Connecting Communities Town Centre Action Plan

good afternoon everyone uh welcome and thank you for giving your time here today to join this webinar uh to listen to our presenters to participate through asking questions and particularly to activate your own thoughts about the opportunities which this new fund uh offers you we're very appreciative of the fact uh that you've joined today with relatively short notice with uh quite tight deadlines uh so it's it's obviously a great opportunity for the city uh and for you to think about what we can do here my name is duncan booker i'm from glasgow city council it's my privilege today just to try to keep things roughly to time to introduce our speakers and in particular to support your participation through the questions you ask if you could use the question function on your panel which should be in the right hand top side of your screen throughout then we'll be able to use those questions maybe blend them if there are many questions on the same theme and if there are very specific ones uh direct them to the right person of the five speakers you're going to hear in a minute i guess that many of you will previously already have attended a webinar very much like this one from the council's consultation on its transport strategies uh and in many ways the link between that one or those ones and this one here today is the abiding interest in the city and our communities in place and people how to make high quality places for all and how we can connect them physically and socially and that's a key theme of course that goes across both today and some of the discussions many of you know doubt will already be involved in around connectivity people and place this one in particular is linked to the glasgow town center action plan you're going to hear about a new grant fund called the animating spaces fund and we've got five great speakers to come they represent a real wealth and diversity of experience uh from the street to the academy from policy making uh through to activism and the key issue we're looking to address through this webinar and the grant fund is how we can use our influence and our our experience on a neighborhood level to support our town centres across glasgow to flourish during this pandemic and as we hopefully emerge from it you'll all be aware of the spaces for people program as an example of an intervention introduced during the pandemic and as many of you know there's already a very lively debate on the merits of retaining that and if there's one particular thought or rather a dual set of thoughts which i'd like you to keep in your mind as you reflect upon what you hear and as you react to the opportunities that are presented today it's this we need to think about how we recover from the covert crisis at which we had not foreseen and then turn once more to address the climate emergency which we already knew to be looming over us and if we can think about that as we go through these presentations and the opportunities that perhaps you'll see emerging with the experience you already have which you bring to today's event then perhaps we'll be able to get some really fantastic ideas funded over the months to come i'm going to introduce our first speaker in just a second just to remind you once more if you use the question function which is on the right hand side of your screen they'll come straight to me and i'll be able to then offer those to the right speakers our first two speakers phil and brian are both going to have to leave after their presentations so i'm going to take q and a for each of them in turn so if you can direct questions to fill in the light of what he speaks and then on to brian i'll try to curate them for you put them to them and then our next three speakers you and anne and victoria i'll take all of them together one after another with their presentations and put your questions to them collectively or individually to the right person as we go along after that about an hour and a half gone i'll conclude offer some final comments and it'll be over to you to consider the opportunities presented by this new fund without further ado therefore i'm going to introduce our first speaker he's phil prentice from scotland's town's partnership he's got a wealth of experience to draw upon across the whole of scotland as a nation and within glasgow and it's over to you garfield for your presentation thank you thanks very much duncan and good afternoon everybody hey i'm going to start off by saying scotland as a nation of towns we've got two european scale cities in glasgow and edinburgh we've got two small ones in aberdeen dundee and we've got three pretend ones in sterling perth and inverness the point i'm trying to get to is more than two-thirds of our businesses and people reside in towns and even when you get down to the level of the city the town center basically the city is just a collection of town centres so you know you live in hay market in leith and denniston and shawlands basically that's your town center so we need to focus on times moving forward next slide please but because they are complex even though globally they are really important part of infrastructure the town's narrative isn't as well articulated it's much easier to look at glasgow and as a as a whole rather than the sum of its parts but when you get down to you know parts of the west end are very different to the north of glasgow to this to the south side to the east end so we need to get down to that level of times to understand them a lot better they are the largest scale for our community that's the sort of logic in terms of the urban space that you can understand but they're also the smaller scale for us urbanists in terms of trying to see that how they connect into the bigger picture next slide please so the scale of nations they are nodes of labor force distinct local production culture tourism scotland invented much of the modern world and many of those inventions came from our towns but when we moved out of our industrial phase we sort of left our times behind we hollowed them out everybody had to jump in the car to go to the city bang along comes covet and we're back stuck in our towns again but many of our towns are pretty beautiful in terms of the built environment the green space the philanthropic investments that have been made in the past so moving forward i think it's really critical that we look at how we nurture our towns how we tell their stories again on how the localism and the need to react post covert to recovery the need to react to climate as an even bigger emergency a you know that's that's the the focus moving forward so that's how we network these towns into a bigger picture but also looking at community-led inclusion new economy green climate-friendly etc next slide proves the government recognized how important times were and back in 2014 we published the independent review that looked at how we could reinvent this this piece how we could repopulate our time centers how we could use them as civic hubs we are very much moving away from retail domination on the high street the city center to create much more civic space on a range of broader uses so this was given us a framework to help us deliver in that next slide so there is existing policy in place this presentation that i'm giving you today is actually a subset of a presentation i give to the united nations world habitat they last fortnight ago so the world is looking at our policy around times because they can see globally that post coronavirus with climate towns are going to become really really critical and times within cities are all part of that next slide so it's interesting to see the policy that we already have looks at how we repopulate our town centers we cannot keep stretching the infrastructure for people to live in boxes and farmers fields in the middle of nowhere to travel 50 miles to go to europe to work we need to think of sustainability we need to think of building products for generation xyz we don't necessarily need to get a mortgage we need to think about building stuff for a parent's generation and we need to make sure that this is net zero and sustainable again inclusion is a big thing we need to make things accessible to people so why would you build a medical center in the middle of newark build it in the heart of your community put the assets that people need in to the heart of the community which normally is the high stream be a wee bit more proactive around our planning system think about how communities