Architectural Humanities focuses on historical and cultural processes and practices of architecture. Founded on humanities-based methods and including interdisciplinary arts and social science approaches to research, our members address contemporary critical questions about architecture and its contexts.

Emerging Territories gathers together scholars working at the interface of urban planning, urbanism and architecture. It broadly focuses on big societal and environmental challenges faced by cities and territories in relationship to evolving notions of sustainability and resilience, and looking particularly at climate change, effective governance, diversity and social inclusion.

The Design Practices Research Group unites designers who teach and research through practice with academic researchers using formal design methods. The group fosters a diverse environment where practical design and scholarly inquiry intersect and enrich each other. Drawing on the school’s strengths in representation, fabrication, live projects, experimental, speculative and environmental design, members critically explore the relationship between design and its impact on the physical, social, and ecological worlds. Overall, the group aims to advance understanding, promote innovative approaches, and encourage ongoing debate about the role of design within complex system interactions.

The Heritage and Place Research Group supports heritage research that is dynamic and “future-focused”, concentrating on subject areas that are linked to sustainability, cultural identity and social cohesion – connecting past, present and future. In addition to publications, the research group provides a home to practice-based and policy-led research, engaging with issues such as adaptive reuse, retrofit, conservation-led regeneration and community participation. Though the research group is wide-ranging in its remit, it forms the natural place for interdisciplinary heritage scholarship which is positioned at the intersection between “people, places and things.”

The Centre for ATM Research builds on over 40 years of air, rail and urban transport research, consultancy and teaching at the University of Westminster. Specialising in ATM since 1999, we have coordinated and led work across appx. 40 major European ATM research projects.

The ATA brings together a broad spectrum of expertise to lead research, teaching and knowledge exchange on walking, wheeling, cycling and other active modes, use of ‘micromobilities,’ and reduction in car use. It is now largely funded by external grants including from the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Department for Transport, and Transport for London.

The Centre for the Study of the Production of the Built Environment (ProBE) is a cross-school research centre between Westminster Business School (WBS), the School of Architecture and Cities (A+C), and the School of Social Sciences. ProBE is concerned with the critical study of the production of the built environment as a social, environmental, and historical process, what this means for labour, communities, cities and nature, and finding innovative ways to construct a just, inclusive and sustainable society.