Rescue Geography
Exploring Eastside with mobile technologies
Welcome to the Rescue Geography project
We're based at the Universities of Birmingham and Manchester and are currently working on a research project which seeks to capture people's understandings of the Digbeth & Deritend ('Eastside') district of Birmingham before it's redeveloped. The idea is to produce something a bit like rescue archaeology, where people go in and record the remains of a landscape before they're destroyed by a major development, except in our case we're recording people's recollections, rather than traces of buildings.
Because we're geographers, we're really interested in how being in a particular place affects the way people think about it, so instead of just collecting people's stories whilst sitting in a cafe somewhere, we're asking people to give us guided tours of the area, recording what they say and - using sat nav technology - where they say it.
This project is funded by the fine folk of the Economic & Social Research Council