Newsletter "FCL-G Weekly Update 39" - issued on September 26, 2025
In recent weeks, we presented a new FCL installation—the Quadroscope—at two major urban futures gatherings in Switzerland: first at the Smart City Zürich Future Festival (August 28, Löwenbräu, Zürich), and shortly after at the Urban Futures Symposium hosted by EMPA in Dübendorf (September 1).
Designed by Katrin Mahlknecht and Sandro Burri (Burri Mahlknecht Szenografen), with video editing by Joanna Sleigh, the Quadroscope invites visitors to lean over a dark, mirrored box, echoing the familiar act of studying a map. Instead of a fixed image, it reveals a city in transformation—fractured, multiplied, and reflected into a global horizon. This shifting perspective underscores a simple but profound truth: cities are never isolated. Every local choice reverberates outward, shaping distant geographies, while global forces—climate, migration, trade—fold back into the everyday textures of urban life.
At the Smart City Zürich Future Festival, the installation sparked conversation about how cities might navigate climate challenges and urban complexity. Visitors engaged with the Quadroscope as both a visual experience and a prompt for reflection on the entanglements shaping urban futures.
At the Urban Futures Symposium by EMPA, the Quadroscope was complemented by a workshop co-led by Julio Paulosand Joanna Sleigh. Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners explored how scientific knowledge can be translated into actionable urban policy. Moving beyond static formats like policy briefs, participants co-designed approaches to make research more timely, credible, and responsive to real-world decision-making.
Together, these recent exhibitions demonstrated how the Quadroscope functions not only as an artefact of research and design but also as a provocation—an invitation to reflect on the global resonance of local urban action, and to reimagine the tools through which knowledge guides our shared urban futures.
After sparking conversations in Zürich and Dübendorf, the Quadroscope has now found a new home: you can see it at the Arch-Tech-Lab in the ITA building, ETH Campus Hönggerberg.
Watch a video of the Quadroscope here.
> NUS PI Filip Biljecki gave an invited talk in Korea at Korea Urban Regional Innovation Industry EXPO, co-hosted by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the Korea Planners Association.
The past weeks were marked by dissemination opportunities and cross-team exchanges. Pradeep Alva from the visited the Zurich team on his way to the CISBAT conference in Lausanne, Zurich, while Kamila Krych visited the Singapore team in connection to the FCL Global Symposium and Exhibition. At CISBAT conference in Lausanne, Pradeep Alva presented a poster entitled "A framework for building circularity potential: Whole-life carbon assessment for residential buildings at city-scale", while Carlo Schmid held a talk on the topic of "Validation of a building material stock model using demolition record data".
