At The University of Manchester’s School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED), the answer is: they thrive as Change-makers.

The SEED Change-makers programme is a growing student-led initiative that’s empowering undergraduates and postgraduates to create meaningful change — within the University, in the community, and around the world. Launched two years ago, the programme gives students the tools, confidence and platform to turn passion into action while gaining recognition and real-world experience along the way. 

And it's just getting started. 

From inspiration to action 

The idea for SEED Change-makers came from Professor Nicola Banks, SEED’s Director of Social Responsibility, who saw how students in the Global Development Institute (GDI) were contributing to One World Together — a social enterprise born out of her research. Seeing their drive and commitment, she asked a powerful question: 

"What if we stopped thinking of students only as future changemakers — and started supporting them to be changemakers today?" 

The programme that followed invites students from across SEED’s five departments — Architecture, Geography, Global Development, Education, and Planning and Environmental Management — to lead, collaborate and innovate on social responsibility projects that matter to them. 

What do SEED Change-makers do? 

Over its first two years, the programme has engaged over 150 SEED students through Social Responsibility World Cafés and Change-maker working groups — spaces for collaborative discussion, reflection, and action on social and environmental issues.

These student-led events and conversations have reached over 600 attendees in person, with further impact through recorded content that continues to be shared across online platforms and teaching contexts, extending their influence beyond the University and across time zones. 

From inspiring peers to informing future students and being used as real-world teaching tools, the Change-maker programme is helping amplify student voices and embed social responsibility more deeply into the culture of SEED.

Recognised impact 

SEED Change-makers is formally accredited through the University’s Stellify programme, meaning students who take part have their contributions recognised on their Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR), an official transcript that adds value to graduate job and study applications. 

Student-led events 

Students have organised impactful lectures, workshops, and campaigns, including: 

• A conversation with Jon Alexander, author of Citizens, on what it means to be an engaged, empowered citizen (November 2023) Watch: ‘Is there any way out of the mess we’re in?’  
• A celebration of 30 years of Fairtrade, with panel guests from academia, co-operatives, and the UK Fairtrade movement.  Watch: Fairtrade: Celebrating 30 years of a movement for global economic justice’ (October 2024)
• A talk by Anshu Gupta, founder of Indian social enterprise Goonj, on rethinking charity and sustainable community support (November 2024) Read: Why everything we know about charity is wrong: Lessons from Goonj 

Working groups creating change 

Students have led dedicated groups tackling real-world challenges: 

• Sustainability at move-out: Addressing waste left behind in student accommodation by helping students donate, recycle and rethink their move-out habits as part of the Give it don’t bin it campaign.  
• Supporting social enterprise: A team of GDI students co-organised a major fundraising event for One World Together, raising over £1,700 to support marginalised communities globally. 

Student voices, real impact 

Beyond the events and projects, the real story of SEED Change-makers is the personal growth it inspires. 

Students describe gaining leadership skills, confidence, new networks, and a deeper connection to their studies and their values. They’re discovering their ability to lead social change, not in the distant future, but right now. 

Here’s how Laura Acosta Varon, one of our student leaders, put it: 

“It makes me very proud to represent my home and country, Colombia. I’m so excited for the future of One World Together — and here’s to many more years of impact, trust, solidarity, and collaboration!” 

Looking ahead: building a bigger movement 

As the programme moves into its third year, SEED is investing in a more structured, sustainable model co-designed with students. 

Two undergraduates, Saniyyah Ali and Haojun Shuai, are spending the summer of 2025 researching what social responsibility means to their peers and helping to shape a new student handbook. From 2025/26, students will be supported through a semester-based journey of discovery, collaboration, and project delivery, with more ways to get involved at every stage of the student experience. 

Get Involved 

• Students: Interested in becoming a SEED Change-maker? You can find more information on your SEED Students Community Pages
• Staff: Want to support or collaborate with SEED Change-makers? Reach out to your departmental social responsibility representative to find out how you can get involved.
• Supporters: Want to help us grow the programme? We welcome partnerships, mentoring, and funding opportunities that enable student-led impact. Please contact sr.seed@manchester.ac.uk

Professor Ferreira is an economist (MA in European and Regional Policies and PhD in Economics, U. Reading) and politician from Portugal, who most recently served as the European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms (Von Der Leyen Commission 2019–2024), the first Portuguese woman to be put forward for the role.  

