Roundtable at UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference 2025
Change Stories partners in Belfast, Geraint Ellis and Agustina Martire, have organized a roundtable for this year’s UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference at Ulster University on 11 September. The session is called ‘Change Stories – Decolonising urban stories of change for a more inclusive future’ and participants will reflect on how narratives of place—particularly those rooted in everyday experiences—can influence planning processes, policy-making, and governance. Participants include research and community-based partners from Belfast and our other partner cities: Sebastian Orlando Espejo Fandiño (Bogotá), Elis Borde (Belo Horizonte), María José Álvarez Rivadulla (Bogotá), Azadeh Sobout (Belfast), and Marissa McMahon (Belfast) .
The State of Belfast exhibition at the MAC features Change Stories
Agustina Martire’s students at Queens University Belfast have been part of the Change Stories project through their StreetSpace studio which aims to address Northern Ireland’s housing crisis through design-led, human-centred research in partnership with Practice and the Participation of Rights (PPR). As shown below, students worked with PPR to design aspects of a potential housing development at the Mackie’s.
Grenfell, by Steve McQueen, is a starting point for the State of Belfast exhibition which focuses on PPR’s Take Back the City campaign, tackling housing injustices and inequalities based on race and poverty. PPR activists with experiences of housing stress will be present at the exhibition.
At the MAC in Belfast from 18 July to 21 September 2025. Read more.
Change Stories in the Global South
“Telling stories is seducing the world” says Omar Rincón, Associate Professor at the Universidad de los Andes Center for Studies in Journalism. The Global South is represented in two out of the three case study cities in Change Stories, Bogotá and Belo Horizonte. Stories are being used to explore and tell a full account of sustainable and equitable change in two Latin American settings. In this video, partners discuss what the project means from a Global South perspective.
Subtitles for this video are available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Residential knowledge exchange event
In March 2024 the Change Stories partners and advisory group members convened for a week in Bogotá, Colombia to exchange knowledge and co-develop our research approach. UW participant Sarah Randall wrote a daily post across the week. Read her summaries of Day 1 including a site visit to El Castillo, Day 2 with a public event at University of the Andes, Day 3 with a site visit to Ciudad Bolivar, and Day 4.
Bogotá academic partners at the University of the Andes published a story about the event: Change Stories: a meeting point between the academic community and civil society (available here).
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Project background and protocol published
Our first paper describes how we developed a multi-country transdisciplinary research project. Parallel to literature review, we used participatory and social research methods to identify case study cities for our primary study and to inform our study design. Read more.