Back to the Future: why we need a return to future thinking post-pandemic

This is the third in Morvern Cunningham's series of Edinburgh pamphlets, following You'll Have Had Your City? (2020) and Edinburgh Reimagined (2021) which explore preferable futures for the city's cultural sector.

Here, Cunningham reasserts the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic for Edinburgh's cultural sector as a means of encouraging the city to work collectively to "go back to future thinking".

Resisting a return to pre-pandemic 'business as usual', the pamphlet makes a case for Edinburgh's cultural leadership to challenge existing power structures and address inequities in access to culture through finding new ways to look forwards. By investing in and caring for people and communities; preserving digital and hybrid programmes; and making time for evaluation and reflection, Cunningham asserts, hopeful futures for an equitable and sustainable cultural sector are possible.

Morvern Cunningham is a freelance creative based in Leith, Edinburgh. They are Creative Lead on the Culture Collective Programme Lead team and co-lead on the Creative Community Hubs project.

This publication was supported by Creative Informatics, which is part of the UK-wide Creative Industries Clusters Programme