Urban Labs in Turbulent Times: Stories from Beirut and São Paulo

Across the globe, cities are being reshaped by intersecting crises: targeted campaigns of urbicide, the erosion of democratic institutions, deepening inequalities, and ecological extraction. In this context, urban scholars face a renewed urgency—not only to document injustice, but to expose its structural roots and co-develop practices that foster more just urban futures.

This event brings together two pioneering urban laboratories—Beirut Urban Lab and LabCidade (São Paulo)—that exemplify grounded, critical, and collaborative approaches to urban research and action. From Beirut, we hear how scholars and practitioners engage the material and political aftermaths of conflict and dispossession, reclaiming space and memory. From São Paulo, we learn how academic and community actors intervene in policy, law, and public debate to defend the right to the city in the face of authoritarian urbanism.

Through these stories, we ask: What does it mean to do urban research in times of political turbulence? How can urban labs function not only as sites of inquiry, but as catalysts for collective action, co-creation, and solidarity?

Join us for a discussion on the potential and limits of urban labs as experimental spaces for transformation in and beyond the academy.

This event is part of a series of activities celebrating 20 years of UCL Urban Lab.

Speakers

Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut where she co-founded and co-directs the Beirut Urban Lab, a regional research centre invested in working towards more inclusive, just and viable cities. Mona’s research has addressed urbanisation through the lenses of informality and the law, land, housing, property and space, always responding to the urge of informing planning theory and practice. She publishes her work in both academic and public venues and she is keen on working with activists, public actors and other researchers to advance the causes of urban justice.

Raquel Rolnik is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of São Paulo and a leading voice on housing rights and urban policy in Brazil. A former UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing (2008–14), she also served in national and municipal government roles. She currently heads LabCidade, a research lab monitoring evictions and urban inequality. She is the author of Urban Warfare (2018) and other key works on cities and housing.

About the Urban Labs

The Beirut Urban Lab is a collaborative and interdisciplinary research space. The Lab produces scholarship on urbanisation by documenting and analysing ongoing transformation processes in Lebanon and its region's natural and built environments. It intervenes as an interlocutor and contributor to academic debates about historical and contemporary urbanisation from its position in the Global South. We work towards materialising our vision of an ecosystem of change empowered by critical inquiry and engaged research, and driven by committed urban citizens and collectives aspiring to just, inclusive and viable cities.

LabCidade – Laboratório Espaço Público e Direito à Cidade (Public Space and Right to the City Laboratory), at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, is coordinated by researchers Carolina Heldt D'Almeida, Isadora Guerreiro, Paula Freire Santoro and Raquel Rolnik. The laboratory focuses on critical monitoring of urban and housing policies, particularly in São Paulo and other Brazilian metropolitan regions, as well as direct intervention in the public debate about them and actions developed in a network with partners, both research groups from other universities in the country and NGOs, collectives and model and technical assistance offices.

Image: Photography by Catalina Ortiz