About Urban Lab

Urban Lab is a quantitatively oriented research program that was formed at the end of 2019 and is run as a collaboration between the Department of Economics and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research. The program is mainly funded by external research funds.

The purpose of Urban Lab is to create an active and multidisciplinary research environment for quantitative studies of issues related to cities and urbanisation processes. The research combines methodological competencies from different disciplines with access to the large amount of geocoded microdata available in IBF's database GeoSweden.

The ongoing and planned research within Urban Lab contains broad questions: Why do some cities grow while others shrink? Why do some areas within cities have a positive development and others a negative one? How do urbanisation and neighbourhoods affect different outcomes in terms of, for example, economic inequality, the health of individuals and the future of children? What role does local politics play in local development?

Urban Lab organises its activities around different types of meetings. The researchers who participate in Urban Lab meet regularly and discuss ongoing research projects, new research ideas and different types of methodological issues. They represent different disciplines (economics, geography, economic history, statistics and political science).

Urban Lab has had regular meetings with Uppsala Municipality, where researchers were given the opportunity to present ongoing and planned research and discuss these with municipal officials, who in turn has had the opportunity to present their ongoing and planned projects. This has resulted in several projects based on Uppsala-specific data. In addition, Urban Lab arranges seminars with external speakers on a regular basis.

The main funders during the years 2020–23 were Uppsala Municipality and Uppsala University. Uppsala Municipality supported the research financially with SEK 12 million and Uppsala University with SEK 9 million during the years 2020–22.