Project description
Urban alternatives at the time of large-scale demolitions
Historically associated with tabula rasa, large-scale demolition has re-emerged as a central strategy of urban development across the Global North and the Global South. Large-scale demolition is expensive and risky: not only it displaces communities, but it can also stall development and fail to attract investment. The ERC-funded BLUEPRINTS project explores why governments and city-builders are willing to gamble on the futures of their cities, and how communities are articulating and realising more just urban futures in response. By generating granular understandings of how demolition operates and the 'blueprints' through which alternatives are imagined and realised, the project opens pathways beyond demolition-led urbanism, exploring how urban development could be more just in the eyes of communities facing demolition.
Objective
Large-scale demolition, historically tied to the urbanism of tabula rasa, has resurged as a pervasive tool of urban development. While gentrification has targeted locations without necessarily destroying the built environment, large-scale demolitions threaten entire urban districts across the Global North and South. Framed by governments and corporate actors as essential for regeneration, they displace communities on an unprecedented scale.
Blueprints of Change (BLUEPRINTS) is a comparative and ethnographic exploration of large-scale demolition and the search for urban alternatives communities have mounted in response. BLUEPRINTS’ research is both analytical and generative. Its goal is not merely to critique urban development but to explore how it could be otherwise, in ways communities facing demolition consider just.
BLUEPRINTS focuses on Birmingham (UK), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), and Jakarta (Indonesia)—a secondary city, a primary city, and a megacity, respectively. First, it conducts a comparative analysis of how configurations of land tenure, state-citizen relationships, and capital investment shape demolition processes, transforming understandings of why large-scale demolition has resurfaced as a dominant strategy of urban development. Second, it ethnographically examines communities’ search for urban alternatives as sites of knowledge production. Residents’ struggles expose contradictions in demolition-driven development and propose visions of community, place and collaboration foundational for realising just urban futures. Third, BLUEPRINTS engages with ongoing quests for urban alternatives to co-produce urban counterproposals that sustain immediate struggles and shape blueprints for longer-term transformations.
By positioning research as a tool for documenting the realities of large-scale demolitions and a method for effecting change, BLUEPRINTS makes the realisation of urban alternatives a subject of anthropological theorisation, research and practice.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
B15 2TT Birmingham
United Kingdom
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