Research / Staff
l.mackenzie@ed.ac.uk
anais.chanon@ed.ac.uk
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The Coastal Communities Research Network is led by Lisa Mackenzie and Anaïs Chanon at the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The Network has developed with the intention of addressing theory to practice and institution to community relationships in anticipating, communicating and responding to the challenges of coastal change in the climate emergency.
The Network will provide a knowledge base to challenge current forms of representing the regional coastal scale asserting that existing methods do not hold significance and value for local people by failing to talk to the dynamic and experiential nature of the landscape. The Network seeks to support positive cycles of knowledge formation and exchange and attend to the gap that exists between research and practice in addressing costal landscape change.
With its fundamentally integrated approach to territorial and multi-scalar thinking, landscape architecture is strategically placed to contribute to meeting the challenges of the impending socio-ecological transition. The intrinsically speculative, prospective and propositional way of working inherent to design exploration can be harnessed to open up dialogues across disciplines. Research undertaken seeks to draw out the often invisible socio-cultural dimensions of coastal communities through the development of new visual methodologies.
In the Cromarty Firth (images below) our fieldwork is currently exploring the unique juxtapositions of oil infrastructure, agriculture and sites of wildlife conservation that contribute to the identity of the landscape.
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Photograph by Lisa Mackenzie, Anaïs Chanon
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Location sketch, Cromarty Firth Basin.
Lisa Mackenzie
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Photograph by Lisa Mackenzie, Anaïs Chanon