conference will try to answer the following questions: Can Soho still be seen as London's gay district? Why are so many LGBT spaces disappearing from Soho? Is there still the need for such spaces? If Soho disappeared, how would LGBT people experience a sense of community? Are new types of LGBT spaces appearing somewhere else?

Dr Ben Campkin, Director of UCL Urban Laboratory, has received the 2015 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation Book Award for his book Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture.

In his will, Jeremy Bentham, UCL's "spiritual founder", requested that after his death, his body be displayed in public, in what he called an “Auto-Icon”. His preserved skeleton continues to gaze upon the university in a glass cabinet. Since 2013, a webcam (PanoptiCam) has been installed on the top of the Auto-Icon watching the reaction of passers-by looking at Jeremy’s remains, and broadcasting the images via Twitter and Youtube.

UCL Grand Challenges have opened up an application process for funding of cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and outwardly-facing activities, costing between £2k and £10k, which ‘address global challenges’ while also supporting the development of at least one other of the principal themes of UCL's 2034 strategy:

Professor Michael Stewart is leading a team looking for UCL students in all fields to produce dissertations (at undergraduate and taught postgraduate level) linked to UCL’s new campus and how it will affect the local area. It’s an opportunity to write your dissertation on a topic that’s a big part of the UCL 2034 plan and to be part of a multi-disciplinary team working across UCL, including Dr Clare Melhuish from the Urban Laboratory, whose case study research on university-led regeneration has just been published (see university-led regeneration case study research, and the university-led urban regeration blog).