Alternative Futures: Who Decides? A story of lived experiences told through art

This mini-book tells the story of the ‘The Ripple – Past, Present, Future’ Project, conducted as a research partnership between the Ripple Project, a community organisation in the Restalrig, Lochend and Craigentinny areas in Northeast Edinburgh, and the Binks Hub (University of Edinburgh) in 2023-24. The project used community art-making, creative and curational methods and practices to co-research local people’s experiences and understandings of their community, and express their hopes, dreams and demands for the future. In this mini-book we focus on the four artworks produced through the project and the series of exhibitions we curated to display them. We discuss how these exhibitions were curated to carry the wisdom of the community to wider audiences, and how this wisdom gives rise to a series of participatory democracy demands made of policymakers. The policy-focused aims of the project are summarised here, but are expanded upon in greater detail in our companion publication Alternative Futures: Who Decides? – The respectful inclusion of community voices in decision-making.