Students from Agustina Martire’s StreetSpace studio at QUB collaborated with PPR to address Northern Ireland’s housing crisis. In 2024–25, they designed elements of a proposed housing development at Mackie’s as part of the Take Back the City campaign.

With this amazing group of people, every minute is filled with inspiration and excitement from sharing and discussing new ideas. Surrounded by beautiful flowers and hills of Villa de Leyva, we worked on our cross-comparative papers and "Other Voices" book, a repository of nuanced stories of change.

Be part of a global exchange shaping more equitable and sustainable cities — and the stories we tell about them! Learn more about the Change Stories Fellows program at the webinar on Wednesday, October 22nd, at 10-11am PT / 1-2pm ET. Register for the webinar at changestories.be.uw.edu/fellows/

Be part of a global exchange shaping more equitable and sustainable cities — and the stories we tell about them! Applications are now open for the Change Stories Fellows program, a learning and knowledge exchange program that includes U.S.-based leaders and changemakers in equity and sustainability.

Bogotá’s public care system addresses the needs of unpaid caregivers, mostly women, and prioritizes investments in the city’s most deprived and peripheral neighborhoods.

Belo Horizonte, Brazil, is a global leader in food sovereignty and security policies. We created an illustrated guide to re-examine the story of how Belo Horizonte developed these policies and programs, celebrate their successes, and expose their unresolved flaws.

Cities have dominant stories about their history, identity, and change. These stories circulate via many channels such as the news, official documents, and political speeches. Counter-narratives oftentimes tell a different story about the city and its change, including who has been left out and why.

Exhibition "The State of Belfast", currently in the Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, is a multi-faceted project drawing connections between art practice and housing rights activism through an extensive public programme of talks, tours, and screenings.

Join us for a walking tour of Cathedral Quarter - Belfast where we will be discussing the area’s recent decline and future potential! 14 Aug 2025 Time: 5pm - 6.30pm Free, but Booking Required: themaclive.com/event/saving...

Maria Brás Solidarity Kitchen remains a powerful example of how alliances between rural and urban social movements can confront hunger through solidarity.

Aarathi Prasad, one of the Change Stories’ advisory group members, is involved in the Plastic Waste Innovation Hub, a team of researchers, designers, and engineers exploring issues of plastic waste while recognizing that there are no simple solutions as plastic is intricately embedded in our lives.

Powerful days with the Women’s Advisory Council in Bogotá 💜 We co-create political advocacy projects through a leadership course built by and for women.

“Stories about urban change are often simplified, giving credit to a single mayor or policy, which is not usually the full story,” says Sergio Montero, Change Stories collaborator and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. @sergemont.bsky.social

Through Change Stories, we are establishing new types of relationships between academic and community-based partners, centering joy and respect for diverse knowledge in our work. Learn more about the Change Stories project in the full video on changestories.be.uw.edu

How does storytelling relate to urban change? And why is important to understand the whole story? Watch the full video on the Change Stories website: changestories.be.uw.edu #Changestories #Storytelling #Storytellingforimpact

Meitheal is the Irish word for a work team and denotes the co-operative labour system in Ireland where groups of neighbours help each other in turn with farming work, such as harvesting crops. To the heart of the concept is community unity through cooperative work and mutually reciprocal support.

In October, we gathered for a powerful Collective Memory event with the Women’s Advisory Council of Bogotá. It underscored the crucial role of women’s voices in shaping the District’s Public Policy on Women and Gender Equality and honored those who have strengthened the Council since 2007.

In the centre of Belfast, a group of artists and activists have come together to turn an abandoned space into a community garden. They have set an open fire for people to sit together and explore what it means to feed themselves in the face of the climate crisis.

Positioning care at the forefront of the public agenda in Bogotá has been a collective effort from various spheres. Women’s movements, policymakers, state bureaucrats, and economists have worked together to ensure that feminism underpins public policy and women fully and equally exercise citizenship

Vila Pinho's urban community garden in Belo Horizonte is the oldest Production Unit in the city with more than 20 years of existence. It's a great inspiration for contextual urban changes in the field of food security, but is now facing a huge challenge to keep existing and thriving.

Take Back the City is a coalition of architects, community organizers, and academics that formed to develop sustainable solutions to Belfast’s housing crisis, such as a vision of a high-quality, non-sectarian, zero-carbon development at Mackie's, a large ex-industrial site in West Belfast.

"We are all natural storytellers, I think that it's not something we have to learn.” Read more about the power of storytelling and oral tradition as a fount of community knowledge in the inspiring interview with Aarathi Prasad taken by Omar Rincón at cerosetenta.uniandes.edu.co/aarathi-pras...

Tracing Policy and Activism: Through detailed analysis, we examine the intersection of grassroots activism and institutional policy in Bogotá, focusing on the contributions and struggles of the Women’s Advisory Council #bogotá #consejoconsultivo #politicalparticipation #feministurbanism

Restaurantes Populares are one of the main initiatives that are part of Belo Horizonte's Food Security Policies. These public facilities have a very important role in addressing food insecurity, especially for the populations in high vulnerability, and can be a huge inspiration for other cities.

Graphic anthropology is such a fantastic storytelling and creative research tool for capturing and sharing diverse narratives of urban change and interpretations of the city. Change Stories had an opportunity to conduct research in Belfast by the side of Mitch Miller, an inventor of dialectograms.

Belo Horizonte is one of the three case study cities in the Change Stories Project. The case study of this Brazilian city focuses on the trajectories of food and nutritional security promotion. #changestories #belohorizonte #foodsecurity #publicpolicy #governance #globalsouth

Our Belfast-based community partners @nooneleftbehind_ppr have launched the community consultation on their plans for 13 hectares of vacant public land that is the area of most acute housing need in the city. You can see the plans, and leave your comments here: takebackthecity.ie

Our first paper is out! Read about how decolonial and storytelling methods can show the complexities behind stories of urban transformation and about the role of marginalized populations in creating long-term change. wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/9-2...

Bogotá is one of the places where thousands of narratives about urban change are exposed and celebrated through the multiplicity of publicly available channels – street art, series of free books “Bogotá contada” written by local writers, a symphony of conversations during Ciclovía, and many more.

Almost a year ago, Change Stories' researchers, community-based organizers, and advisory group members convened for a week in Bogotá, Colombia, to exchange knowledge and co-develop our research approach.

What a powerful experience visiting Manzana del Cuidado in Ciudad de Bolívar, Bogotá, offering for free so many amazing services to women and men in the neighborhood and promoting new ways of solidarity and self-esteem that way. #BlocksOfCare #Bogotá #ChangeStories

"Bogotá (and Colombia in general) has been a laboratory of experimental policies, disruptions, and attempts at changing that could be useful examples for other places," says a sociologist and Change Stories collaborator, María José Álvarez-Rivadulla.

More about Change Stories in Bogotá at changestories.be.uw.edu/cities/bogota/

More about Change Stories in Belo Horizonte at changestories.be.uw.edu/cities/belo-...

More about Change Stories in Belfast at changestories.be.uw.edu/cities/belfa...

Change Stories is an international research partnership that aims to spark dialogue and learning through storytelling about sustainable urban development. More information about the Change Stories project can be found at changestories.be.uw.edu