PhD Funding Opportunity: LEVERHULME UNIT FOR THE DESIGN OF CITIES OF THE FUTURE (LUDEC)

Professor Berthold Schoene introduces the LUDEC launch. Picture by Dr Jenny van Hooff.

We’re excited to announce that the second round of the Leverhulme Unit for the Design of Cities of the Future (LUDEC) funding scheme has now opened. As the acronym might suggest, there’s space here for playful interventions and thinking about future cities and we’d welcome applications that take this approach. The application has two stages, the first to secure a PhD place at Manchester Met and the second to submit your LUDEC application (25th March 2022).

See below for detail from the LUDEC website…

Manchester Metropolitan University has been awarded a £1.35m Doctoral Scholarships award from the Leverhulme Trust to support doctoral research into cities of the future. The Leverhulme Unit for the Design of Cities of the Future (LUDeC) will provide funded studentships for 15 students over the course of the award. Based within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, LUDeC will focus on how research might begin to bring together academics, students, local communities and urban designers (in the broadest sense) to transform the way we think about cities and to envisage new ways of living and working.

LUDeC takes its inspiration from William Hesketh Lever, who was committed to a holistic vision of urban planning that emphasised the vital importance of social justice. In this spirit, LUDeC seeks to redress the limitations of scholarship that conceives of the city as a site of competition, by expediting a humanistic design philosophy that envisages the city as a site of collaboration, equity and social justice.

Under conditions where the divisive nature of the city has become so concentrated, not least in light of the Coronavirus pandemic, the future of urban design is, we argue, thwarted by the limitations of disciplinary boundaries and by an inability to conceive of the city beyond immediate economic, social and environmental measures. LUDeC instead focuses on integrating and galvanising the diverse assets of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in order to enable research dedicated to producing a more humanistic and just urbanism that can generate glimpses of an alternative future.

LUDeC is motivated by the proposition that what constitutes the livable city can only properly be explored outside disciplinary constraints. Our commitment, then, is to research that does not simply reassert the city and its communities but that self-consciously seeks out the unforeseen. LUDeC will elicit what might be surprising or unprecedented about the cities of the future, and how we might envisage, harness and utilise this uncertain potential in the interests of long-term sustainability. LUDeC is committed to using the diversity of city life as a driver for positive social and cultural change.

To this end, we seek proposals from across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences that challenge conventional notions of the city and of city communities. The successful Leverhulme scholars will be based in the Postgraduate Arts and Humanities Centre in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and will have access both to a trans-disciplinary programme of research training and to a community of practice that seeks to challenge traditional notions of what a PhD might be.

Eligible disciplines include: Architecture, Art, Criminology, Cultural Studies, Design, History, English, Fashion, History, Human Geography, Information and Communication, Languages, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology.

Please note that we encourage proposals that seek to traverse disciplinary boundaries in creative ways and which challenge disciplinary norms.