Urban Sciences Lab
“It would be impossible to conceive of a [single] science of the urban… Every discovery in the fragmentary sciences leads to a new analysis of the total phenomenon.”
— HENRI LEFEBVRE, The Urban Revolution
ABOUT
Based at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), and building upon the latter’s radical legacy of spatial and technological innovation, the Urban Sciences Lab (USL) is an interdisciplinary platform for critical thinking and inventive design working across the social, cultural, technological, and environmental dimensions associated with contemporary urbanization.
The USL aims to rethink the role and potential of design in an age characterized by a condition of ubiquitous urbanization, as well as by the complex intersection of global climate crisis and fast-pace technological development, traversing the field of the urban in its multiple scales—from that of the building as its composite unity to that of the city, and from extended landscapes of production, agglomeration, and circulation to planetary geographies, territories, and ecological boundaries.
Mobilizing a feedback-loop research methodology that articulates a critical positionality vis-a-vis the status of contemporary urbanization, while at the same time advancing speculative and projective scenarios about the future of the urban world, the USL is uniquely positioned to amalgamate cutting-edge academic research and innovative design praxis.
EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMES
IAAC’s Master in City & Technology (1 or 2-year program) is a unique program oriented towards redefining the future of the urban, through innovative, evidence based and experimental approaches to understand, design and materialise cities.
The Maestría en Urbanismo Próximo (MaUP) – previously MOeC – is a 1-year online master’s degree in Spanish, designed for working professionals seeking to obtain additional accreditations in the field of Urban Planning and Design. It focuses on issues that represent the great contemporary challenges surrounding the city as the most complex dynamic system of exchange and interaction invented by humankind.
ONLINE PLATFORM
An open-source online project that organizes a thematic series of conferences, symposiums, and dialogues, with professionals of excellence within the broad cultural geography of Spanish and Portuguese languages. The Redes/Network forum was created to promote debates on the contemporary thinking around cities, a crossroad of voices and ideas from the Ibero-American context.
PUBLICATIONS AND RESEARCH
A book that aims to begin constructing a necessary up-to-date and committed agenda for cities tailored to new generations seeking to participate in the construction of their future.
A report of the research developed in the Advanced Urban Design Studio of years 2018-2019, which investigated the hypothesis of a new conceptual space defined as Extreme Urbanism.
An event that marked our first step towards a research on the advanced experiences in territorial sustainability that are being applied at El Hierro, in the Canary Islands.
