Blueprints of Change: large-scale demolitions and the search for urban alternatives

Objective

Large-scale demolition, historically tied to the urbanism of tabula rasa, has resurged as a pervasive tool of urban development. While gentrification has targeted locations without necessarily destroying the built environment, large-scale demolitions threaten entire urban districts across the Global North and South. Framed by governments and corporate actors as essential for regeneration, they displace communities on an unprecedented scale. Blueprints of Change (BLUEPRINTS) is a comparative and ethnographic exploration of large-scale demolition and the search for urban alternatives communities have mounted in response. BLUEPRINTS’ research is both analytical and generative. Its goal is not merely to critique urban development but to explore how it could be otherwise, in ways communities facing demolition consider just. BLUEPRINTS focuses on Birmingham (UK), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), and Jakarta (Indonesia)—a secondary city, a primary city, and a megacity, respectively. First, it conducts a comparative analysis of how configurations of land tenure, state-citizen relationships, and capital investment shape demolition processes, transforming understandings of why large-scale demolition has resurfaced as a dominant strategy of urban development. Second, it ethnographically examines communities’ search for urban alternatives as sites of knowledge production. Residents’ struggles expose contradictions in demolition-driven development and propose visions of community, place and collaboration foundational for realising just urban futures. Third, BLUEPRINTS engages with ongoing quests for urban alternatives to co-produce urban counterproposals that sustain immediate struggles and shape blueprints for longer-term transformations. By positioning research as a tool for documenting the realities of large-scale demolitions and a method for effecting change, BLUEPRINTS makes the realisation of urban alternatives a subject of anthropological theorisation, research and practice.