Architectural Futures
Architectural Futures is an emerging Glasgow Changing Futures Area. It advances a new field of knowledge, “felt experiences of place”, defined as the way we feel in and about place, and the felt relationships we have to and with place.
Working in partnership with industry, the public sector, and community groups, Architectural Futures aims to design, deliver, and evaluate people-centred places in the UK and internationally.
Our vision is to deliver architectural environments that nurture attachment, stimulate belonging, strengthen identity, provoke positive emotions such as joy and pride, and reduce negative feelings such as loneliness, frustration, and disillusionment. These are all elements that are evidenced to improve lives, increase productivity, and generate public value through optimising socio-economic outcomes.
Our mission is to advance people-centred, place-based research, innovation, policy and practice and directly build from and extend the Arts and Humanities Research Council Place-Based Research Programme.
We focus on both the retrofit of historic places and the creation of new places and spaces, ensuring that sustainable development is informed by our collective felt experiences of place.
Architectural Futures is interdisciplinary, challenge-led, and outward-facing. We start from the position that academic research leads to innovation within the architecture and wider creative industries and built environment sectors.
In turn our partnerships with industry as well as the public sector and community groups stimulate new research questions, generate new empirical evidence, and provoke conceptual and methodological innovation.
Delivering people-centred places depends on a long-term, trans-disciplinary approach that brings together arts and humanities disciplines with, for example, economists, engineers, computer scientists, planners, public policy specialists, psychologists, neuroscientists, surveyors, technologists and urban designers at the University of Glasgow and beyond.
Expected outcomes
- people-centred places are designed, delivered, and evaluated
- we provide the trusted evidence needed to catalyse people-centred architectural environments
- we evidence the socio-economic impacts of our work across different places in the regions and nations of the UK
- we support the development of place-based business cases and inform the evolution of place-based policies and practices across UK and Devolved Governments
- people-centred places become the dominant frame through which architectural futures are realised