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Creating a vibrant and stimulating environment is an ongoing challenge for education systems. If the learning environments are to also reflect the culture and heritage of the pupils and the broader community of which they are a part, such challenges appear to be even greater. This calls for a reconfiguring of the relationship between space, culture, place and learning, as well as the role and meaning of culture, creativity and arts as sustainable development paradigms. Indeed, there is a significant intertwining between space, culture, place and learning that has been part of a broad interest in the last few decades with cultural authenticity and representation and how this might facilitate communal and societal development, especially among Indigenous communities. We draw on projects by UNESCO Observatory to provide a snapshot of the directions taken in terms of designing and developing spaces and places that intersect with notions of culture and identity across a number of communities in order to highlight the potentialities as well as the tensions between cultural authenticity and modernity.