Using transition design to utilise the knowledge of living heritage provides cost-effective opportunities to reach sustainability targets. If only we can learn to communicate it effectively.
Communication is the lynchpin to change. Fail to express what we need people to know – and do – in a way that connects and provokes them to act, and we can wave sustainability goals goodbye.
Getting the message right isn’t easy, which is why the sustainability movement needs people like Bruna Souza, a visual culture researcher and expert at disseminating complex information in ways that engage a mass audience.
Bruna is one of the co-authors of From Tradition to Transition, an outcome of the Fruitful Synergies Erasmus+ research project. The project itself investigated the reasons why young people from the Flanders region of Belgium are losing touch with their fruit-growing heritage; it also made attempts to rekindle their interest. The handbook is a record of the methodology they developed. As is typical of research, the team needed help interpreting this into language suitable for a general audience. “The great barrier in academia is the intellectual wording,” our CityChanger tells us. “If you cannot explain it to your grandma, it’s not a good translation.”
Cross-Cultural Communication
Translation is a subject firmly on Bruna’s radar. She says that her native country of Brazil “produces a lot of strong work and writing on sustainability topics”, about which she is clearly passionate. The problem is that this “knowledge written in Portuguese rarely reaches the same visibility or legitimacy internationally” as that in English. Therefore, it fails to reach a wider audience where it can have most impact. “We often end up having to translate our ideas into English for them to circulate, be validated, and be taken seriously beyond our local context,” she explains.
Just look at LinkedIn or do a search on the internet: most reports, research, and discussions are Anglo-centric.
It appears to be a relic of colonialism, the same historical imprint that saw Bruna’s school history lessons adopt western- or European-dominated narratives. It is not truly representative of many people’s experiences of the world. “A majority of Brazil is based on African heritage,” she informs us, but this rarely featured. Alongside Portuguese and Italian heritage, Bruna herself has Indigenous roots – also largely ignored in the curriculum.
To bridge the information gap, she makes efforts to post about important sustainability matters in Portuguese. Intended to encourage diverse conversation, Bruna admits that she gets the most joy from interactions in her mother tongue.
When I post in Portuguese, it’s to reach the bubble that I want to be part of.
There’s no denying, though, that her posts in English gain much more reach, and she appreciates that too. This is actually how CityChangers.org came to know of Bruna’s work; her announcement of the From Tradition to Transition playbook garnered a lot of traction. “To me, that response highlighted a real interest – and perhaps even a methodological gap – in this area,” she says.
Design for Change
That methodology was developed by several experts from the Fruitful Synergies project’s various research partners: POMKO, Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis, DOON U.A., and two schools: Fruit Tech Campus and PTI Kortrijk. Joos van Cauwenberghe from Change of Course, for example, conceived the design thinking framework outlined in the book.
It was developed in line with the project’s work to address the decline of fruit-growing knowledge in Flanders – their “living heritage”. Bruna was brought on board to help write it in such a way that localities anywhere could replicate their processes to address the challenges they face. Design thinking Is based on truly understanding the challenge at hand. So that’s where Fruitful Synergies started.
Flanders’ Living Heritage: A Case Study
For centuries the long tradition of growing fruit in Flanders’s plantations has sustained a thriving economy and kept bellies fed. Techniques for how local communities plant, tend, pair, and prune the trees – mainly apples and pears – has changed very little over time. Fruit science, as it’s known, has been retained largely by the oral tradition: youngsters would join their elders in the orchards, observing their ways, and learning fruit-growing techniques by doing.
But today this is under threat. Globalisation has given contemporary society easy access to other cultures, allowing us to pick and choose elements that we like, diluting young people’s connection with local customs. Signs of this are clear in Flanders to the extent that even the region’s horticultural collages have stopped teaching traditional methods.
This could be passed off as an inevitable side-effect of a shrinking, more inclusive planet. Plenty argue that it’s still important not to lose the old customs though.
Bridging the Gap
Fruitful Synergies worked to reconnect young people in Flanders with their living heritage by creating youth ambassadors and, as the project’s website states, working with teachers to design “new learning experiences together to reintegrate this knowledge and craftsmanship into the horticultural school curriculum”.
