Creating Edinburgh: The Interdisciplinary City – Course topic OERs

Creating Edinburgh: The Interdisciplinary City is an Edinburgh Futures Institute course led by Dr David Overend that sets out from the seminar room to explore the city of Edinburgh, on foot and online. It offers a unique opportunity to engage with the contemporary city as a site for new ideas, designs, and methods, by responding creatively to Edinburgh’s various sites and routes.
Focusing on processes of commerce and trade in the city of Edinburgh, Business Edinburgh explores different types of retail, from mass-produced, globalised high street brands to the many independent, ‘artisanal’ shops, which sell more artful and unique products and experiences.
Decolonising Edinburgh examines the colonial history that has shaped this city, exploring places that are connected to the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th to the 19th Century, and considering the legacy of oppression and subjugation in the urban environment.
Travel through time to explore the geological processes that have shaped the city over hundreds of millions of years. Deep Time Edinburgh explores the area around Salisbury Crags, which was previously explored by James Hutton in the eighteenth century, informing his influential theories of geology.
Designing Edinburgh explores different scales and fields of design which contribute to the physical places of the contemporary city – including infrastructure, planning, environmental urbanism, architecture, craft, products and graphics.
Exploring Edinburgh through a digital lens to see how virtual spaces are entangled with the physicality of Edinburgh and its communities. The digital is a complex and messy concept which could send us in all sorts of different directions. The specific focus of this resource is social media platforms and their role in creating Edinburgh.
This topic offers an encounter with a city created in numbers, algebra, symbols, and equations. Mathematical Edinburgh invites you to complete a series of mathematical problems in key locations around Edinburgh, while telling the story of influential theories and discoveries.
Exploring Pandemic Edinburgh this topic examines how Covid-19 is remaking urban space and transforming our norms of interacting, moving about, consuming, working and playing.
Performing Edinburgh explores different types of performance in the city and investigates how Edinburgh performs itself in various ways. This topic looks at artistic performances that take place within, or respond to, the urban environment; and also attends to the everyday performances that we are always involved in.
Sustainability has become a paradigm for how we should continue to live on our damaged planet. It offers a collection of ideas, methods and practices that can help to avoid continued inequality, climate crises, environmental degradation and social injustice. As we move into the future, a sustainable world is one with greater opportunity for peace and prosperity. This will require fundamental changes across multiple areas of contemporary urban life.
Cities are often imagined as places of human habitation, with ‘the wild’ positioned out there in the surrounding countryside, or further away in some imagined wilderness. But wildness is an integral part of the urban environment and there are myriad species sharing the city with us that we might pay greater attention to. This topic incorporates Lucie Pestiaux’s Lichen Walk OER.
Student Created OERs
Creating Edinburgh students are also encouraged to design an develop their own topics as open educational resources, which will be available to future cohorts. You can explore these student created OERs here: Creating Edinburgh: The Interdisciplinary City – Student created OERs.
All Creating Edinburgh resources are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise indicated.
Header image cropped from Edinburgh by Natalie Parham, free to use image on Unsplash.