Our 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.
We 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.
Visit our research project directory to view a list of all our current and past research projects.
Priority Areas
Through ten priority areas – each led by a Director, Co-Director or core team member – you can learn more about the research that guides us, propose activities, and connect with our work.
Climate, Displacement and the Posthuman
How can we rethink urban spaces and migration through a planetary lens amid the climate crisis?
Feminist Cities
How can fundamental freedoms to the city be secured through public policy, innovation and design?
Globalising Urbanisms
Developing frameworks for engagements and dialogue with urban scholarship globally, across a diversity of urban experiences.
Queer Infrastructure
Considering the networks of people and sites that have helped to support communities with non-normative sexualities and genders.
Reparative Urban Practices
Exploring reparative justice in cities shaped by colonial violence, focusing on land disputes, spatial imagination and urban healing.
Speculative Urban Statecraft
In an era of financialized urbanism, city governments and global capital reshape space, fuelling displacement, resistance and contested visions of urban futures.
Critical Urban Heritage
Engaging with heritage as a key shaper of urban experience and identities, the urban environment, and urban futures.
Urban Nights
Exploring the various ways in which we engage with and impact the urban environment at night.
Urban Verticality
Developing new cross-disciplinary, comparative and creative engagement with ideas and issues associated with urban verticality.
Wasteland
How can the increasing challenge of societal waste open up new ways of charting the uneven geographies of urbanisation?
Biennial themes
For our current biennial theme, UCL Urban Laboratory will examine how urban futures are formulated, understood and imagined through processes and practices of 'Speculation'. Find out more about our 'Speculation' theme.
UCL Urban Laboratory looked forward from the pandemic and launched its engagement with the theme of Memory in conjunction with UCL Urban Room and Memory Workshop at UCL East. Find out more about our 'Memory' theme.
UCL Urban Laboratory explored Emergency as an annual theme for the 2020-21 academic year in collaboration with the UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, and during 2021-22 in collaboration with the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. Find out more about our 'Emergency' theme.
UCL Urban Laboratory and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies collaborated during the 2019-20 academic year on a shared research theme, Waste. Find out more about our 'Waste' theme.
Previous activity areas
We explore diverse kinds of human shelter and settlement, aiming to improve housing for lower income city dwellers, and to understand and contest the evictions that have accompanied many contemporary and historical forms of urbanization.
We tackle urgent questions regarding political ecology, urban nature, and public health, re-conceiving relationships between cities, environments, people and infrastructure.
We study urbanization and the restructuring of cities from varied perspectives, analysing the effects of cycles of investment and disinvestment, and the mobilization of citizens and built environment professionals in response to instability and critical situations.
We have a strong focus on urban culture, design and aesthetics, the representation of cities of the past, present, and future – as well as their challenges to representability – and the relations between different urban imaginaries and material conditions.
We study emerging digital technologies interwoven in the city fabric, in order to understand how they are changing everyday urban life, enabling new models of production and consumption, and redefining citizens’ relationships with one another as well as the cities they live in. These activities include work on physical ‘Internet of Things’ devices being embedded in buildings, transports, objects, and the like, as well as new virtual (or online) services, as exemplified by the collaborative economy wave. The digital footprint – data – that these new technologies create afford us the ability to systematically study the impact they have on our daily lives, the way we interact with one another, and with the space we live in.
Cities are now the focus for contemporary debates over citizenship in the face of new kinds of religiosity and ethnic identification that challenge secular conceptions of the modern metropolis and individual identity.
The erosion of the nation state has also fostered different kinds of relationships between place, locality and the global economy that are manifest in widening disparities in wealth and quality of life.
The location of power in the contemporary city has increasingly shifted from concentrated and visible manifestations of state power (governmental bureaucracies, police services and so on) to a more diffuse set of networks dominated by capital (corporate lobbies, financial derivatives and other dispersed and ultra mobile elements) and also new forms of social and political organization and mobilization.
Housing urbanism seek to unpack, problematise and construct a critical inquiry into housing, as noun and verb, as product and process, and as one of the most powerful agents of urban transformations.
It frames housing as city-making and highlights its political parameters, at a time when bordering, exclusion, and violence are permeating the quotidian, and when bodies are frequently detained or under threat of having their rights of mobility severely infringed.