we can become empowered and more enterprising make sure that the whole local economy piece uh builds on all of the opportunity that we've got moving forward for example if we are going to repopulate the time center that's going to involve repurposing retail does europe mill and the house building industry want to do that probably not but there's an army of local supply chain that would the local small builders the family organizations the slater the joiner the electrician there's lots of stuff that we can do in there with green roofs rain water gardens green walls solar panels and roofs micro energy generation ev infrastructure to support the removal of liquid fuel cars etc and to build more resilience into our localities and some of that can be community owned but fundamentally a lot of that can be delivered by social enterprise and local businesses so digital is another thing we've relied very heavily on digital infrastructure through the pandemic but that's also shown a light on digital exclusion and the need for more and we need to be more ambitious around the internet of things and 5g and technology because it can be used to provide better healthcare solutions better education solutions and also economic opportunities next slide please so we had good policy good ideas scotland's science partnership were set up to be the disrupter to try and make some sense of the complexity of our town centers you have to you have to think about how complex they are you will have competing interests so you've got absentee pension ownerships you've got institutional investors big and small developers house builders house builders who might be social who might be private you might be cooperative you've got the energy piece digital culture tourism you know there's a lot there's a lot in that and sometimes the law of unintended consequence sets in where you fix one thing for somebody it doesn't work for somebody else so we have built over the last five years platform 25 000 members across scotland who are focused on trying to improve their luck to improve their time centers to improve the beating heart of their communities and there's been a lot of learning over that period of time a lot of proof through demonstration a lot of investments around tool kits we've got understanding scottish places so when you look at 486 towns across the country every town in scotland with a population of more than 1 000 people has been built into that data model so you can actually compare which times you're like we can't do it for the cities because the cities just don't fit into that model so glasgow is just shown as one entity but this is a again another world leading tool in terms of taking an evidential database to prove approach a time tool kit how to make our places more active attractive accessible everything that we have is online on the scotland's times platform and it's available for you guys to use um to give you some ideas but moving forward next slide please the covert pandemic has really shown a light on scotland as a society lots of people have stepped up to the plate they've gone the extra mile but it has shown there's a lot of inequity so we have taken a step back to look at what sort of scotland do we want post coronavirus we have my chairman of the minutes leading he's co-chairing a a policy group with cabinet secretary in campbell to look at a new action plan that builds upon all of the learning to date but also is ambitious for the future and builds in some of those things he talked about around community wealth about climate pushing these agendas harder so there's a massive opportunity at this point in time to do things a wee bit better come march whenever the lockdown set in we had to move very quickly so as a small agency we had to engage with government and with our clients across the country we issued the times sorry we issued the bids recovery fund in april we supported about 40 projects across scotland moving into july we issued the towns and bids resilience and recovery fund we supported 188 projects across scotland we're now moving into the times recovery bids recovery fund which will support another 40. in the middle of that we had the 18 million pounds capital boost the economic stimulus money to help with our town centres and finally we've got scotland loves local and this is the point that i want to leave you with today you can't fix the bigger things in the world that are worrying you but what you can do is fix the things that mean the most to you your family your local community your local high street so we have launched this national campaign as a call out to scotland's citizens to support their local communities that might be their local high street but it also is the vulnerable within their community this is a call for people to work collaboratively so this brand is just something to allow people to come together last week we announced the winners of the high street heroes award there were 1200 applicants across the country 32 regional winners and it really did show to the extent scotland's citizens stepped up to the plate and really went that extra mile to help the vulnerable to help those who were in need and the key learning from all of that was big government move fast local government moved fast but the real impact was where we had hyper local delivery infrastructure led by communities whether it was a business improvement district a town center partnership a charity a registered social landlord you know these were the delivery vehicles that made the difference once you get down to that level the time the community the neighborhood you need those local actors who have knowledge of all the people who have the war with all the help but also the knowledge of the people who needed the help and they were able to get those people helped as quickly as possible so it was really heartwarming we cannot lose those types of behaviors but it's also telling you why you should shop local you're building in resilience to local food supply and food security to supply chain you're reducing your carbon footprint you're keeping your local neighbor and a job so these are all the reasons that we want neighborhoods to lift this type of concept moving forward and to start thinking about how you support localism and climate and inclusion and community wealth and just the whole approach by glasgow have to say through the connecting communities has been quite heartening so today together if we act we will build back a better and stronger scotland if we take this localism approach we will do it faster so thanks for your time i'm happy to take some questions thanks very much bill really appreciate that and if for me especially uh a e-reflection of what you've just been saying we seem to so many years to have had a narrative of decline for our town centres across scotland and within glasgow and now perhaps we begin to see the opportunity to turn a corner to see their resurgence not just as part of kobe recovery but linked as you said at the end of your comments there especially with uh with a healthy healthier regard for the environment and the climate crisis in particular just to say to people phil has to leave immediately after this so i'm going to put questions to phil now we've had a few coming in i'm not going to put any specifics about the grant fund uh but they won't be forgot about don't worry because we'll leave those till ewen's presentation later but phil one of the key things that's come up i suppose in the questions which is a particularly distinct glaswegian perspective is about deprived areas uh those which we know sometimes bisected by by busy roads uh with communities least likely to have high levels of car ownership um and there's really a question there about how i suppose the question is should the most deprived areas in glasgow be prioritized in this i'm going to turn that a little bit on its head because i think that's a given and say how might we prioritize the most deprived areas in glasgow when we look to build back from the covert crisis yeah it's a very valid point duncan you know when i take a look global like nationally across scotland to see which places seem to be doing very well they they're they tend to be more middle class where there's a lot of human capacity there's a lot of business knowledge etc so you know if you're in somewhere like giffnik or pressed but you're fine but if you are in one of the more deprived communities you lack basically the time in your day because your life is usually about survival it's not through