Lead city-making change.
Build what the world adopts.
For people and planet.
Expo City Dubai’s Urban Lab is a living ecosystem where government, industry, and academia unite to turn bold ideas into large-scale, global urban change.
The ecosystem
Expo City Dubai is a place like no other. It is the future centre of Dubai — located between Al Maktoum International Airport and Jebel Ali Port, and built as a freezone city that innovates in real time.
Joining Expo City Dubai means becoming part of a globally unique ecosystem — one where corporates, government, and academia co-create solutions that no single player could achieve alone. These pathways are not isolated offers; they are entry points into a living innovation marketplace where the power lies in how partners interact, collaborate, and scale together.
At its heart is the Urban Lab — the engine of city-making inside Expo City.
We bring nature and the city back together, proving solutions that regenerate air, water, energy, biodiversity, and community while building the systems of tomorrow.
Our role & capabilites
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.
The 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.
Our team
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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If you are a large or small business looking to partner or pilot, please register your company on our portal: