Video introduction to cities@manchester

The world is primarily an urban place and so scholars, policy makers, and public debate needs to address the urbanity of human experience. Cities are often projected as sources of disorder and social problems, yet cities have always been sources of cultural creativity, transnational connection, diversity, conviviality, and motors of intellectual, economic, environmental and political transformation.

Building on our work in both the global north and south, we speak to city making and its contradictions that include growing economic disparities, challenging environmental conditions, shifting political affiliations and borders, and globe spanning cosmopolitan cultures.

• Railways, Red Barrel and Robin Hood: Interrogating the Modernist revival
• Tax Increment Financing – a model in motion
• Migrants and Comparative Urbanism
• The economic crisis: a view from the Everyday
• ‘Skeletons in the closet’: Forgetting the past in an urban present
• Telescopic Urbanism and the Poor
• Market Forces and Education in Manchester
• Fragrant Cities – Relationships between smell and urban environments
• Contemporary Cities and Infrastructural Imaginaries