a lack of willingness it's just through a lack of capacity and resource so i'll point to a great example that's underway just now in glasgow possible park and north glasgow uh we have a community improvement district concept that's been evolving over the last 18 months or so it's been underpinned by north glasgow homes the social landlord but it also brings in all of the key stakeholders so the local community the various community groups tenants and residents community council it brings in the businesses big and small so you've got allied vehicles right down to the local hairdresser it brings in the police the nhs uh und on the stakeholder agencies like glasgow city council and uh you've got scottish canals down there at spears wharf you know scottish enterprise so that collaborative is about how we collectively deal with problems like baltimore road sarson street how do we reinvent them one of the key lessons with covet is that moving out of cohort not one sector is going to be able to stand alone this is a time to set aside fiefdoms to set aside the traditional approach to stop measuring stuff that's not worth measuring in terms of gvn gdp and start to measure things that are worthwhile which is health and well-being and climate so with the three sectors the social sector the public sector and the private sector having to come together this is the type of approach that we want to encourage so from the scottish government's perspective we've been putting in seed corn finance and we'll continue to do that to tease out how these how these delivery vehicles can be embedded longer term so there is not there's no place in scotland that's without hope and yes i do think there should be a degree of prioritization to target resources to those that have been left behind you know the east end got dalmarnock through the games west end's nice and leafy okay with pockets but south side again with pockets but also you're getting out to your gifts and clarkson's and so on so so north glasgow has you know it's time for north glasgow in these areas to be given a wee bit of extra help your apostles your spring burns and so on but there is there are plans in process it's how we learned enough to do this properly and to bring the communities with us and the telling point and all of that the one thing that i remember most because my father-in-law's from sarasota street and was really keen to get engaged was the small business owner who was listening to a presentation from glasgow city council about house building on how they were going to take hamilton hill and rock hill and turn it into this big housing investment zone and she turned around to me and said that means i'm going to have to move when i laughed i says no this is your place you're part of the dna you are part of glasgow you mean more to this place than someone building their house so go back to glasgow city council and tell them to think again and that confidence in that group has grown to the point now where they are starting to take ownership and feeling confident but that needs a lot of investment and nurture but uh yes there are ways and means to do it where there's a will bill thanks so much and thanks for getting us off to a great start with the your experience and your reflections there i know you have to go now so let me thank you for your contribution phil really appreciate that and if you want to cut your camera now we're going to i'm going to ask the next speaker brian evans if you can switch on your webcam and your mic brian if you're out there please um brian is the city urbanist for glasgow well known to many of you also from his role in glasgow school of art uh and brian's gonna be our next speaker for around 10 minutes or so over to brian thank you duncan sorry i was a few minutes late the link decided not to work i do apologize can i have the next slide please so i focused today on uh thinking about the fund that is being announced um and uh techniques uh and aspects uh of simple approaches that might be of help to people um i enjoyed this image because it's the proposition about physical distancing in streets next and there's a great deal of propaganda that's put out um and some quite good graphics about the whole series of issues that we face in reconfiguring public space although i do enjoy this image on the right there from a church in the united states six feet apart better than six feet under next uh something that we need to remember uh is that we have seen a considerable uh change in model split uh in movement patterns uh post uh pandemic um so this one was an early one i think from from one of the eastern countries but it shows that there was an almost exact flip between uh the private car and buses and metro whereas other percentages of modal split remained much the same and i think this is a challenging proposition that we need to face when we're dealing with movement in public space next this is just an image to remind us all um that we're not dealing with a demographic that's 15 to 55 uh clad and lycra when we talk about walking and cycling that we're dealing with the entire demographics and i've always been very keen to introduce wheeling as a dimension to remind everybody that there are those with buggies or wheelchairs and indeed other disadvantaged folks who have to be able to move around in the species that we're thinking about and reconfiguring next next um some of these have been quite simple and there's one or two examples here which made it early into the twitter sphere next a more recent one from edinburgh which i was pleased to retweet um i believe it's been carried out by optimized environments and i think i like this because of its simplicity it's very simple and because they've been able to do this without an over reliance on thermoplastic paint which tires very easily and very quickly in the street next just one or two other examples um uh about simpler approaches to defining space which i think is quite important and the bottom left there you see an oil drum which has been filled with aggregate and topped up with uh with compost and then got some plants in it it still does a bit of damage if you bang it with your car um but it's a relatively inexpensive uh way to go about the reconfiguration of space next uh and then a suburban example from the united states which is quite simple okay perhaps a more prosperous neighborhood but very simple and reasonably elegant next um just another example of some of these inventive and imaginative solutions that have been thought about in the reconfiguration of space and i really don't see why we can't do things like that in some of our species with communities next the next two or three slides shows um simple examples where um some change has been brought about uh the bottom left there um even lists out the uh some of the um different elements that were used and that uh manyone.com is quite interesting because there's a number of uh species indicated kind of guerrilla or tactical urbanism if you like next i like this one from rotterdam i think by the shape of the building in the background which is just a simple use of some um some simple greenhouses to create physically distanced outdoor eating next uh this is another example of the same thing of course there's all manner of regulation and standards need to be thought about for um image for examples like this nonetheless this is a time where we need to be inventive okay next um this uh i my took my hat off to aberdeen who very quickly produced a guide very clear and concise guide um about physical distancing and also were very quick to deliver uh some very simple um external space um in union street i think they are next there is a very good document produced by the landscape institute for scotland next which goes through a number of principles about how to encourage health and well-being outdoors it's ordered it's structured and it's very helpful next and this slide shows um how um a common uh element of quite a number of pieces of work has been um the use of social media and apps very easy to put together these days and i think that's something that could be thought about actually for a community in a small town or indeed a neighborhood of glasgow to communicate some of the information next slide i enjoy these images um because a lot of information uh on this and it's not really intended this afternoon for you all to read it on your slide obviously on your screen obviously but the document is publicly available reimagining a new outdoors and the little image on