Testing the Future of Urban Living. Scaling Globally.
“The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it.”
The Urban Lab is the engine that drives the UAE’s first dedicated hub for sustainable industries, the Green Innovation District, at Expo City Dubai.
Ecosystem
Expo City Dubai is the new centre of gravity for Dubai’s future economy — a freezone city built to innovate, test, and scale in real time.
Positioned between Al Maktoum International Airport and Jebel Ali Port, it connects global supply chains to next-generation industries. Here, corporates, government, and academia co-create investable solutions that redefine how cities work.
At its core is the Urban Lab — the city’s engine of transformation — regenerating air, water, energy, biodiversity, and community while building the systems that will power tomorrow’s cities.
Role & capabilities
The Urban Lab’s primary role is to convene government, industry, and academia to design and deliver large-scale urban impact programmes with commercial and global reach. By aligning regulation, innovation, and investment, we create pathways for solutions to move from concept to global market adoption.
Testbed & pilots
The Urban Lab turns Expo City into a full-scale testbed — the only place where innovations can be tested across an entire city in real life. By trialling solutions in a live environment, partners uncover interactions and impacts no simulation could reveal, making this the world’s most advanced platform for proving what truly works.
The Urban Lab at Expo City Dubai is a living testbed where cities and companies worldwide collaborate to scale new technologies, create markets, and drive a city-led vision for a new global innovation economy.
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