Manchester Urban Institute (MUI)

Description

About

Our vision is to realise more inclusive and just cities that are environmentally and socially sustainable for current and future generations.

Manchester Urban Institute combines the strengths of multiple thematic groupings drawn from across the University of Manchester’s three faculties. We deliver our vision through serving as a leading academic urban institute generating world-class research. We achieve high levels of engagement and impact with both academic and non-academic stakeholders, and are committed to training the next generation of urban activists, decision-makers, researchers, and scholars.

Bringing together work from across the arts and humanities, social sciences, business and health, we offer an increased understanding of the global urban condition – past, present and future – and to studying and changing the world through engaging with a range of global, national and local stakeholders.

Manchester Urban Institute positions the University of Manchester as the leading location for urban research, with a combined focus on the global north and global south.

Uniting the strengths of several research groupings, the Manchester Urban Institute is the culmination of an impressive history of urban studies at the University of Manchester spanning more than four decades.

Making a difference to UK cities

Since the 1980s, several research centres have been established, each focusing on different urban specialisms in the global north.

The Centre of Urban Policy Studies was set up in 1983 by Professor Brian Robson to develop research on UK urban and regional policy, while in 2000 the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology was formed to address challenges associated with steering behaviour, settlements and landscapes towards more sustainable futures in the UK.

Both centres largely consisted of environmental scientists, geographers and planners working in the most industrialised economies. Former colleagues, such as Michael Bradford, Peter Dicken, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell contributed to this agenda through their work on urban and regional restructuring in a globalising world.

A world of cities

The Global Urban Research Centre (GURC) and the Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) were established in 2007, reflecting both the growing number of disciplines working on urban issues and the urbanising global south. Anthropologists, architects, development studies scholars, human geographers, and planners, working on issues of urban design, housing, informality, inequality, and planning, were researching cities in Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin and South America.

Under Caroline Moser, GURC launched the interdisciplinary MSc Global Urban Development and Planning, which gave graduate students a broad training in the challenges facing cities from around the world.

A research network

In 2010, in response to the growing recognition that the future of cities is integral to the future of the planet, and that the challenges presented by this demanded a move towards multi-disciplinary research, the University of Manchester established cities@manchester.

This initiative brought together expertise from the fields of anthropology, architecture, economics, education, engineering, geography, history, languages, medicine, sociology and other disciplines. It established the Summer Institute in Urban Studies in 2014. Through its value-enhancing activities, cities@manchester paved the way for the formation of the Manchester Urban Institute.

The Manchester Urban Institute

Given the increasingly important role that cities are playing in addressing many of the most pressing global challenges, in 2016 the strengths of these various centres and groups were united to create the Manchester Urban Institute (MUI).

MUI is one of the largest urban focused research institutes and emphasises the University’s commitment to addressing global inequalities, one of the University’s five research beacons of excellence.

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2016

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University affiliation(s)

University of Manchester
Manchester