the right demonstrates clear designed thinking about the reconfiguration of space but doing so in a simple consistent way next one this is another example of an app for access to the outdoors for for those who have health issues to be able to track where people are and encourage their support in could be a large park or it could be it could be here in the countryside uh surrounding a town or city next next slide thank you sorry okay it's all right just leave it and then i also wanted to make the point about the after the pandemic summer school there is an event on friday an all-day event which looks at a lot of the initiatives that came up through this um where we are learning uh from this work and it's a bottom up uh piece of work next slide um the after the pandemic summer school uh the collaboration between these folks it was very well done next slide they put together a nice little film narrated by ricky ross which they took on their cycles around about the first couple of weeks glasgow and lockdown next slide and they said six briefs um about challenging people to think about things and what i really liked about this is that the ideas that came up through this piece of work were very inexpensive the sums of money that were being talked about looked about looked at were um very small indeed but it's an excellent example of collaboration between [Music] folks associated with public authorities and the design community and the volunteering community and the bottom-up example in the next three slides if you just go through them very quickly please these slides can be put as part of the record just keep going we'll put their arm on a number of us to help in the process stop uh and um provided us with uh um providing us with information to put out on social media to communicate to folks about the initiative now of course not everybody has access to social media but probably everybody knows somebody who has access to social media uh even those who are uh elderly perhaps um and this i thought was a very interesting piece of work here about um refugees and the architecture of resettlement next slide again very simple things sensing the city walks um and i like this because no social media were involved in this and this was based on people going out for their daily walk uh and things uh related to that just doing the things that were possible during lockdown and now even the various tiers of system that we have i'm going to go through the next three slides and stop please which is another example of um using an app to imagine spaces and places and then just finally moving on please um some arts and music uh projects that were thought about as well including a very haunting a moving piece um that was put together next slide for the um space uh under the kingston bridge um where next slide uh the work started off just with um a violinist um playing some notes from vivaldi's four seasons and gradually other musicians have been filmed and have created a very nice piece which is available on is available online and this was all brought together in a showcase earlier in the year thank you and is now being all brought together in a symposium on friday and that's my last slide if duncan i could just say in conclusion i'm motivated by john hick's work and uh his travels in the 21st century the future starts here and in that he says in a number of things like if we're to build the city of the future we must first of all imagine it and i think this is a time for creativity and imagination in these small funds i'm not suggesting that we abandon um regulation we need to keep people safe but i do think we can be more creative and what i've tried to do since today is talking about the launch of a fund and inviting communities to work together perhaps with a local designer or something um i i want to suggest that we're creative about the way we do that and we don't necessarily need to imagine that it needs to go into physical works or physical works only and that we try to be creative and inventive in terms of the structures that we might put into species to divide space that there could be an artist involved and perhaps if people are bidding for a few thousand pounds up to ten thousand pounds maybe it might be possible to pay a small amount to an artist or a designer to work with the community and to help them to listen to their needs to reflect on their needs and to do something creative with materials in a way that might win a bit of space now i'm sure that we would need somebody from in glasgow's case uh the local authority to go out um and and maybe spray it out on the ground to show what where things could be and be made safe but i think we need to be more creative and imaginative in the way that we do these things and that was why i put those slides together to try and suggest streams of thought to people for the discussion this afternoon thank you thank you so much brian again again as i was making notes from what you were saying there that the words imagination creativity and reimagining came up and in many ways brian you are i suppose you've got half a foot inside the council you're like a critical friend but the good thing about that is you can hold a mirror up to the council and those who work in the council may always not always like the reflection of what we see i think many of the questions have kind of encapsulated that about um issues of community empowerment and its converse sense of disempowerment at times over influence on local place and what can be done to support people um one or two questions which i'll leave to other uh speakers later on so don't worry if they're not going to come up for those of you who have made particular issues about streetscape spaces and parking for instance um but in this instance i just want to ask you to reflect a little bit more on a question before you leave us um one of our correspondents on the questions to talk about a tired and declining local shopping center and the confidence or the lack thereof that the community locally has in the regeneration through obviously the private ownership of that asset and how can people be empowered you think in a practical way to be able to engage in that kind of thing that is on their doorstep but not of their community but there to serve it in many ways what practical steps would you recommend brian well i can talk about some of the practical steps uh duncan um but i'm also conscious of the fact that we're talking about small sums of money here um and by the way when i took on the role of city urbanist i did i did say at some meeting do you want to me to act in some way as a critical friend and i was told brian glasgow city council only has critical friends but anyway i thought it was an amusing response in terms of something like a privately owned local shopping center that's not quite so easy to unlock and the reason that's not so easy to unlock is that it takes us into land ownership and property ownership and of course we all know there's a great deal of discussion today with the scottish land commission um and with measures around about that about provoking uh movement in what we might call stranded assets so there are people who have assets on their books probably valued on their books to be much more than their market value and that creates something of a challenge if you're turning this on its head to say to me well one of these stranding assets exists in a community and people are disappointed rightly so that it is deteriorating then with a small fund um it's possible to create to start a conversation it seems to me with a local community now as we all know probably i imagine everyone can't see everybody who's on the call but it takes um it takes a skill uh we need to be it's a skilled thing to do to have a con an engagement conversation with a community um people need to be trained or skilled in listening and asking the right sort of question to um encourage and to use the right language to to work with local people i mean i've worked internationally as you know uh but i've also worked over my career constantly in glasgow and i think there's no substitute for actually trusting local people and and if if we approach local people sincerely and we explain uh counter-intuition things openly clearly succinctly and sincerely um the people will people will work with you um it's wrong as we all know to um have a conversation around about a stranded asset like a local shopping center owned by somebody in the private sector um and imagine that there's some kind of silver