Speak Up! Getting residents voices heard in times of urban change

Early this month a team from the UCL Citizen Science Academy, run by the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP), took part in Speak Up! an event exploring how residents and housing campaigners in Manchester and London are getting their voices heard through citizen science and participatory theatre.   

Exploring creative ways to understand whose voices are heard in processes of urban change, the event combined a discussion around research in London with the first public reading of an in-progress script by playwright Nathaniel McBride about Manchester’s cladding crisis, an on-going collaboration with Dr Connie Smith.  

Dr Saffron Woodcraft, who leads the research on prosperity in the UK at the IGP, Hannah Sender from the UCL Department of Geography, and citizen social scientists Lorraine Owusu, Coco John Baptiste and Paula Lewis, talked about their research exploring regeneration, change, exclusion, and community voices in east London and North Kensington. 

Speak Up! was part of People Fest, a public festival of anthropology hosted by Manchester University and the Association for Social Anthropologists.  It is one of a series of public events the team at the UCL Citizen Science Academy are involved in as part of the IGP’s 10th Anniversary celebrations in 2024.