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 (MUI) combines the strengths of multiple thematic groupings drawn from across The University of Manchester’s three Faculties, and deliver our vision through serving as a leading academic urban institute generating world-class research.
We achieve elevated 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.
MUI positions The University of Manchester as the leading location for urban research, with a combined focus on the global north and global south.
Our history
Uniting the strengths of several research groupings, MUI 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 Prof Brian Robson to develop research on UK urban and regional policy, while in 2000 the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology was set up to address challenges associated with steering behaviour, settlements, and landscapes towards more sustainable futures in the UK.
Both centres consisted of environmental scientists, geographers and planners working in the most industrialised economies, and 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, and established the Summer Institute in Urban Studies in 2014.
Through its value-enhancing activities, cities@manchester paved the way for the formation of the MUI.
The Manchester Urban Institute (MUI)
Given the increasingly key 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 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.
Our vision
World-leading research, engagement, impact, and training activities for current and future generations.
The vision of the Manchester Urban Institute (MUI) is to realise more inclusive and just cities that are both environmentally and socially sustainable for the current and future generations through world-leading research, engagement, impact, and training activities.
We deliver our vision by serving as a leading academic urban institute that generates world-class research, achieves high levels of engagement and impact with non-academic stakeholders, and trains the next generation of urban activists, decision-makers, researchers, and scholars.