bullet that you can do something with and that even includes working with an artist and working with a local community and painting it up because even to paint up a tired uh um parade of two or three shops nonetheless requires uh permission from uh the owners so yeah i mean i i think um if we if we move away from um simply imagining uh that there might be a conversation between a local community and uh let's say an artist or a designer with access to a small pot of money i may be more thinking about how perhaps outside of a couple of shops it might be possible with consultation with the local authority in terms of the regulations but also creativity with the local authority in terms of uh what could be done in terms of dividing the space then it should be possible for people to um bid into this fund to um to do something and to do something within the time scale i don't think people should panic about the time scale of needing to have these things done and delivered by the end of the financial year if you are if you are working with people who understand the way to put materials together and source them timber decking or whatever source the compost source some plants that's not a difficult thing to do but the expertise to do that well to have the conversation uh with local people and to have the conversation with the local authority about the regulations that's a skilled thing to do and that's why i suggest um artists or designers many of whom i think would be prepared to do it for a very small amount of recompense just to help that keep them ticking over as well just one last thing on that it was a long answer to one question but i was very impressed with the artisan residence program that glasgow city ran uh last year um now this pr prior to lockdown um but um glasgow life embedded an artist um in every ward across glasgow and these artists started conversations and it seems to me that this small fund um albeit with a slightly different focus could also be something that could learn from that artist-in-residence program thanks very much brian and it's safe to say from the the question function a lot of people approve of the notion of engaging with creative artists though though experience at times a sense that maybe uh in scotland it's not always as well appreciated as it should be we're gonna have to move on now brian i know you have to go thank you so much for your contribution this afternoon if you'd like to cut your webcam brian let's say goodbye to you for the time being we're now going to go to our set of three speakers sorry i'd like to go on it it is an event that was or are already on the cards before before i i was asked to do this one so i do apologize because i would like to listen to everything i hope it goes well thank you no problem at all thanks brian for your contribution and see you later so we now got three speakers and i'll leave the q a's until after all three have spoken in particular first speaker ewan curtis from glasgow city council will give you some more information about the grand scheme itself and will help maybe to answer directly some of the questions that you've been putting to me already or i'll be able to offer them to him later we'll then have victoria lieber and sorry anne led and then victoria lipa so we'll have three presentations in a row now uh so keep putting any questions and the ones that already come in i'll try to curate and offer to our speakers in due course as well i'm now gonna ask you and to speak if you and you're able to right hello and uh yourself it's over to you now you and curtis from glasgow city council okay thanks very much um first of all apologies my webcam has stopped working so i hope you can hear me um i'm here um i'm going to give you a very brief overview of the animating spaces grant where it's come from and the sort of things that we're thinking about with it um it's been funded through the scottish government the town centre fund and it's within the context of the glasgow town center action programme um this is basically a program of activities to support the neighborhood centres within glasgow so it's not the city centre it's more the normal neighborhood centres um other projects which have been funded through this over the last year include the pantries program which is looking at providing um if you if you like access to food without shame like with food banks there's also been repairs to a number of um vacant historic buildings within town centres etc um this grant fund is really a great opportunity that the council got just just over a month ago it's an incredibly um quick process and it's really as part of the covered recovery process um this this grant itself we're intentionally not wanting to keep too prescriptive um but it is for capital work so that's kind of physical works but it can be quite flexible i think there was very good examples that brian gave um it could be for um physical things like planters parklets or could be things like for um you know improving web presence many different examples which i i hope that we'll also be able to send on some links for um some ideas for people to stay forward um similarly it's for businesses and communities but it could be led by an artist could be led by a landscape designer we're just looking for kind of flexibility interesting things and it can be very much temporary things i mean it's it's framed under the realms of um the covered recovery um and and as such it can be quite experimental we would hope that there's a general consensus about what's being carried out in in a town center and that it's not too controversial the grants itself um is up to 20 000 pounds although really i think that that's a wee bit of a kind of there's no more because you can get a lot of quality a lot of interest through actually spending a lot less money so we're we're not looking for you know schemes to all hits twenty thousand pound target um as noted the time spans unfortunately are incredibly tight we do we do recognize that um they're kind of hostage to fortune i think this is a good opportunity um to be funded but um we're we've got the current grant program is open till november 20th which i think is next friday and this is for commitment by march 21 we're aware there might be quite a lot of um discussions to take place in between november and march and to source things um for spend up to september 21 now recognize that that's incredibly tight we hope that we'll be able to run something similar to this next year dependent on funding being available and we would hope to be able to give a lot more notice for it and we would hope that we get some good ideas out of this year that help focus um attention for the town centres we are reimagining the town centres and for next year and this could be an ongoing process for communities and businesses to really take their to take their town centre back into their ownership um so i'm very happy to ask um to answer any questions when they come up um there is the website there which i hope you've already um already seen which gives a lot more background to it um comparatively simple application process but as i say um it can be quite wide into who actually makes the application but what we do ask um is that they're properly thought through applications um but are deliverable within this time scale um and are interesting exciting things that bring your time that bring the people's town centres um back into a better future um after covert so thanks very much for the opportunity to speak to you sorry i didn't show my face or show any slides beyond that one but i'm happy to take any questions afterwards thank you thank you please keep yourself unmuted uh i i did say we're going to take all three presentations in a row but there are some quite specific questions which really are you commands that yes which i'm going to put you if you don't mind exercising chairs prerogative i think it'd be good to to you know while you've just given your presentation ask you these questions first one is about the kind of organization that can apply to the animating space is fun does it can community councils apply for instance or does it just recognize charities and um i mean we're we're basically looking for um somebody with a ca with a bank account for instance it's somebody to be able to um underwrite to be able to process payments through but um i'm looking that we're actually quite open in that whether it is a community council a business improvement district um a local group of traders local group of community um