As part of our ongoing relationship with Edinburgh World Heritage, we designed and developed a brand new microsite to showcase their latest exhibition, ‘Heritage for People’. The website shows how five of Europe’s World Heritage Cities are tackling common challenges including population growth, seasonal tourism and ageing civil infrastructure.
Edinburgh World Heritage tasked us to design and build a website to communicate what they have learned from years of urban management and conservation in Bordeaux, Edinburgh, Florence, Porto, and Santiago de Compostela. Central to our approach was to find a way to humanise the issues shared by each World Heritage City. To do this, we collected data from Atlas World Heritage to identify the critical obstacles before consulting with experts to see how each location had responded. In doing this, we identified five crucial areas of overlap: urban fabric, agriculture and forestry, economic activity, leisure spaces and flow spaces. These learnings were then visually compared and contrasted to determine areas of growth and development, revealing potential solutions that towns and cities can adopt elsewhere.
As part of the creative process, we agreed that the website should be visually engaging, using location imagery and infographics to shine a light on each location’s main problems. Every City page feels unique and uses people-centred visuals to show its extraordinary growth and progression, with five key areas to explore.
As part of the visual system, we used fantastic local photographers to capture and showcase the things that make their city unique. Some of this photographic work includes Filipo Brito capturing the Porto Cidade; X at the Firenze Patrimonio Mondiale, Florence; Jeremy Buchholtz at the Fernand Lafargue Square, Bordeaux; and local Edinburgh craftspeople by Kevin McLean.
