Humanities 2 addresses the professions of architecture and urban design and how it can have an impact beyond the bounds of its own sites; architecture in the city can have unexpected political, economic, environmental, and other implications, questioning the ethics of architectural and urban practice.

With Tracing the City, we turn our focus towards a critical approach to architecture and the city, looking at processes of production, consumption and maintenance that constitute the built environment and beyond. We do this by questioning common definitions of a static city by acknowledging that it is alive and constantly evolving through and with the mechanisms that make up its networks. Our explorations are accompanied by new methods of tracing (mapping) these city relations in creative, non-linear ways. We look at a wide range of urban artefacts and discover new methods of understanding their multiplicity. The course is structured with a dual component in mind: a) it explores historical and theoretical underpinnings of urban practice by addressing notions of nature, technology, race, and class as embedded within particular socio-political contexts, and b) it suggests alternative methods for mapping these relations by zooming in and carefully unpacking their complexity.

Sustainable Urban Futures is a central pillar of our broader strategy on creating climate literate landscape architecture graduates. The module encourages students to develop their critical thinking on a range of issues relating to climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. Students cover debates including the role of technological change vis-à-vis human behaviour, the interconnectedness of humans with other species, insights from indigenous knowledge, and how to advocate on behalf of the climate. We welcomed guest lecturer Professor Luca Csepely-Knorr (University of Liverpool) who discussed ‘Context, precedent, antithesis: the role of nature in architecture’. The course draws on literature from a variety of disciplines to help students understand the importance of developing a theoretically informed positions when addressing the climate emergency. Central to the course is an appreciation of the complex social, environmental, and economic contexts within which the built environment disciplines operate, and how this translates into an ethical and moral responsibility towards engaging with the climate emergency.

Humanities 2: Tracing the City

Aylin Rzayeva

Oxford Road Re-Interpreted

While navigating this segment of Oxford Road—situated between the grand civic heart of St Peter’s Square and the more industrious southern stretches—one is immediately struck by the remnants of an older order: a structured ar-chitectural arrangement that was once dictated by the ideal of cohesive inte¬gration between the street and its design. This was a place where the street was not merely a channel of passage but a civic stage—defined by the delib-erate arrangement of building masses, linear perspectives, and the interplay of shadow and proportion.

Here, architecture has yielded to expediency. Once cohesive street walls are now punctuated by vacant voids or overwhelmed by towering structures with no sense of civic decorum. Interventions that neither speak to context nor aim to elevate the urban ensemble have obscured the subtle discipline of grid and volume. The corridor, once a grand gesture in the city’s plan, now struggles under the burden of visual and spatial dissonance.

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Kiran Venugopal

Beneath the grey northern sky, where the sun is an infrequent visitor, the traveller’s promenade along the pavement stretches North-bound, like a long thought, interrupted by the hums of buses and the murmurs of student’s voices, loathsome of the early start to the day. The Oxford Road corridor, which to the traveller, starts to feel homely, reveals a boulevard filled with libraries and laboratories of whirring brains and hungover eyes. After a thirty minute’s march through the turmoil of lethargic footsteps and empty coffee cups, the traveler’s journey leads to the city of Architura. Hearing this, Kublai reminisces the times of his own youth. His nostalgia takes him back to the many cities he visited as a young man , but nonetheless he just smiles and keeps listening.

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Auriane Conti

In a world without objects, Oxford Road is nothing more than a canvas for the constant flow of movement and eclectic buildings. If objects are nothing without us, we are nothing without them. They are optical reducers, magnifiers, cameras, catalysts. The moment we give them our attention, the world around us shifts—and sometimes, people do too. They dictate our gestures and shape how we occupy space. A cigarette held between two fingers slows down time. A skateboard tilts us toward the ground; the city is seen from the asphalt—we glide, we skim. A beer in hand turns the pavement into a public space. A ball creates a group. Objects bring us together in shared listening, in smiles, in the burst of laughter when “the music guy” rides by on his bike. They isolate us with AirPods—suddenly we don’t see that bike crossing ahead! They create thresholds, scenes, pauses and that’s how Oxford Road becomes a theatre.

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Holly Froggatt

Castlefield viaduct a national trust site and previously neglected industrial space has transformed through an adapt and re-use scheme which now enhances local heritage, promotes sustainable urban development and community engagement.

On a more local scale the viaduct provides an accessible community-based hub for all demographics, connecting people, improving mental well-being, encouraging active-aging and creating a calm nature filled space juxtaposing the typical busy urban scene.

However, ‘as the back-to-the-city movement generates demand for more liveable urban areas, environmental gentrification constitutes one of the major environmental justice issues faced by marginalised urban communities today’ (Anguelovski, 2016; Hyra, 2015).

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Humanities 2: Sustainable Urban Futures