Anna Stacey, Cristina Gratiela Chiran, and James White — co-organisers of Heritage Authenticities, Dissonant Ecologies, and Urban Futures (April 2025) — share their reflections and a summary of the event.

A collage of four images showing participants at a workshop.

What happens when an architect (James), a researcher of visual media and nature (Anna), and a political scientist researching cinema and diplomacy (Cristina) come together?   

They organise an interdisciplinary event that combines their research interests, of course! 

The one-day rapid workshop ‘Heritage Authenticities, Dissonant Ecologies and Urban Futures’ invited participants to imagine the future of a contested Old Town site within Edinburgh’s UNESCO World Heritage boundary. Once a garden, later a working-class neighbourhood, and now transformed into a space for hospitality, tourism, and government institutions, the area became a focal point for urgent conversations about heritage, erasure, ecology, and justice.  

The purpose of the workshop was to catalyse interdisciplinary discussion around narrative power and the socio-political dimensions of culture, while promoting complex urban ecological layerings. The event was kindly supported by SGSAH and hosted at the beautiful Edinburgh Futures Institute, in partnership with the SAWH network (Schools of Architecture + World Heritage).  

Participants included doctoral researchers from across the arts and humanities in Scotland, as well as architecture students from Sevilla, Spain. The mixed teams engaged in creative explorations, generating varied proposals ranging from architectural interventions to narrative-driven projects. The final proposals offered ways to counter the erasure of working-class heritage and the displacement of communities, promoted inclusivity in societal narrative-making, and emphasized the responsibilities of architects, planners and other professionals in processes of ecological sustainability and urban justice. 

In June 2025, the University of Sevilla included outputs from this event in SAWH’s annual international online exhibition, contributing to broader collaborative pedagogy and research efforts to address social and ecological crisis: https://sawh.network/ox25/

We were delighted to bring together such a diverse, creative and open-minded group of researchers and students, and foster new connections. We’d like to thank all participants for helping create such a vibrant and collaborative mood at the workshop. The range of research interests sparked fresh ideas and charted exciting ways of envisioning more sustainable urban futures.  

First published: 1 May 2025

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