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Closing the Global Heritage Deficit

Part 2 Project 2022
Matthew Graham
Queen's University Belfast | UK
Closing the Global Heritage Deficit, we are preserving less today than ever before, is a critique of our inability to take full advantage of the existing built environment, and our unwillingness to ensure that what we build is resilient and enduring.

Accelerating global urbanisation threatens what we attempt to preserve through bodies such as UNESCO, and is occurring parallel to static heritage generation at regional and global levels. These trends are only worsened by loss of built heritage within past and present conflict zones from Belfast to Mariupol.

This design research thesis frames a proposal that equalises the heritage deficit, analysing global trends to propose recapturing latent and lost heritage in Belfast’s Falls Shankill interface area, facilitating reunification of two districts through introducing resilient, shared, integrated space and architectural form. The target to remove all Peacelines by the end of 2022, set out by Stormont’s ‘Building a United Community Strategy’ (2013) is significantly expedited. In the current context of political silence, it is vital that we develop voice and architectural form for sustainable and integrated communities. This proposal addresses peace building, multiple UN Sustainable Development goals, the decarbonisation of architecture and articulates sustainable methods to Close the Global Heritage Deficit.

Matthew Graham

Tutor(s)
Laura Coucill
Tom Jefferies
2022
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