City Lab Barcelona

In September 2021 I began a new research position at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology ( ICTA ) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). It has been a pleasure to meet new colleagues and get settled down in a beautiful eco-friendly building that is LEED Certified. I look forward to focusing my research agenda on Barcelona and this blog will be a platform for sharing some of the research ideas that are emerging, and become sort of the embryo for the new research team based at ICTA.  My new research group will be called  City Lab Barcelona and our mission will be the generation of new knowledge that accelerates the transition to sustainable urban planning and design . To call a research team a Laboratory or Lab has become quite fashionable recently, especially in the social sciences. I welcome this analogy because there is much that we social scientists can learn from those researchers that run physical labs - of course, adapting as appropriate. In ...

City Lab Barcelona is a blog about experiments in urban planning . The word 'experiments' can take on different meanings, and here I use 'experiment' to refer to 'doing things that are new or different' but also, and perhaps more importantly, 'to test formal hypothesis about how cities work'. Experiments are always exciting because we do not know in advance what the outcome may be. In this sense, city planners are experimenting all the time, testing new ways of engaging with the public or new ways of promoting sustainability. I have already made the case for formal urban experiments in the City Fix and academic writings such as here and here . This blog will be a place to extend my argument for urban experimentation. I also hope to engage in productive exchange and learn from others who are 'thinking experimentally'.  Right now, most urban experiments are informal and there are very few formal experiments. I hope (and expect) that in the next d...