Areas and projects
Research Opportunities in Architecture
Topics on which academic staff currently welcome PhD proposals include:
- The lived and built reality of cosmopolitan urbanism
- Understanding buildings: Developing a sociology of architecture and urban development.
- Re-Interpreting environmental design: Theories, discourses and practices of sustainable architecture and cities.
- Architecture and urban futures: Identifying pathways of urban design and development.
- Sensing the city: Architecture and multi-sensory environments.
- Architecture as culture, studies of architectural practices: design thinking, visualization and cognition in design
- Socio-historical and socio-technical understanding of debates surrounding museum architecture, architecture of renovation, architecture of addition.
- NIMBYism, social conflict and place-making: deepening understanding of public responses to renewable energy technologies.
- Microgeneration, renewable energy and the home.
- The development of analytical tools for the better understanding of socio-technical constraints and potentials for more sustainable buildings and cities.
- Cognitive Science and Architecture
- The urban grid and its implications for social interaction
- The role of climate, culture, religion and history in shaping traditional building layout
- Urban artefacts as mirrors and mediators in contested cities.
- The urban built environment and sustainable social practices.
- Co-evolution in action - HOWTO?
- New urbanism - theory and practice.
The lived and built reality of cosmopolitan urbanism
Professor Simon Guy & Ralf Brand
The 21st century will not only be a uniquely urban but also a uniquely cosmopolitan era which requires systematic research about the way the material make-up of cities reflects, accommodates and facilitates the lived reality of cosmopolitanism. How and why do architects and planners - deliberately or unintentionally - encourage genuine mingling or (benign) segregation of people from different national, ethnic, religious, linguistic backgrounds? Why are Chinatowns, little Indias and little Italies celebrated all around the world? A PhD in this area could develop a comparative project to investigate the different answers of different cities to these questions. The University of Manchester and The National University of Singapore have signed a partnership agreement with a research focus on Cosmopolitanism. Under this programme, it would be possible to support a comparative study of these two - and possibly other - cities with travel grants etc.
Understanding buildings: Developing a sociology of architecture and urban development
A PhD in this area would contribute to the development and application of a sociological approach to architecture and urban development, which looks beyond ideas of building and cities as either primarily aesthetic or technical objects. Instead the student would explore the multiple frameworks of meaning and action that frame design and development practices. By identifying different institutional actors that tend to be either neglected or studied in isolation when researching urban development, and by unpacking their contrasting 'ways of seeing' and 'acting', the PhD would highlight how the changing social organisation of diverse development interests can transform the design of buildings, networks and cities. Topics for study are open, focusing on issues as diverse as architecture and health, housing, work, education, community, environment, terrorism, poverty and so on. A range of social science methodologies may be employed and case-studies may be developed in different local, national and international settings.
Re-Interpreting environmental design: Theories, discourses and practices of sustainable architecture and cities
A PhD in this area would apply an interdisciplinary analytical perspective to the debate about sustainable architecture and cities in order to enhance our understanding of the contextual framing and contested nature of ecological design. By examining the relationships between diverse technical design strategies and competing conceptions of ecological place-making, the student would highlight the conceptual challenge involved in defining what we mean by calling a building, network or city 'green'. In doing so the PhD would develop and apply a 'sociotechnical' methodological approach which treats the social and the technical, and nature and culture as inextricably linked in processes of co-evolution. As a result the PhD would explore new forms of hybrid urbanism located in shifting design priorities and changing development and network management practices. Applying the analytical approach to field work the PhD would increase our understanding of the path dependency of environmental innovation by both identifying the ways in which alternative logics of ecological design have their roots in competing interpretations of the environmental problem, and by exploring the ways in which each logic pre-figures technological strategies and alternative visions of sustainability. A range of social science methodologies may be employed and case-studies may be developed in different local, national and international settings.
