Humanities 2 addresses the professions of architecture and urban design and considers how they operate beyond the limits of individual sites. It explores how architecture in the city can generate political, economic, and environmental effects, raising questions about the ethics and responsibilities embedded within architectural and urban practice.

With Tracing the City, the focus turns towards a critical engagement with architecture and the urban environment. The course examines the processes of production, consumption, and maintenance that shape the built environment and extend beyond it. It challenges the idea of the city as static by understanding it as something alive and continuously evolving through the networks and systems that sustain it. Students explore these relationships through creative and non linear methods of tracing and mapping, developing new ways of engaging with urban complexity. A wide range of urban artefacts are examined to reveal their multiple meanings and connections.

The course is structured around two key strands. It introduces historical and theoretical perspectives on urban practice, engaging with themes such as nature, technology, race, and class within specific socio political contexts. At the same time, it proposes alternative approaches to mapping and representation that allow for a more careful unpacking of urban conditions.

Sustainable Urban Futures forms a central part of the programme, supporting the development of climate literate practitioners. Students engage with debates on climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, including questions around technology, human behaviour, ecological relationships, and indigenous knowledge, while reflecting on the ethical responsibility of responding to the climate emergency.

Sustainable Urban Futures ultimately aims to develop students as critically engaged practitioners who place a deep understanding of climate justice at the heart of their practice. Students complete a critical essay and develop their own sustainability manifesto as part of their assessment.

Humanities 2

Aurelian Criganuta

Public by Design, Private by Nature

Oxford Road : A User’s Guide

Student: Aurelian Criganuta

Traditional survey mapping captures the physical organisation of the city with considerable precision. What it cannot capture is the political and economic logic that organises the space beneath its surface. This gap between appearance and operation. is not incidental, it is structural. The cartographic conventions Unwin worked within (figure ground, formal composition, the legibility of public and private mass) were developed to describe the physical city, and they were never designed to reveal the governance of that city, the invisible boundaries that decide who is welcome and on what terms.

Freddie Jerome

Sound of the City : Infrastructure Mapping

Student: Freddie Jerome

This mapping project takes music as its primary object of investigation, not as cultural decoration but as urban infrastructure. Across four pages, it traces the spatial distribution, historical loss, relational flows, and speculative futures of the sites through which music is produced, circulated, and experienced in Manchester. The working hypothesis, borrowed from Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker's theorisation of infrastructure in 1999, is that music venues, rehearsal rooms, recording studios, record shops, and community radio transmitters constitute a form of urban infrastructure that is largely invisible until it breaks down — which, in the context of Manchester's accelerating gentrification, it is breaking down at pace (Star, S.L. and Bowker, 1999).

Lap Chang Laurie

Tracing the city - Elevated walk ways in Hong Kong

Student: Lap Chang Laurie

This project traces Central’s elevated walkway as a privately-produced zone whose politics are made invisible by the comfort it provides. Following Winner (1980) and Latour and Hermant (1998), the mapping treats the network as an artefact that sorts who moves where, producing what Easterling (2012) calls a ‘zone,’ a space of exceptional governance hiding in plain sight.