From 2016 to 2019 Professor Ferreira was Vice Governor of the Bank of Portugal. Prior to that, Professor Ferreira was a Member of the European Parliament (2004–2016), and held ministerial posts in the Portuguese Government, serving as Minister for the Environment and later as Minister for Planning (1995–2002). 

Earlier in her career, Professor Ferreira played a key role in shaping and implementing regional development policies aimed at revitalising Portugal’s industrial North. Her experience in designing and coordinating policies for regional cohesion and structural reform offers important insights for regions such as Greater Manchester and the North-West, which face similar challenges of post-industrial adjustment and spatial inequality. 

Prof Ferreira, a faculty member at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto, Portugal, is already a valued collaborator of the Department of Planning, Property and Environmental Management at The University of Manchester, having recently supported a fieldtrip for our undergraduate students to Portugal. During the visit she accompanied students to the Côa Palaeolithic Art Park and the Douro International Natural Park; two sites where she had major political input.

The Department is now planning a series of events and activities to coincide with Professor Ferreira’s upcoming visit in November 2025. 

Over two engrossing and thought-provoking days, dozens of staff and students from across The University of Manchester community, alongside practitioners, artists, and activists from across the UK, came together for transdisciplinary discussions on the fundamental transformations needed to challenge systemic drivers of unsustainability and chart more liveable pathways forward.

A key aim was to foreground perspectives and disciplines not typically centred in STEM-dominated sustainability discourses, namely the humanities, social sciences, and activist voices.

Key themes and topics included: the transformative role of hope and imaginaries; cultivating our ecological selves; working with and through climate anxiety; the relationship between war and ecological breakdown; collectively crafting new stories; generating value shifts and cultivating relations of ‘integrity over transaction’; opting for slow research and travel; how mosses might help us rethink the more-than-human ethical dimensions of sustainability; how to disrupt universities’ complicity in climate breakdown; and the need for a distributed ethics that cherishes individuals through collectives.

As speaker Susan Brown (MIE) asked, “What if education were to beat not to the neoliberal economic clock, but to the earth’s clock?” How can we develop an intersectional, ecological approach to sustainability, that recognises extreme inequality, political polarisation, misogyny, systemic racism, transphobia, pollution, and biodiversity collapse as deeply entangled and indivisible crises? And how might we better engage actors beyond our immediate circles, ensuring we don’t merely preach to the converted?

In service of keeping hope alive, these crucial conversations will continue in future events over the coming academic year.

The UK’s new Labour government has set itself the bold target of building 1.5 million homes in five years to deal with the critical shortage of housing.

To achieve this, it will have to deliver 50% more than the previous government managed over the same period.

Can it be done, and if so, what obstacles need to be overcome?

Labour has made it clear that reform of the planning system is an important element of plans to foster growth in the economy, and at the same time deal with issues that have been slowing down the pace of new development.

The party also made several other pledges, including re-introducing local housing targets, recruiting more planners to local government, promoting social housing, prioritising brownfield sites and allowing development on so-called “grey belt” areas, such as wasteland or disused car parks, within the green belt, including a new generation of new towns.

This week’s king’s speech is expected to contain proposed legislation to enable these policies.

As planning and property professors at the University of Manchester we applaud the ambition to boost housing supply that has been lower than housing demand for a long time; however, we urge caution about looking for quick wins by reducing planning powers and reforming planning in a rushed way.

For a start, this scale of development is pretty much unprecedented, so there are questions about whether it is achievable without recruiting many more skilled construction workers, building inspectors and local authority planners, as the government recognises.

Many infrastructure pinch points need to be resolved, too, not least upgrading the electricity grid, but also in transport and flood protection.

There are dangers, too, in giving the impression that large-scale proposals for new housing will automatically be looked favourably upon without adequate scrutiny around housing quality and neighbourhood design, flood-risk reduction and biodiversity.

New towns in particular must not be rushed. Instead, they need to be phased in over decades so they can grow organically rather than create townscapes that reflect a particular era of building styles.

While there is something to be said for releasing grey-belt land in the green belt, there is a danger that, if poorly devised, this proposal could create a perverse incentive for those farming productively in the green belt to allow their lands to convert to scrub so it can be sold off at higher prices.

The UK needs to build more houses quickly, but must address the known risks of future climate change. As we know from Met Office climate predictions, increased temperatures, more extreme weather and rising sea levels will affect the how and where of house building in the UK. It will require choosing building materials and designs that withstand changing conditions, avoiding areas of heightened flood risk while using durable materials and energy-efficient heating and cooling systems.