community activists or um i think as i said before it could be a landscape architect an artist whatever who's got buying in cooperation with a local community so really it's quite open um but it's just it's a competent individual i think the phrase would be said legally okay thanks you're in possession of a bank account and and please put your ideas down i will give them give the web link to people at the end of the the show um another couple of questions if you don't mind briefly one person's asked is there a point of contact for communities uh if they require support uh in thinking maybe the application process within your team i think just now i'm trying to try to get another officer to help as well just now um there is a um email address on the website um to send them um to send any inquiries through to about this um likewise um if the the works for instance are looking at um taking place within the the public realm if you like the space that's owned by the council um the city services group which we've also got links on the website too um can provide help and assistance um to what can and cannot be done so really i think i'd just point you to the website in the first instance um and send any questions through there thanks you and appreciate that one final question we'll move on to the next presentation someone's asked about what's the relation between scotland loves local grants and this one that makes the spaces one are you able to take a short answer yeah uh i must admit we we launched this before we do about scotland's local grants set the wheels in motion i think it's from the same funding source and it is looking at the same kind of issues i mean it is very much um i think in common to scottish government the council etc um there's there's great concern around the town centre so the community hearts of the city um and to support them so i think um there's a great crossover between the two um grand schemes i think this one is probably more to do with physical interventions um in in the town centers and scotland loves local which i think has a slight more twist towards marketing but um there's no reason why you can't apply to both for instance okay that's great to hear so also especially for people i'm sure on this call to here you can apply for both that's that's always a piece of good news thanks very much please stay with us for the for the final q a but now please can ask anne led if you can unmute yourself and open up your webcam and hello thank you good afternoon and particularly associated with uh her community champion role uh especially the buyers road improvement group uh she's our next presenter over to um well thank you very much and uh great to be able to share some experience of the kind of things that we've been hearing about just first of all i love the word learning from phil prentiss we certainly need to do a lot of that imagine and create from brian evans and also critical friend because that's i do think how a lot of things work in glasgow so could i have the first slide please next slide thank you so this is what we had in buyers road a dead-end street cut off their venicum street which was really the only possible public space as an asset for bars road as a whole and had just become a bit of a parking space telephone kiosks and not a lot else so really when there was a thought about doing something in the mars road area this was the most obvious central spot for doing something that really needed something doing so um we did public consultation and we moved on to thinking about all the rules and regulations you know what kind of things should we be looking up to there's the place standard and we think we all have recognized all the elements in that if community councils are thinking about doing things they probably need to really be sure they know what all the criteria are it's just useful and sensible so having thought about that we had a lot of community consultation that's where i think how much consultation we can do is perhaps difficult for what's being proposed at the moment i think they will have to be quite quick on their feet to get somewhere within the time available but i'm sure it can be done i'm sure it can be so there we have um shops residents customers everyone trying to get together and talk about what they might want okay next slide please and here we are um an idea for design to liven up a shopping center for example public space location you know where are you going to put something how big should it be what kind of activity would you like to see in it afterwards all these kind of thoughts are you know things that can latch into for for getting some kind of decision what can be difficult communities sometimes i think this is maybe old-fashioned and maybe things are moving forward sometimes communities find it a lot easier to decide something they don't want and campaign against something they don't want which is actually easier because everyone agrees they don't want x perhaps whereas choosing what you do want from a whole range of choices can be much harder and you can't please all the people all the time and it can be as i think came up already a question of collaboration skills listening skills learning all these things are i think a great part of what we've got to do to move forward and then is the bit where a lot of trust comes in now somebody's already talked about the council trusting the community we also need to talk about the community trusting the council because i have to say in our project which was a few years ago now we honestly may have thought we were talking about something that might never happen and i remember someone saying do you know i think there's a danger this might actually happen now we shouldn't have been feeling like that we should have been sure it would happen right from the outset but we weren't and that's where i think we need to take the courage i think this exercise will enable a lot of more people to discover the council can be trusted and it will do projects like this that would be a huge benefit alone never mind the actual projects themselves so you talk to all the right people you think about designs remember there's a sort of experimental as well so that gives you a bit less worry about the whole thing okay next slide please and then you have construction that's just a teeny little bit there was a whole lot of heavy construction this case was a whole lot bigger than the ones you're being talking about here uh but the same principles apply so yes there was some enormous digging up and of course there were lots of concerns um that all had to be addressed so next slide well it gets done it gets finished and my goodness it's beautiful it was intended to be a good quality back cloth with lots of flexibility and space to do things to do things so that you weren't uh we didn't want to build permanent structures because the space had to be flexible it's not so huge that you can divert any one part of it for something we had to understand all the constraints i'll come to those in a minute but it gave us a space which is there and will be there in perpetuity which actually has had lots of events you know we have to say that they all they the private bars indeed have had their chairs and seats out on it especially during cover 19 so i would say in a sense you go oh well is that all it is but actually it's a blank canvas for whatever people want to put in it and it has been very useful and i think it has generated activity but let's look at the next page next slide yes so you've got all of this on the way what is the motivation and division the group dynamics of the people working on it do we believe what we can do and are we put off if we get setbacks resistance to change other people who are not involved in the thing well they might be jealous of you of course or they might just not want something to change and that's what the community has to deal with which usually is the council's uh job but the community has to deal with that as well the huge restraints of public realm requirements well they've come up already a little bit but actually um yeah once you know what the constraints are you realize that you haven't got really all that many options that are possible within all the regulations although i know well hopefully these projects might get speeded up slightly but there's still a lot to be careful of this is public safety yes you can't please all the people all the time deal with that that's another one and it's a short-term experiment i am not being negative