“They noticed that this knowledge was being lost, so they tried to do something about it,” says Bruna of the Fruitful Synergies team, which she joined at a later stage.
It wasn’t straightforward. Some senior community members – the last living gatekeepers to traditional fruit growing techniques – viewed the project as an intrusion on their way of life.
Building trust was essential. Encouraging them to pass on the knowledge as they had in the past relied on openly communicating the purpose: to help preserve their way of life. With this established, the barriers came down.
Modern Relevance of Living Heritage
From there on in, the researchers discovered that – in fruit science – people in Flanders inherit an intimate knowledge of local environmental conditions, and how to respond to them. They comprehensively understand how fruit trees are affected by temperature, moisture levels, soil structures, hungry insects, and the coming and going of the seasons. Because of their living heritage, these communities are able to select the most suitable trees for soil types and changing weather conditions, hinting at a resilient future.
“It was a beautiful approach, something that I saw could be a bridge in this gap between heritage and the modern world and can actually tackle climate change challenges.”
Compared to modern intensive farming methods, it is no great leap of the imagination to see how. For example, a deep understanding of native vegetation opens up possibilities to improve biodiversity, provide shade to cool urban heat islands, mitigate flooding, support food security, and prop up an active green job sector even as the environment around us becomes more unpredictable.
Introducing Living Heritage
This is a specific example, but living heritage is everywhere. With the right guidance – like the handbook – decision-makers can leverage this to tap into cost-effective and easily implementable opportunities to ease the pressures on their doorstep, wherever they are.
Bruna explains that living heritage is unique to a place. It can consist of knowledge, culture, beliefs, behaviour, or practices. We can identify it as that which is passed down from generation to generation and connects people under a shared identity, whether at the scale of a small village, a bustling city, or an entire region.
Although it may be hundreds of years old, living heritage adapts for contemporary conditions, retaining simultaneously its relevance and its roots in tradition – hence aligning with modern sustainability goals.
Heritage is living because it’s always adapting, is always being transformed within the generational context.
People often form an emotional attachment to their living heritage, helping to preserve it. For example, fruit-growing is so deeply ingrained in the cultural fabric of Flanders’ communities that seniors speak of how the sight of a particular type of apple can trigger fond memories. (Elsewhere, strawberries get a similar reaction.)
That reaction could just as easily come in the form of a traditional song or a historic festival. Personally, Bruna is transported back to a happy childhood by the smells and tastes of family recipes. “That’s knowledge embedded in years of practicing and making the same thing and learning from our mothers.”
Transition Design
Using the Flanders case as an example, Bruna kindly takes us through the basics of the handbook’s methodology, which walks readers through how to incorporate living heritage in macro-level changes in the pursuit of sustainability goals. It is presented in four straightforward steps – “the fours Ss”:
S1: Scan
First, identify the problem and possible routes to solve them.
“You literally scan your surroundings” to see what it is that’s “bothering you,” Bruna says. It could be too much concrete causing Urban Heat Islands, for example. “Then scan the heritage practices” that may present a solution. And remember, this is a joint effort: “Talk to people. If you don’t find it in your community, scope larger,” Bruna adds.
S2: Select
Phase two is all about prioritising the challenges, to target those where your knowledge can have most impact. Select the relevant practices from living heritage that you discovered in the first stage, which align with the identified problems. In the case of excess heat, it could be that people with horticultural knowledge can help grow nice shady trees, for example.
S3: Shape
Next is to shape the knowhow selected to best tackle the problem. This recognises what the techniques embedded in heritage can achieve, although acknowledges that they may need to adapt, e.g. for new weather conditions, technology, urban typography, etc.
S4: Support
Last is to run pilots for solutions you’ve narrowed it down to, with the aim of scaling up.
Remember, this is a community effort. Get permission from the authorities. Recruit volunteers. Build the trust with the community, which we already know is so important. “Share the idea,” Bruna says, “and make it happen.”
Living Heritage in the Digital Age
Bruna’s work and interests appear varied but, she explains, it is all connected by a theme of “how knowledge is created, preserved, shared, and represented”.
Not that she set out to be a communications specialist. Bruna’s original pursuit was international relations. “My background is specifically focused on military and conflict strategies because I like to understand why humans choose to do what they do.”
