Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) Global is a comprehensive and long-lasting research programme on rapid urbanisation and its structure and organisation reflects the complexity of the system it is investigating and the related global challenges.
Credit: David Neudecker
The programme consists of 13 different research projects, each of which has its own research focus, its methodologies, its research questions, is acting on different scales (from the nano scales of innovative building materials to the regional or country scale). Each project has a team working in Asia (Singapore) and Switzerland (Zurich) and is conducting research in different locations around the globe or is hosting events and exhibitions in multiple cities.
Since its foundation in 2010 FCL has created an ecosystem of internal researchers and experts, external collaborators and partners from the industry, from NGOs, governmental and inter-governmental institutions as well as from other academic and research institutes scattered all around the globe.
Such a variety of entities and complexity of elements need to work together if they want to perform efficiently. As Russel Ackoff, one of the funders of the System Theory, stated: “The performance of a system doesn’t depend on how the parts perform taken separately, it depends on how they perform together.”
In order to facilitate interactions and collaborations, synergies and exchange among the various parts of FCL Global Ecosystem we have created the Engagement Platform: a cyber-physical space offering to all our stakeholders an open stage to share views, trends, knowledge, experience and data.
Future Cities Lab Indicia 03 - Artist: Idea Ink
The Engagement Platform serves as a crucial tool for internal research coordination and public knowledge dissemination. It aggregates news, events, materials, and newsletters and functions as a comprehensive data repository. Additionally, it provides access to tools that highlight partnerships and establish a network of research practitioners.
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Goals of the Engagement Platform
Promote a holistic approach in our research activities, by coordinating various scales, dimensions and elements of the FCL Ecosystem and seeking an understanding of the broader and complex context of urbanisation and how the different projects fit into it.
Support and expand the network of the FCL ecosystem by identifying potential synergies among researchers, partner universities and stakeholders.
Fostering resilience and responsiveness, by creating learning spaces, building digital capacity and enabling researchers to contribute to the growth of the platform itself.
Federating all in-house developed technology stack to create the first Urban Synthetic Data Hub.