because at the end of the day you know you are working to make an improvement and that really feels good but you need to know you need to deal with these other things as you go along and the last slide please um i'm just saying well you get the satisfaction the success once you see the thing of course you evaluate i think that will be a big part of this project and the spending of money across the city in the neighborhoods because once we evaluate it we can do it better next time and we'll have more time to get settled into it in the long term so that is my general take on the whole thing i hope that's been useful and thank you for listening thank you so much and that was fantastic and uh i was really picking up on the words collaboration listing skills and trust uh assets without which few things are really possible whether you want to stop something as part of a community campaign or make it happen either way that that's going to be key isn't it and and the the way in which you've made that tangible reality as it were in bricks and mortar town buyers are open vinegar street is is a real testament to your to your work we're going to move on now to our next speaker so and if i could ask you to shut down your webcam for the time being and mute yourself please i'm going to invite our last but certainly by no means least speaker victoria lipa who's from bike for good which many of you will know has been getting really good policy for some of this incredibly uh important work to engage under-represented groups in cycling and so forth victoria over to you for your presentation okay thanks very much and thanks for um inviting me along today to speak about um the work that we do at bike for good um so specifically i'm going to be talking about our electric cargo bike library that we've uh recently just launched as a pilot and i'm going to start just by giving you a little quick summary of who bike for dude is and what we do um so yeah we were founded uh 10 years ago we had big plans to celebrate our 10th birthday this year but obviously coverage has um discovered many of those so we'll postpone them until next year a water charity a social enterprise we refurbished related bikes we provide a maintenance service a fictional bike service a program of cycle training we maintain and redistribute the glasgow mass bike hire scheme we have 45 staff members and 25 uh volunteer well more than 25 volunteers but at the moment uh we're limited to 25 volunteers due to coverage so we're a really big team of staff now um all of our work to engage the community is delivered under the umbrella of three themes impact themes the first is health and well-being so under this theme we support people with long-term mental and physical health conditions to cycle as a way to improve and manage their life so we do this by working in partnership with local health services gp surgeries mental health support services addiction recovery groups and integration networks and we try to engage the most vulnerable people in glasgow and to help them to build exercise um and active travel into their lives and this is such a great way of helping them access the financial services because obviously we all know that cycling is a super low cost transport option um and to enable this we also also offer free access to the citywide bike share scheme under the umbrella of bikes for all an enhanced membership to next bike um which removes some of the barriers that people who are living on a very low income have to active travel um our second theme is skills and development so under the umbrella of this work we work with young people who are not in employment education or trading refugees and asylum seekers people who are experiencing homeless and people who are long-term unemployed to develop their own kind of mechanical skills so that they might enter into further training opportunities volunteering or even in further employment um so we we provide an accredited city and guild qualification and the program of build your own bike courses at which at the end of which all the participants get to keep their bikes so not only do they develop their skills but they get access to a bike that they can then use as a means of travel and our third theme is active travel and so this is a program of work to support people to transition from site from driving to cycling as their main mode of transport and we reach people through working directly with schools universities workplaces and community-based services and we deliver a whole host of activities like one-to-one cycle training route planning about buddy service which is riding from their place of work to their to their home helping them find a suitable and safe route that they're comfortable with um group orientation right pop-up doctor bikes we've developed a website called i cycle glasgow that captures all the different cycling opportunities and organizations across the city to make it easier to navigate we deliver festivals like the glasgow women and whale cycle festival which found last year we were hoping to do again this year but it was temporarily on hold but we delivered all this from our two hubs which are based in the west end of glasgow in finniston and in the south side of glasgow and governor hill we work really closely with glasgow city council as well and a lot of these projects in particular some of the main infrastructure projects like the science city um and the most recent plans for the europe both working in partnership with york hill and hilton grove community council on the cycling village um in and around the area and so all that work is about encouraging a reduction of carbon emissions by enabling that transition to cycling and under the same umbrella effective travel we've now developed this new project which i was asked to talk about as a way of potentially inspiring some ideas uh for the fund that's currently available so this product is a pilot we've we only launched it in the summer it was delayed due to coved and we did purchase the bikes at the start of the financial year um but we weren't able to launch the pilot due to lockdown so we we did actually use the bikes um to deliver food to um local people during the the first lockdown but as the restrictions were easy we were able to launch that properly in the summer so we have um a fleet of eight electric cargo bikes and two electric trailers that make up the lending library it's available to to businesses um it's not for individuals to access we've got a different library of bikes that includes cargo bikes are for individual use but this is specifically for businesses the pilot has been funded by the energy savings trust and the climate challenge fund the fleet of bikes that we have varies massively from um small lightweight car electric cargo bikes so the one you see in the picture there which is an urban arrow and is massive is it's like a small van but pedal powered and the two electric trailers we have can be attached to any bike and normal bike and just kind of give that a an additional um electric power support if you're carrying a heavy load and we also have one staff member who's coordinating this part time and the long period for a business is up to four weeks and but that is flexible depending on on the demand for the bikes and it comes with the it's not just access to a bike it's a package of services to support a business to transition from using a van to make deliveries or to to conduct business whatever that might be whether it's moving goods or picking up or delivering um items to customers um it's not just access to the bike it's also cycle training because a lot of the people who are working within are new to cycling so suddenly going from not riding about very often to riding a large cargo bike for your regular deliveries is quite a big step so we provide this one-to-one um support for members of staff who'll be doing that and making those deliveries um as i said route planning so we can help them find like safe routes that they're comfortable with and then once the long period is finished support to help identify uh finance options because obviously these the books we're talking about are pretty expensive but there is a an interest-free loan that businesses can access through the energy savings trust we can help them identify what bikes they might want to purchase um and making that application so the next slide is um about uh case studies so one of the first businesses that has engaged with us is the hidden lane brewery so this is a partnership that