The Technological Change Lab (TCLab) is a research and advisory program associated with the Urban Planning program at Columbia University. It is housed at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and brings together economic development and social policy concerns underlying technological changes in urban city-regions and countries today. TCLab works across multiple industrial sectors with ongoing and planned projects across several industrialising countries.
What is Technological Change?
Technological change is far more than mechanisation and specific innovations. In economics, it refers to the process by which changes to the production function come about. In daily life, it refers to new ways of producing goods and services, often with new machines and techniques, variations in the use of capital and labor, and shifts to new forms of economic organization.
More broadly, technological change is a process of institutional change having important implications for labor and workers' welfare, especially in countries that are rapidly industrializing. These institutions may encompass norms of work, relations of people with machines, production systems, social rewards and recognition as well as mechanisms for governance, participation and protest. Thus, technological change research is concerned with the political economy of institutions and a governance around growth and equity.
The Program:
TCLab ("T-C Lab") is breaking down several disciplinary and programmatic boundaries in conceptualizing economic development and local institutional change. A unique feature of TCLab work is the linking of innovation and welfare/equity issues. We have an ever-widening student and Senior Research Affiliate body, drawing on expertise in economic development, social policy and technology issues. Methodologically, we pride ourselves on challenging the status-quo regarding how science, technology and innovation issues can be studied in development. We also hope to represent the best conceptualization and practical work in economic development. Increasingly, this expertise has dwindled in several traditional disciplines and has become split into scholarly and policy analysis communities that have on-the-ground planning and policy expertise, and those that model economic development in the abstract without this experience. TCLab research is situated to remedy this academic and advisory divide and provide a public forum for intellectual and policy debate around issues of development.
All current TCLab programs are structured around the relationships between technological change, working conditions and access to health and skills.