Walls as Informal Urban Archives

Walls as social surfaces. Introduction: This project examines the walls of Manchester

as socially produced surfaces through which urban histories, power relations, and lived emotional

states are materially expressed. Rather than treating walls as neutral backdrops,

or street art as discrete aesthetic objects, the research approaches walls as active

sites of inscription, shaped by and responding to processes such as industrial decline, regeneration,

gentrification, and social marginalization. The central claim is that walls operate as informal urban

archives that accumulate traces of presence, erasure, conflict, and repair,

offering insight into how cities are lived at street level. These treaces- traces