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INTRODUCTION
The Living Heritage of Diasporic and Queer Communities Project Summary
Project Aims
Sheffield Otherwise is a collaborative research-design project that proposes a counter mapping approach to reveal the living heritage of diaspora and queer communities in Sheffield that have been left out from official heritage narratives, urban policies and public space representations.
1. To learn from diasporic and queer communities’ legacies and stories to question traditional practices of urban design which often lacks understanding of the spatial heritage of diverse communities.
Through learning alliance, Sheffield Otherwise promotes the interaction of multiple actors, as learners, with multiple knowledges as a strategy to deal with the complexity of the production of space.
2. To challenge narratives about stigma by focusing on the living heritage of diaspora and queer communities around the continuities of systems of care, community connections, use and livelihoods, and memory
Project Partners
Research Questions
The project has been carefully co-developed through the following partners:
Using a research based design approach, our guiding questions are:
SADACCA is a multi-use space and
• How do we frame diasporic and queer geographies as living heritage?
inclusive association providing support to the African Caribbean community of Sheffield and district
• As a consequence, what type of socio spatial strategies for a just urban transformation to foster diasporic and queer communities’ legacy can we imagine?
GUT LEVEL is a queer-led DIY
event space and collective that focuses on dance music, club culture and the surrounding communities.
The Living Heritage Framework Official heritage sites, narratives and archives tend to reproduce hetero patriarchal and racist assumptions. In times of reckoning with racial justice and gendered oppressions, collectively documenting living heritage of diaspora and queer communities is central to make visible the continuation of communities’ intangible connection to place, rather than the preservation of urban fabric for itself which is central to their claims for spatial justice.
RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary
design collective combining architecture, engineering, tech and art to address social challenges.
The practice engagment project used the living heritage framework to guide the collective work. This framework derives from critical heritage studies that shifted the meaning of heritage from the idea of a homogeneous single identity toward a polyphony of values, and from
BUDD is an MSc Programme at the
Bartlett DPU that immerses students in the theory and practice of urban design and its role in building just cities and communities. 6