Poorly conceived reforms to bulldoze planning regulations in order to expedite new development, could result in poorly designed communities and poor-quality homes not fit to meet the UK’s net zero ambitions, passing on the costs to future generations, and specifically to home owners needing to retrofit at greater expense.

Getting high-quality developments put forward in the first place should reduce public opposition and the need to engage in months of negotiating. Arguably then, more and better planning regulations are needed, not least to create high-quality, sustainable communities.

Building blocks needed first

For planning reforms to work well, other building blocks are needed first, such as expanding training for construction workers, building inspectors and planners. Reform of building regulations to address climate change, particularly energy performance in new buildings, is required as well as ensuring adequate water and sewerage infrastructure is in place, and improving electricity distribution networks.

The danger of not getting these building blocks in place early is that the scale of proposed house building will derail other policy goals, such as controlling inflation, reducing energy costs and achieving net zero targets.

For instance, if in the next two years, homes are built at the rapid pace as proposed, it might contribute to diverting skills from other growth sectors (such as vital retrofit work for heat pump or solar installation). It could also potentially fuel labour shortages and some regional and national wage inflation, mainly in the south-east where the gap between housing demand and supply is severe, and affordability are such serious issues.

While some increase in wages would be welcome after several years of stagnation, it is important to avoid returning to earlier periods of regional skill shortages and wage costs, especially now it is no longer possible to rely so much on attracting labour from EU countries.

Training enough new construction workers, re-training existing workers and attracting back those who have either left the labour market or moved into other sectors, will be key.

Finally, in creating new solutions to the under-delivery of new housing, it is important to acknowledge the value of public consultation on new plans and development proposals. So let’s focus first on getting the necessary building blocks in place and reform planning by making it efficient and better for all.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The popular event, on the 5 June, co-designed by RTPI and PPEM welcomed national and local employers across real estate, planning, and environmental management sectors to The University of Manchester to talk with students on a one-to-one level. 

In contrast to more traditional career fair events, the afternoon took a more innovative and interactive approach to recruitment, with the speed networking format facilitating interaction between all attendees, on a ten minute rotation between tables. This encouraged students to consider additional career opportunities and employers to those that they might have expected. 

The approach was welcomed by students, with feedback on the day that the event was ‘a fresh approach to targeting students’, allowed ‘real engagement and interaction’, and ‘was fun’. Industry attendees were equally enthused, both by the format and by the calibre of students, with two offers of short-term placements secured immediately after the event, and valuable connections made for others. 

Following the success of this event, the second in a series, it is now hoped that similar events will be held in both the autumn and easter period of the 2024/2025 academic year. 

The department is grateful to Beverley Watson and Ben Teague of the RTPI for co-ordinating this event, alongside University colleagues Ushma Khadir, Bertie Dockerill, and Ian Mell.
 

Dr Vaidehi Tandel features in a new documentary taking an inside look at India's vast black market for water.

'Water Mafia' produced by Vice Studios and DocuBay explores the political economy of water provisioning in two of India's major cities, Delhi and Mumbai.

The film explores the various methods employed by the water mafia to regulate water access for urban residents through interviews with individuals connected to the water mafia, whistleblowers, and victims. It also provides insightful perspectives from investigative journalists, economists, and urban planners and sheds light on the role of government corruption in facilitating and sustaining this operation.

The trailer for the documentary can be found here.

The documentary was released in January 2024 and is available for streaming on the DocuBay website.

As an urban economist who researches the political economy of urban governance and planning in Indian cities, Dr Vaidehi Tandel was approached by the documentary makers to provide insight on the causes and magnitude of the problem of access to water in the city of Mumbai.

Describing the challenge of providing adequate water to the nearly 40% of the population that lives in slums, Dr Tandel notes in the documentary that “with the planning process, we did not do a good job of forecasting the number of people to come into the city…rather the focus was to try and de-densify. But the people came because of opportunities. The housing stock was not affordable for them…and there we saw a lot of slum settlements come up.”.

Dr Tandel has previously been quoted in the Financial Times (here and here) and appeared on two BBC podcasts (here and here), where she discussed the impact of COVID-19 and the future of cities.

• View Dr Vaidehi Tandel's research profile.

The award recognises Dr. Pineda-Zumaran’s outstanding professional and academic contribution to the field of urbanism and planning, and particularly the contribution to Peruvian cities. The award ceremony took place as part of a wider event to mark World Urbanism Day, with architect Álvaro Ugarte and economists Álvaro Espinoza and Ricardo Fort also honoured.  

