TURBA Lab

Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory

Detail Research lines Projects Publications Collaboration Theses

Date of inception 01 September 2010

Leaders: Hug March CorbellaIsabel Ruiz Mallen

Center: Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Social and Cultural Transformations (UOC-TRÀNSIC)

Website: https://turbain3.wordpress.com/

The United Nations 2030 Agenda has brought all nations together in the shared goal of achieving sustainable global development in order to end poverty and address the environmental emergencies facing us. These challenges, which already seemed ambitious at the time, have now been made all the more urgent by the pandemic and the growing impact of climate change. This is particularly affected by the unbalanced impact of the socio-environmental transformations carried out in different territories. As the European Union itself admitted in its Post-Pandemic Recovery Plan, we need a greener, more digital, and more resilient future. Furthermore, these challenges – exploring the socio-environmental and socio-economic outcomes of intertwined political-economic restructuring processes and the fast development of new technologies – lie right at the heart of TURBA. These issues, particularly those still under 20th-century criteria, do not fall under separate disciplines. This is why we are now exploring these processes from an interdisciplinary point of view, starting at the urban scale. We observe them through their networked multi-scale geographies beyond the merely urban facet; applying a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to capture their various dimensions; and carrying out empirical research but making progress in theory, because socio-economic developments, socio-environmental actions and technological innovation in the field often move forwards at a much faster rate than theory. Therefore, we have built a critical interdisciplinary perspective using approaches from geography, urban studies, environmental sciences, anthropology, political science, education, arts and science, and science and technology studies. Specifically, we categorize our research together with four research areas to understand the geographies of digital capitalism and grassroots alternatives.