In secular yet multi-faith Glasgow, this project explores how a soft and safe interfaith initiative can be created to improve understanding of faiths and build a sense of belonging within urban culture. Through research and co-creation with community partners, Interfaith Glasgow and Interfaith Scotland, it seeks to create softer, safer ways of talking about difference, moving beyond passive tolerance toward more meaningful connection.

The project highlights the exploration of cultural diversity through the lenses of faith, inviting reflection on how design can hold space for curiosity, empathy, and coexistence across beliefs.

The study identifies Glasgow’s faith tensions in three layers: historical wounds of sectarianism, the trend of secularisation, and the potential of religious diversity. Within this context, interfaith dialogue emerges as a response, a respectful exchange between people of different or no faith. Fieldwork showed that many approach such dialogue with attitudes both cautious and curious. This is both a challenge and an opportunity, highlighting the role of interfaith & cultural institutions in fostering understanding.

The Ecosystem Map revealed Glasgow’s faith landscape in detail, identifying key actors and the relational networks they inhabit. Different groups connect to faith in different ways: secular participants through cultural spaces, and faith communities through interfaith institutions and local congregations supported by IFG and IFS. In practice, the collaboration between IFG and the St Mungo Museum highlights a key insight—a bridge linking different audiences.

Building on these, the response is “Faithscape: A Citywalk Route Exploration“, an interfaith co-creation project that brings people from different backgrounds into dialogue without imposing religious teaching. Designed as both a route and a framework for encounters, Faithscape uses participatory workshops to co-create stories, supported by IFG and St Mungo Museum.

In conclusion, it is a proposal that combines:

• Process value in interfaith dialogue,
• Tangible outputs in the form of a visual system and route map,
• Real-world embedding through collaboration with the city’s anniversary programme.

Through interfaith co-creation, city landmarks shift from isolated sites into shared memories; and people from different backgrounds begin to see each other’s stories mapped onto the same city.
Finally, bridging belief and belonging.