Urban Lab wins joint funding

The UCL Urban Laboratory has won a joint bid for funding from the European Commission’s Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency to participate in an international network of urban laboratories.

The network, Urban Lab +, led by the Technische Universität Berlin, includes eight established Urban Laboratories worldwide.  Funding of €473,372 has been awarded for the network to run from 2013 to 2015 under the Erasmus Mundus Programme. This investment will support the participating Urban Laboratories in expanding and developing their work through international partnerships.

Activities will focus on enhancing urban teaching and research, and will include joint symposia, workshops, faculty exchange and hands-on projects. These will be structured around three clusters; interdisciplinarity, global education, and exchanges between academic researchers and built environment professionals.

Dr Ben Campkin, Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory, comments:

“This is a fantastic opportunity for us to strengthen our work through international collaborations. In order to address conditions of globalization we need to prioritise the development of innovative comparative frameworks in urban research and education, working across disciplinary and professional boundaries. This programme will provide an excellent structure for us to work productively alongside other world-leading laboratories to push creative and critical urban scholarship and practice forwards”.

The eight partners are:

• Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
• UCL Urban Laboratory, University College London, UK
• École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
• Università della Calabria, Italy
• Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
• Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies, India
• University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong