The phrase "urban laboratory" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a city or urban area that serves as a site for experimentation, research, or innovation in various fields such as social sciences, urban planning, or environmental studies.
Example: "The city has transformed into an urban laboratory, testing new policies for sustainable living."
Alternatives: "city experiment" or "metropolitan testing ground".
For more than a century, the Village was an amazing urban laboratory.
At the end of the day, Detroit isn't simply an urban laboratory for the creative class.
China, Sorkin said, has become an "urban laboratory for organic green design" — despite, or perhaps because of, its environmental woes.
And yet, the hybrid vertical village of the Torre David illustrates an alternative, "an urban laboratory for how cities might work differently".
As Tere Garcia writes in This Big City, last year Venezuela became an "urban laboratory" for participatory city design and community development.
Even as his ideas seemed to go out of fashion, he continued to work on Arcosanti — his "urban laboratory" — about 70 miles north of Phoenix.
That place turned out to be Oakland, one of the nation's most interesting urban laboratories, with extremes of wealth and poverty, an unusually integrated population and access to a great university.
Surveillance programs and research for acute respiratory infections in remote Australian communities are complicated by difficulties in the storage and transport of frozen samples to urban laboratories for testing.
Studies aimed at investigating respiratory illness and the microbiology of those illnesses in remote communities have to date been limited by the inability to store and transport clinical specimens requiring freezing/refrigeration to urban laboratories.
For the Futures team at the Catapult – a kind of speculative urban ideas laboratory, led by Dan Hill – the project represents the first stages of a much bigger inquiry.
To do so, he needed to identify a suitable community and premises that he could "rip apart," as he put it, to create an urban research laboratory for himself and other doctoral students.