Dr Pineda-Zumaran achieved her PhD in Planning and Environmental Management in 2013, with support from two doctoral scholarships - the Overseas Research Scholarship programme by the School of Environment and Development (now School of Environment, Education and Development) at The University of Manchester and the FINCyT Doctoral Scholarship Programme, awarded by Presidency of the Council of Ministries of Peru. During her studies at Manchester, Dr Pineda-Zumaran also acted as a Graduate Teaching Assistant.  

Since leaving Manchester, Dr Pineda-Zumaran has held postdoctoral positions in Japan and Chile, before returning to Peru as lecturer in planning and urban development at the National University of Saint Augustine. Now Research Director at URBES-LAB, a Research Centre in Urban and Territorial Theory, Dr Pineda-Zumaran works on issues such as urban informality, inequality, and the impact of neoliberalism on urban and territorial development, in the Peruvian and Latin American context.  

Dr Joanne Tippett won the 'Excellence in Teaching' award for an online module that used her engagement toolkit, Ketso Connect, to build key skills in inter-disciplinary and critical thinking.

The AESOP competition recognises and rewards innovation in planning schools and the theme for 2021 was Planning Education in the Digital Space.

Dr Tippett’s winning module, Designing Sustainable Futures, introduced first-year students to sustainability challenges and asked them to find ways to tackle them, using the hands-on toolkit to help them visually structure their arguments and ideas during the teaching sessions, group work and assignments.

The toolkit Ketso Connect was designed by Dr Joanne Tippett during the pandemic to maintain a sense of community during online teaching. It allows users to ‘grow’ ideas using its sticky, colour-coded ‘leaves’ that can be written on and placed on a felt workspace, helping to capture thoughts and ideas and to prioritise them. These toolkits were posted to all students taking the module.

To further encourage engagement, students were asked to share pictures of their toolkit work in progress via a digital noticeboard, combining the value of individual time for reflective thinking with shared ideas and discussions. The judging panel praised the way this interactive approach provided an innovative way to teach large classes remotely and supported student-orientated teaching.

“When the pandemic physically disconnected students from their peers and lecturers, I created Ketso Connect to bring engagement and a sense of community back to teaching. I was genuinely surprised by the amount of positive feedback from students about how using the toolkit helped structure their thinking and helped them make sense of their learning both during and between the teaching sessions” said Dr Tippett.

“I am now really looking forward to using this tool in my future dual and face-to-face teaching, as it allows me to interject short bursts of active learning and discussion into sessions, no matter what the class size or setting.”

To share their expertise in student engagement and study skills, the winners of the 2021 AESOP awards will be hosting a series of webinars in August and September 2021. Find out more information and register: Building Study Skills and Student Engagement

Find out more about Ketso Connect.

Robyn, who studied MPlan Town Planning and Urban Regeneration at the University in 2009/10, currently works for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and, among other achievements across numerous planning roles, oversaw the delivery of the UK’s first Voluntary National Review of progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, presented to the United Nations in July 2019.

The judges commented: "Robyn embodies the idea of what an ambassador should be, for not only Young Planners but the profession for many years to come.

"Her confidence and passion for planning, and the future of the profession, shone through; it was all-encompassing and reached beyond the conventional realms of planning.

"Her work on developing the SDGs within Government and with the UN was particularly impressive and noteworthy.

"The judging panel were in awe of what she has been able to achieve in her career to date and are excited to see what she achieves as the Young Planner of the Year, and beyond.”

The School's six successes came in three categories, highlighting the breadth of support our colleagues have shown to social responsibility over the past year. Congratulations to the following winners:

Outstanding benefit to society through research

• Winner - Professor Neil Humphrey and the HeadStart learning team (Manchester Institute of Education) for HeadStart learning
• Winner (emerging impact) - Dr Sarah Marie Hall (Geography) for Everyday Austerity

Outstanding contribution to social innovation

• Winner - Dr Jonathan Huck (Geography) for #Huckathon: Mapping hidden homes in post-conflict Northern Uganda to deliver medical care
• Highly Commended - Seyedehsomayeh Taherimoosavi (Planning and Environmental Management) for Tackling fuel poverty with artificial intelligence techniques and blockchain technology

Outstanding local engagement

• Highly Commended - Craig Thomas and team (Geography) for The Old Abbey Taphouse: A STEAM hub in a pub
• Highly Commended - Caroline Boyd and team (Global Development Institute and the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute) for Be//Longing