Pushpa Arabindoo, Miranda Miller and Pavan Manogaran reflect on an Urban Lab roundtable held in December 2022, re-reading this embodiment of poetic modernism in the present as a foreshadowing of the Anthropocene. 2022 was the centenary anniversary of not only TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, an ur-modern poem that…

by Guy Mannes-Abbott, PhD candidate based at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London James Lovelock died at his home overlooking Dorset’s Chesil Beach on July 26th of this year. It was his 103rd birthday. From the vantage of 2022, it’s clear that the core ideas of Lovelock’s Gaia…

by Eduardo Nobre, Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, Brazil. The rationale for organising urban sporting mega-events has been defended by international urban planning consultants as a way for cities to promote urban regeneration, achieving economic and spatial development in the ‘highly competitive…

By Florian Koch, Professor for smart cities and urban development at HTW Berlin, University of Applied Sciences; Visiting Researcher, UCL Urban Laboratory, May — August 2022 “Data is the new oil”. This famous quote by British mathematician and entrepreneur Clive Humby from 2006 sounds nowadays almost absurd, as we are…

Hanadi Samhan and Camillo Boano Over the past three years multiple simultaneous and interconnected crises have unfolded in Lebanon. This ‘polycrisis’ manifests in the country’s entrenched socio-political dysfunctionality and more evidently in the everyday life of Lebanese citizens/denizens. Alienating and troubling, living in Lebanon, and particularly in the capital Beirut…

During the Spring of 2022 UCL Urban Lab curated a series of walks across East London, as a means of exploring London once more following the Covid-19 ‘lockdowns’ which had enforced the cancellation of so many in-person events, and linked to its annual theme Emergency. One of these walks, through…

PhD Life: The following gives an account of the online workshop “PhD Life”, organised by UCL Postgrad Urbanists — an interdisciplinary academic forum organised by students associated with the UCL Urban Laboratory — on 29th March 2022, for PhD researchers at UCL and beyond. This report was written by committee…

Dr Giada Peterle joined Postgrad Urbanists’ PhD Life Workshop in March for a conversation with PGU Chair Sidra Ahmed about Giada’s research and illustrations, PhD experience, and Narrative Geographies blog. This piece recaps the conversation and is written by PGU committee members Sidra Ahmed and Lu Mirza, PhD Researchers based…

During the Spring of 2022 UCL Urban Lab curated a series of walks across East London, as a means of exploring London once more following the Covid-19 ‘lockdowns’ which had enforced the cancellation of so many in-person events, and linked to its annual theme Emergency. Running between UCL’s Bloomsbury Campus…