Architecture and urban futures: Identifying pathways of urban design and development
The aim of a PhD in this area would be to connect debates about urban design and development to broader questions about urban futures. The PhD would focus on the contrasting "visions", or multiple models of urban futures employed by different actors and agencies in the design, development and management of cities. The research would identify the contrasting assumptions underlying each urban vision and strategy; firstly questioning how we view the future of cities, the conceptual images and design approaches that underpin research, planning and policy-making; secondly, the types of design and development practice considered necessary to re-construct cities along sustainable development pathways; thirdly, the processes through which urban futures are seen to emerge; and finally, the policy strategies deemed necessary to promote future cities. A range of social science methodologies may be employed and case-studies may be developed in different local, national and international settings.
Sensing the city: Architecture and multi-sensory environments
The urban environment is experienced through all our senses and yet more attention is paid to the visual experience than the experience through our other senses. Yet current and past urban research has been framed by a 'primacy of the visual', and there are few contemporary accounts of the auditory nature of everyday experience in urban and architectural studies. A PhD in this area would explore what the built environment would be like if sensory response, sentiment, and memory were critical design factors and equals to structure and program. While it is obvious that all the senses are involved in human interaction and engagement with the city and while it is clear that research is being carried out from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives there is still much to learn about and from these relationships. To date there has been no systematic compilation of work being carried out in this area. The aim of a PhD in this area would be both to develop a critical approach to understanding the role the senses play in furthering understanding of the city and urban life and to identify the politics, practices and geographies of the senses in understanding urban environments. A range of social science methodologies may be employed and case-studies may be developed in different local, national and international settings.
Urban artefacts as mirrors and mediators in contested cities
Potential studies could investigate the shaping and impact of the built environment in contested cities such as Belfast, Beirut, Nicosia, Mostar and others (but also in non-violently divided cities such as Brussels, Montreal or Fribourg). Are there particular types of artefacts that afford hostility or foster rapprochement? The latter question is particularly important for the goal to create neutral, or even more ambitious, shared spaces. As of yet, there is only little evidence to support recommendations for the design of such places. But maybe it is even more important to focus on design processes rather than on the best practice of architectural and urban design. A Ph.D. in this area could tackle one of these important questions through an in-depth study of one place or a comparative study across different cities
The urban built environment and sustainable social practices
A set of Ph.D. projects could focus on the potentials of the built environment to facilitate more sustainable social practices. What urban or building designs are more or less conducive to make people use stairs, their bicycle, grow their own food, waste less water, recycle their rubbish, refrain from heating all rooms etc? In conceptual terms, such research projects would analyse the prescriptive potentials and dangers of the notion of “scripts” which is typically used in the STS literature as descriptive concept. Integral parts of this suite of research questions are also issues of governance, democracy and culture which could be pursued through comparative studies of cities of different political dispositions and cultures. The result could foster our understanding of how the built environment and social practices influence each other – and how this phenomenon could be harnessed to make our world more sustainable without infringing people's freedom of choice
Co-evolution in action - HOWTO?
The discourse on sustainability is often couched between technological utopianism on the one hand and heroic choices on the other. While not all policies occupy the extreme ends of this spectrum, many sustainability efforts occupy the middle ground with some technological and some social “fixes”. Even such a seemingly fair compromise, however, misses important potentials for concrete progress. What is needed instead is a synergistic, strategically synchronised or co-evolutionary relationship between technical and social change. It is not clear, however, how this idea could be translated into concrete design practice. A "co-evolution audit" has been suggested as a first methodical step in such a process and would analyse the complex web of factors that has so far influenced particular social practices. A potential Ph.D. project could develop such an audit tool and pilot it in a concrete urban setting.
New urbanism - theory and practice
Several of my current and recent PhD students have explored specific issues in contemporary urban design practice. For example Pedro Neto Leao (2003) on digital visualisation of public spaces, Stuart Batho (2005) on public realm design, Michael Short (2006) on tall buildings in heritage areas, and among current students Ally Lu's doctoral work on cultural landscape assessment, Dominic Wilkinson on residential estate layout, and Rung-Juin Chou on urban riverfront design. I'm especially keen to have people working on the urbanism and 1) university campus design, 2) railway stations and their settings.