Explore the Urban Frontiers Showcase
Urban Frontiers
Urban Frontiers is SHIFT's innovation showcase. Hosted by UCL and curated by the SHIFT team, the space offers viewers a glimpse into the future of urban living, showcasing groundbreaking innovations that are set to transform our cities.
Urban Frontiers aims to demystify cutting-edge urban innovations, making them accessible and engaging for everyone. It aims to inspire and inform visitors, igniting an inclusive conversation about what innovation really looks like and how it will affect all of us in the future.
The showcase features:
From biochar-based building materials to AI-powered infrastructure, the exhibition demonstrates the pioneering work of Future Industries Demonstrator SMEs, as well as academic researchers, and community innovators. These are the minds that are actively shaping the cities of tomorrow, and their work has been inspiring for visitors to the space.
Future Industries Demonstrator Pioneers:
Attendees can explore the materials and technologies that will form the backbone of future urban environments, including eco-friendly construction methods and ways of reusing materials in creative and sustainable ways.
Cutting-edge Digital Innovations:
The space highlights digital breakthroughs addressing urban challenges, from AI systems optimising city infrastructures, to data-driven solutions enhancing urban life for humans and wildlife alike.
Experimental Interventions:
Visitors have engaged with projects from the UCL Connected Environments Lab and People and Nature Lab that blend the physical and digital realms, demonstrating the potential of tangible objects to educate about data flows and energy usage.
Experience Urban Frontiers right now by visiting our virtual exhibition. Here, you’ll be able to explore the space, deep-dive into the artefacts and their creators, and discover the technologies shaping urban futures.
This exhibition re-imagines the way we experience data from the weather to Co2 levels in the air around us, even helping to answer the question ‘do bats celebrate when West Ham score a goal‘?
We hope this exhibition inspires you to think differently about how we are already solving issues that face urban spaces and communities, travel and mobility. And, perhaps, inspires you to become a change maker yourself.
Designed by London-based design studio Mitre & Mondays, the exhibition embraced principles of sustainability and reuse, with a demountable, reconfigurable design built primarily from repurposed hemp blocks sourced from a local construction site.
For the disassembly, we partnered with Are You Mad, residents at the FID Loop Circular Economy hub, who reused the hemp blocks once again for their event ‘Dismantled’ at Unit 5, Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross.
