UNIFORM NOVEMBER

Articles

​

The founder of UNIFORM NOVEMBER, Frazer Macdonald Hay specialises in place informed peacebuilding.

He has spent years assessing and improving confrontational conditions in Iraq, South East Asia, Europe and the UK.

Frazer has worked with clients such as the UN in Iraq addressing Housing Land and Property (HLP) issues (Report) and has recently completed a

contract funded by the Japanese Government and facilitated by IOM, to conduct field assessment, develop programming and provide training for IOM staff on appropriate memorialization initiatives that support trauma recovery, open dialogue about past events, and promote social cohesion in areas that have experienced conflict, grave human rights abuses and displacement (report).

Currently, Frazer is overseeing the design and construction of a local urban park project in Mosul’s urban West (Old Town). The project is a collaboration between The Halo Trust, UNMAS and Al-Ghad and aims to address ‘Explosive Hazard Risk Mitigation and Risk Education to change the behaviour of the affected population affected by Explosive Hazards in Mosul Old City'.

Frazer is also a member of a research team developing a co-created smart-city solution for managed adaptation and monitoring of climate change related risk in Mexico City. This is an ESRC project led by Edinburgh University and the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico 

Frazer's  qualifications  are a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies from St Andrews University, a Masters in Architectural Conservation from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland where he has returned to read  for a PhD at the School of Politics and International Relations. Frazer is a member of The Scottish Parliament: CROSS PARTY GROUP on ARCHITECTURE and the BUILT ENVIRONMENT (CPG) and is involved in developing socio-economic projects that centre around the re-use of buildings in the UK.

​

​

       UNIFORM NOVEMBER is a facility that helps:

​

• Design peace-building interventions using the built environment as a key component 

• Explain how the built environment has a role in peace-building and social cohesion

• Explain how buildings might be perceived as ex-combatants

• Offer strategies of collaboration and co-creating between stakeholders whilst helping to identify new actors in a peacebuilding or social impact project

• Identify and map the everyday buildings that have social importance or cultural significance - developing ‘fabrics of place’ which are important locally and within a wider context of nation-building and social cohesion - a fabric of places that recognise and acknowledge the past.

• Map social dynamics and identifying areas of potential contention

• Explore a narrative that purposely avoids blame or the positioning of 'victim versus perpetrator' rather focusing on the context in which violence surfaced and how to avoid it in the future.

• Explore the notion of community and explain the potential of networked people

​

Our UNIFORM NOVEMBER blog below is a knowledge transfer feed aimed at developing collaboration, dialogue and awareness...  

““whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place: we are immersed in it and could not do without it. To be at all - to exist in any way – is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place”.

"No one therefor  can conceive anything, but they must conceive it in some place”.