Our CityChanger pivoted toward art history and heritage studies while studying in Belgium in 2022, during which she became “fascinated by how art, heritage, and conflict all reveal something fundamental about human expression”. She says that they can all “tell us a great deal about how people make meaning, communicate, and shape the world around them”.
Now she’s part of it, helping preserve the stories and knowledge of the past for the benefit of today and tomorrow.
New Technology, New Threat
However, we have to ensure that living heritage is not corrupted by exposure to false narratives. In a digital age, that can be tricky.
Each of us already feels the effect of a powerful new tool: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is touching multiple parts of our lives, whether we even know or want it. It’s there, for example, summarising internet searches, aiding medical research, creating new sustainable materials and, via Digital Twins, making urban planning more efficient.
In its current capacity, AI is unlikely a worthy substitute for humans’ role in passing on living heritage. For one, it cannot share the emotional attachments that come from the relationships cemented by a lifetime in the bosom of a family, community, or culture.
But sometimes we trade quality for convenience – an issue MIT lecturer Micah Nathan had to address with students who cut corners in their creative writing class. His lesson for them was a reminder that – like the fours Ss – often it’s the process that is important. And – like Bruna’s Europe-centric childhood history lessons – overlooking that can be dangerously misleading.
Untold Stories
Bruna now lives in Portugal, where she is equally keen to talk about sustainability in her native language. But she is concerned about the influence AI, if left unchecked, could have on the impression younger generations get of the world.
As an experiment, she once asked a generative AI tool to produce an image of a standard classroom; it returned a white male teacher and mostly white male students.
The reason for the strong bias, our CityChanger points out, is “because AI replicates what is online”. And not just online, but in data overall, as Caroline Criado Perez explains in the book Invisible Women: white and male has long been treated as the human default.
With AI now the go-to resource for students, the danger is that children everywhere, or all cultures, will adopt this homogenous view of the world. There’s a chance it will contribute to them losing touch with their own living heritage, much as globalisation already has in Flanders. “I think nowadays we lose track of who we are,” our CityChanger poses. “In the end, you don’t understand yourself anymore. You don’t understand your place in the world, and that causes a lot of anxiety.”
Which is why Bruna founded Untold Stories.
Delivered in collaboration with four educational institutions from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Greece, this Erasmus+ project tests ways to use digital storytelling to produce teaching materials and run cross-curricular projects that support ethical use of AI in classrooms.
They use AI specifically to tell historic stories from multiple accounts. Moving away from the “history as told by the victors” narrative, they get three-dimensional interpretations, making lessons fun, interactive, more relatable, and theoretically closer to the truth.
Critical Intelligence
This is so much more than a history lesson. Bruna tells us that Untold Stories recognises how AI “increases human capability and creativity” and therefore young people should not be denied access to it if used as a tool to support learning appropriately.
In Untold Stories, students are taught how to dredge the truth from disinformation by approaching material “in a way that makes the youth question the sources and be critical about everything they are reading”. In the age of disinformation, this is a life skill that we could all make use of.
It’s nice just to teach them to have this critical thinking, this humility, this reflectiveness in the age of AI.
Equipping young people with critical thinking can protect them from falsehoods – in printed and social media too – while simultaneously enabling them to engage with more information than any generation has previously had access to.
When the Ancient Meets the Futuristic
In terms of living heritage, it’s very possible that synthesising ancestral voices could help communities retain their emotional connection. AI could very well become an ally in cultural preservation.
It is also increasingly adept at translating between the world’s most spoken languages. One useful purpose of this is that is helps to narrow the gaps in information that fuel Bruna’s fears for sustainability. At the click of a button, a report can be changed into the language of your choosing, giving almost anyone access to the details it contains.
That doesn’t mean that it would be interpreted into accessible terms, of course – it may translate from academic speak in one language to equally convoluted terms in another. But we cannot really wait for AI to catch up. As time ticks by, as climate change accelerates, and as we fail to do enough to mitigate it, the historic knowledge we have as society – and applying it – becomes ever more crucial. People with the kind of skills and passion that Bruna possesses still need to step in at times to break it down for us.
“Sometimes the solution is already there, and we just have to look back a little bit deeper with a different perspective.”