Wednesday, 27 March 2024
15.00-16.00 GMT – Zoom Webinar (Register via Eventbrite here)
Building resilience: community empowerment through adaptive reuse
Communities across Scotland are increasingly taking ownership of buildings and transforming them through adaptive reuse. This talk addresses this growing trend and examines how such grassroots projects of reuse can act as engines of resilience within communities. Through case studies from across Scotland focused on the adaptive reuse of former churches, I will explore how the complex social and material processes involved help foster resilient and empowered communities. This will bring together discussions of community and heritage with an anthropological attentiveness to the everyday experiences of the people involved to better understand how these traits develop and are manifested in different communities. In doing so, this talk will present a framework for understanding the profound impact and transformative potential of this phenomenon in contemporary Scottish society.
Donation box in Ullapool business with a flyer about the community buyout of Lochbroom Parish Church, 2018.
Molly Miller
Molly Miller completed a PhD in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh in 2023. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the relationship between communities and their built environment, with particular interest in negotiations of heritage and identity as ongoing lived experiences. In addition to advising heritage groups on community ownership of former churches, she has presented at the Centre for Parish Church Studies and on an international stage at the virtual 2021 Herrenhausen Symposium.
