Control and Display (Test and Trace):

This Research Method workshop explored whether the control and display of bodies might be evident in the architecture and urbanism of Manchester. It focused initially on archival research using maps from the University of Manchester Special Collection, which were analysed in combination with other historical material, architectural plans, legislation, interviews, large datasets, and academic work from various other disciplines.

With our current experience of C-19 very much in mind, the workshop explored various phases of Manchester’s history in order to trace how previous “knowledge” of the body might have affected the layout and organisation of the city. Research situated the issues raised by our recent experiences into longer historical trajectories, in order to examine how attitudes to bodies might be legible in building and city fabric, and how these have been changed over time. Analysis was sustained across a wide range of scales, from germs, miasma or viruses, to human bodies, to buildings, the city and the wider region. Understandings were gained of the interdependencies between the materiality and spatiality of specific buildings or neighbourhoods, and various factors of control, including social attitudes and habits, and legislation (i.e. soft and hard power).

Research was undertaken in small groups working on five different, but interrelated themes:

• Public Health
• Parades and Protests
• Entertainment/Leisure/Culture
• Medicine
• Non-Humans Analysis combined close-reading of buildings and historic documents with comparative analysis of geo-referenced historic plans undertaken in QGIS, which also supported the visualisation and analysis of large data sets including population density, industry, mortality, air and water-borne pollution.

In the workshop, students developed a more complex and in-depth understanding of the relationship between Manchester, architecture and the body by working on the five themes. They learned about the interrelationship between bodies, architecture and urban space, and the connections between these within western European thinking; the relationship between the production and circulation of medical knowledge and architecture; and how current C-19 controls exercised on our behaviour and interaction can be situated in a much longer historical trajectory.