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Abstract
The Future Cities Laboratory is a trans-disciplinary research center focused on sustainability in the global frame. It started as a think-tank composed of nine individual urban research modules that converged towards a common goal: to understand the city as a complex system and to identify methods to design, produce, manage, maintain, and inhabit the city in order to increase its sustainable performance. The Future Cities Laboratory is based in both Singapore and Zurich and works on the building technology scale (small), the urban design scale (medium), and the territorial planning scale (large). It has adopted the idea of urban metabolism as a conceptual framework and focuses on the consequences of resource allocation, distribution, and deployment over time. It has adapted the principle of stocks and flows and specifically explores those of energy, materials, water, people, capital, and information. A simulation platform stores, combines, visualizes and communicates the findings to stakeholders.
Three assistant professors in architecture and construction, urban design, and territorial planning have built up groups in Singapore. While a majority of the research projects focus on Singapore and the surrounding area, more than 100 researchers are investigating 22 cities, mainly in a broad belt around the north and south of the equator where the most intense urban population growth is predicted to occur.