City Lab

Exploring urban possibilities through art, culture, health, housing, commerce and design research.

The Lab asks how we can enhance the urban experience through socially engaged creative practices.

Lab Leaders: Dominic Wilkinson and Simon Piasecki

City Lab aims to develop research that will:

  • build new forms of citizenship based on creativity and social responsibility;

  • help us to re-imagine our current uses of architecture, art, design, fashion and urbanism within and across the fields of culture, health, housing and commerce within the context of the city;

  • develop new forms of hybrid and transdisciplinary practices that are capable of having positive, real world and sustainable impact on the social, political, economic and cultural infrastructure of the city.

Key principles

The Lab is centred on three key principles:

  • Internationalisation
  • Interdisciplinarity
  • Impact

These are achieved by working across a range of socially oriented projects and practices that call for social change within the city context. Respecting and examining existing disciplinary specificities, working with more comprehensive, expanded constituencies, reaching and building new audiences and developing models of city-based architecture, art, fashion and design practices.

Research columns

City Lab combines two columns of research:

The Built Environment

  • Architecture
  • City Planning
  • Policy
  • Urban Design
  • History

The Lived Environment

  • Communities
  • Identity and Belonging
  • Lived Experience
  • Health
  • Applied Practice
  • History
  • Urban Arts

Research activities

City Lab currently has five key areas of research activity:

Hilbre Island

Led by Dominic Wilkinson, the Hilbre Island project connects to City Lab both because of its historic importance to the port, its architecture and its development as a centre for artists.

Cities of Art

A cluster for researchers interested in public, sculptural, community, visual and performing arts that relate to urban or city contexts.

Healthy Cities

A cluster for researchers interested in contexts of urban wellbeing, participatory works, recovery, aid and health.

Port Cities

A collaborative project open to all members. This will intend to form a symposium in early 2024 connecting to other 2nd tier port cities and extending the conversations of the members’ projects.

Mapping and Meaning

A cluster for researchers interested in contexts of belonging, identity and migration in and through cities.

City Lab in context

All the research fields within City Lab expose the impact and influence of architecture, art, fashion and design within the context of our everyday environment. City Lab’s research projects embody how the production of original knowledge, through practice and critical theory, can lead to real, impactful and sustainable change within our contemporary culture.

Rethinking and reimagining the city through constituent practices of sustainability, material constructions and applications of technology contributes to the enhancement of our local, national and global environments.

The research themes of City Lab simultaneously occupy the cutting edge of their disciplinary specificities whilst remaining active within the real-world context of the city. City Lab supports research and practice that embraces or focuses on those elements that are undiscovered or operate in the realms of periphery, such as design for well-being and constituent practices that enable the reimagination of marginal cultures within the urban environment.

City Lab will seek to innovate and promote enterprise-based teaching and learning practices within its research context via the development of a student-led and entrepreneurial pedagogy.

The remediation of architecture art, fashion and design practices within City Lab leads to the development of culturally significant practices whereby the communicative powers of art and design objects and projects allude to the transformative nature of products and environments. This research is evident in the projects of spatial design through themes of the vernacular and sustainability.

Current Projects

London Festival of Architecture: Artist Housing – an evening of film screenings and conversation

Artist-Led Housing: Programme of Public Events

No Going Back

Rethinking ecology as an agent for urban economy: A case study on Meles Stream Delta

Changing the identity of a place by changing street names: The process of renaming the streets of Üsküdar between 1927-1934

The Hilbre Island Arts, Science and Sustainability Project

Events

Past events

Upcoming events

Publications

Artist-Led Housing: Histories, Residencies, Spaces

Sustainable Planning Strategies for a Port City

Changing the identity of a place by changing street names: The process of renaming the streets of Üsküdar between 1927-1934

Exploring students’ experience of urban space

Putting the ‘i’ in icon: An autophotographic study of iconicity

Smart Libraries and Library 3.0

People


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Project archive

L'Internationale

The Uses of Art: The Legacy of 1848 and 1989

Museum of Arte Útil

Really Useful Knowledge

Confessions of the Imperfect, 1848-1989-Today

Glossary of Common Knowledge: Constituencies

The Arte Útil Summit 2016

Asociación de Arte Útil

Conference: Working with Constituents

The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition

Health and wellbeing projects

Health and wellbeing projects

What's on for dementia wellbeing

Labyrinth Exchange

Life Chance Fund Steering Group

On Cloud 79

Health Systems Global Symposium