There is an immediate need for new and multi-disciplinary perspectives to understand the transformational dynamics of urban / social life and the relations that these dynamics have created with the environment we live in. The complexity of the dynamics in question is growing steadily, while facing them makes the implementation of multi-disciplinary programs based on multidisciplinary cooperation inevitable. For this reason, it is necessary, in addition to educational programs, to create well structured research environments and programs that focus on urban issues/studies. In this context, the work of UBT – URBAN LAB will be based on multidisciplinary work, including areas such as urban planning, architecture, design, engineering, computer science, sociology and economics; to focus on the multidisciplinary nature of urban problems and to provide research and applications that empower our cities to provide citizens with a more livable urban environment and to improve the quality of life.
Being a multidisciplinary research center dedicated to research and to high-level applications on various topics of contemporary urbanism, the philosophy of our laboratory, whose work will be based on theoretical and practical applications, is to provide innovative and practical solutions through the combined skills of various expert groups, including urban planners, architects, engineers, communication specialists, sociologists, economists, psychologists and other experts from all relevant fields.
Through research, projects, reports, conferences, talks, exhibitions and publications we research, build and launch strategies to improve our cities. Our vision for an urban future pushes us to use existing data to make more complex analyzes in order to lead the process of transforming our cities and make our future cities more innovative, more efficient and consequently more livable
Our Lab, in cooperation with civil society partners, politics, economics and science, explores urban challenges in the era of digitization, linking technical issues with social and cultural developments. It intends to analyze and predict how current dynamics (and technology) are changing the way of life and the implications of these changes on the urban scale. In this context, our Laboratory aims to provide creative interventions and to investigate the interface between people, technology and the city. Thus, in our Lab, urban transformations are analyzed and new, creative and innovative solutions are developed. In addition to research in areas such as urbanization, urban planning, urban design and other issues related to settlements as well as collaborations with various partner organizations, our Lab aims to provide a research environment equipped with advanced technical infrastructure which will enable researchers to use contemporary scientific methods and techniques in researches related to urban planning, to support scientific research and university curricula, to assist and cooperate with individuals, institutions and organizations at national and international level.
The main goal of our Lab is, in addition to comprehensive city research, to focus on social, economic, historical and spatial transformation of cities in Kosovo, focusing on research such as demography, urban geography, cultural heritage, technology, urban transformation, the economy and its impacts on the urban structure, etc. These and similar researches will be used to build strategies that will make our future cities more innovative, more efficient and consequently more livable. In this way, the most innovative and advanced global practices will be used to research, and later to build strategies for creative and long-term solutions to local problems.
The activity of the Urban Laboratory can be summarized as follows:
The Urban Lab focuses, but is not limited to, the following areas of research: