UCL Urban Laboratory

UCL Urban Laboratory is pleased to be supporting a project in the north London suburb of Walthamstow this month. Hoe Street Central Bank will be the centre of an act of citizen money creation and a programme of events on finance, debt and the search for economic alternatives that work more in the public’s favour.

The 2017 edition of The Bartlett Review, by UCL’s Faculty of the Built Environment, has been published, with short stories and essays that highlight a number of projects and activities from UCL Urban Laboratory.

Urban Lab Co-Director Dr Pushpa Arabindoo (Senior Lecturer, UCL Geography) has written an article in The Conversation on the popular representation of 'slums' in the media, and what this signifies for the future of global-level policy initiatives.

This half-day symposium on the afternoon of Monday 19 March 2018 will bring together postgraduates working in range of disciplines and fields to explore research centring sexualities, queerness and space. The scope of this event is deliberately wide so as to facilitate engagements with sexualities and queer research from a range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives.

Urban Salon hosted the launch of the new edited collection Urban Geopolitics: Rethinking Planning in Contested Cities on 20 November at UCL. Edited by Jonathan Rokem (UCL Geography) and Camillo Boano (The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL / Urban Lab), the book moves away from loosely defined urban theories and contexts, and argues it is time to start learning from and compare across different ‘contested cities’.

Once the main pivot for passenger connection between France and England, Folkestone is a town on the littoral edge of the UK, with an urbanism that connects equally with land and sea. With the more recent construction of the High Speed 1 railway between London and Kent, the town has been gifted the questionable status of dormitory suburb to the Capital.

As part of the International Conference on Policy Diffusion and Development Cooperation in São Paulo, Brazil between 16-19 May 2018, UCL Urban Laboratory is a partner for the panel session Making Southern Urban Policies: International Agendas, Transnational Networks and National Programmes.

The Urban Studies, Transport and Architectural Space pathway is one of 25 pathways that comprise the UCL, Bloomsbury and East London Doctoral Training Partnership (UBEL DTP) involving UCL, SOAS, Birkbeck College, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of East London. More details about this partnership can be found at https://ubel-dtp.ac.uk/

Well-known throughout India due to its appearance in popular films, Lavani is a dance form originating in Maharashtra, Western India, that often directly explores themes of female sexuality. However, women who dance Lavani have tended to be characterized as either money-minded manipulators, instrumentally and unscrupulously enlisting the sensuality of their dance to seduce impressionable men and destroy respectable families, or as themselves exploited — victims of caste, class, and gender-inflected sociopolitical structures and age-old relations of marginalization, exclusion and oppression.

Brought together alongside The Bartlett's MA Architectural History, the Situating Architecture Lecture Series explores the powers and effects of architecture today.

As induction week begins for newly arriving UCL students, we have produced an introduction pack to the UCL Urban Laboratory, covering our history, current activities, and how students can get involved in our work. You can download the introduction pack here (pdf).

The programmes for each day in the Edge - Situated Practice in Art, Architecture and Urbanism series are now available to view and download online.

The number of LGBTQ+ venues in London has fallen by 58% from 125 to 53 since 2006, according to a new report published today by the UCL Urban Laboratory, and commissioned by the Mayor of London and Greater London Authority (GLA).

UCL Urban Laboratory is pleased to announce a major new trio of symposia in the autumn on the subject of situated practice in contemporary art, architecture and urbanism, in collaboration with the Folkestone Triennial 2017.

A number of academic staff associated with the cross-faculty UCL Urban Laboratory, including three of our Co-Directors, have been issued promotions and new appointments by the college as a recognition of their outstanding achievements.

UCL Urban Laboratory is a partner for the first Architcture Film Festival in London. This exciting, new biennial event takes place across six days from 6-11 June, with screenings at the ICA, a takeover of the OXO Tower's Bargehouse venue, and an after-party at Corsica Studios.

The DPU summerLab team is glad to announce the launch of the DPU summerLab 2017 series. We are glad to confirm some destinations from the the previous years’ series while landing in new exciting cities too. 

Co-organised by the joint UCL-University of Gothenburg Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, this international conference invites artists, curators, commissioners, scholars and researchers across the arts, humanities and social sciences to consider the highly specific, but nonetheless pervasive, cultural phenomenon of genocide memorialisation.

LSE Review of Books have taken a look at Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (I.B. Tauris, 2016), a UCL Urban Laboratory publication edited by Ben Campkin and Ger Duijzings.

Professor Matthew Beaumont (Urban Lab Co-Director) has contributed to the first Art Night publication, Expanding the City’s Boundaries, a collection of essays from leading curators, urbanists, writers, art historians and sociologists reflecting on the meaning of Art Night and its role in a city like London.

A new publication exploring issues relating to the history of urban housing in London has been published through RIBA, featuring a number of UCL contributions. Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past (RIBA Publishing, 2017) has been edited by Peter Guillery and David Kroll.

The brutalist architecture of the French capital is the subject of a new city guide published by Blue Crow Media in collaboration with Robin Wilson (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL) and Nigel Green (Photolanguage).

It is with great sadness that UCL Urban Laboratory received the news that Prof. Dr. Maider Uriarte Idiazabal, who was resident with us as a visiting doctoral researcher in 2012, passed away last summer after a short illness.

Articles on UCL Urban Laboratory’s activities across the past year feature in the first edition of The Bartlett Review, published by UCL’s Faculty of the Built Environment.

In collaboration with The Bartlett, UCL Urban Laboratory has launched a staff-student collaborative research project that will produce student-led reccomendations for UCL developments in east London – UCL East and Here East.