we've um established with this organization which are based in finiston and they're using one of our bikes which is a model made by a brand called butchers and bikes and they're delivering beer growlers which are um bottles like refillable bottles of beer and that their customers can purchase online and then they will deliver them using one of our electric cargo bikes and so their ethos is all around zero packaging and low carbon delivery so that they can guarantee their customers that when they purchase something from the hidden lane brewery is sustainable and as environmentally friendly as possible and they should place a van currently with the use of one of their electric cargo bikes they wanted to trial it before they buy it as i said it is an investment for a small business to make buying an electric cargo bank so it's really important to know whether or not that's a viable investment and that's the whole point of the lending library and we've also been providing training for for their staff so that they feel confident and comfortable using the bike um another big motivator for them as i said was the environment it was environmental impact for their business um and that has come back from feedback from their customers and so that initial partnership has received quite a lot of press interest um there was a lot of articles uh in the in local and national news recently about that which is great because it's generated some additional interest for the library and some additional um organizations that have signed up for the pilot so we've got five further businesses on board and there are various stages of of uh actually accessing one of the the fleet bikes um that includes the national theatre of scotland who are going to use bikes to move kits and crocs between their theater theaters and their stores store units um a storage unit called lock keep storage they're using that already have one of the bikes and are using it to move goods between their two storage units um and also to drop off things at the recycling centres um an organization called proxima where uh is a growing initiative in partnership with swg3 and government hill community project you're delivering food packages um and green city whole foods who are really keen to start doing um deliveries of customer purchases by cargo bike and they really want some advice and some training before they embark on that and invest in a fleet of electric cargo bikes um so we support um the users of the loan throughout the whole period or in regular contact each organization has to help us with some evaluations obviously this is a funded pilot um but what we're finding is there are some common barriers that are emerging mostly around a lack of confidence to cycle like i mentioned if you're new to cycling it's quite a big leap to suddenly start riding a large cargo bike around the city um lack of connected cycle infrastructure so you know glasgow is making big steps towards improving in cycle infrastructure but it's not entirely there yet and it's not connected so there's some some issues around um that in terms of safety um and what comes up quite a lot is that driving a van and making deliveries is still the convenient option so there's a lot of work that we need to do as a city and also as organizations to break down those barriers but we're trying our best to work with each organization um to do that and our next big plans are to develop or to create a home for the electric cargo bike and we're hopefully working in partnership with civic house um in calcutta to work with them on their civic street development which will provide um a dedicated space for the electric cargo bike making it much easier for organizations to pick them up drop them off as and when they need them um and we're looking at the potential of incorporating electric cargo bikes for businesses into a new bike leasing model that we're establishing um so just to summarize um we're really optimistic about the impact of the pilot we think it's going to raise some really um interesting examples of how businesses can transition um but the biggest factor i think that we have to focus on is the barriers that businesses still experience um but uh hopefully i'll get a chance to get a feedback at some point on how that pilot is uh is going in the near future and we'll certainly be applying for a grant so that we can extend the number of events that we have available thank you victoria that was absolutely fascinating and in particular you know one of the recommendations of glasgow's climate emergency report was to look at the issue of use of hgvs and vans within the city center for that last mile especially of deliveries uh and you've come up with a fantastic solution with the uh e cargo bikes there can i ask please for anne and ewan to unmute yourselves and also to put on your webcam i know you and you when i'm gonna see you hello um we've got a number of questions uh particularly for you you and obviously for detail but before we go into that i want to ask a question of victorian ad in particular this there's been an interesting uh few questions in in the box there uh some people are asking how can we make more parking spaces and uh open up our town centers to to more free car use others are asking how can we convert parking spaces uh into community spaces and repurpose them all together and those are not necessarily easily compatible and i i think maybe an ad in particular going back to what you talked about with collaboration and listening skills you know it's a genuine debate shopkeepers are concerned sometimes about parking residents prefer maybe car free spaces uh how do you have that discussion and uh how did you perhaps have that around the buyer's road area for you ann first and i'll come on to victoria yes i would say in the case of vinnica street there weren't i think there were five parking places involved there and there was resistance to them going but i think at the end of the day when you get something much better in return i think that makes the argument all right however i actually would say that you just have to put this in the context of climate change sustainability i really want to see a much better transport plan an integrated one for the city really that is a lot of what drives all the need for cars is the fact that the city does not really run an effective alternative so until we have a proper transport system that can get people out of their cars i'm afraid people will resist enormously losing parking places although you know i would say cars are a problem we just inflict on ourselves you know nobody's making us all of a car but at the end of the day if we don't have a really good alternative for getting around that's going to be a problem and i think we just have to be uncomfortable we won't like it you know i'm just waiting for someone to tell me i don't really shouldn't have my car and then i'll stop so it's i think there's a lot of it just waiting to be squeezed out of there i'm afraid and unfortunately we have to look at the bigger picture here and parking and cars is now become unfortunately a short-sighted way of looking at things and it's not what people want to hear always i'm afraid but thanks for your reflections there and any thoughts from you victoria on uh i suppose how you handle that discussion and where you'd see it going yeah again i agree a lot with what has already said i think the biggest factor will be changes like having like the big avenues project that's about to kind of start across the city um and the roll out of the low emission zones i guess we need to make sparkling inconvenience sorry driving inconvenient i mentioned that at the moment it's it's it's still the kind of the go-to easy choice but the more changes we make to the city landscape the more attractive we make cycling the the less attractive driving will be and i think we'll have less of these discussions because the easiest way to to kind of go to your local shops or or go to do the school drop-off will be to to actually ride a bike there but i definitely think we're a long way from from achieving that and yeah i think big ambitious projects like having used like some of the big infrastructure projects like spaces for people um the kind of changes that we've seen during the pandemic are all big steps towards that and are showing that there is an alternative at the moment it's really difficult to visualize what that alternative is and we need to be seeing some of that work happening um and more people cycling bikes so it becomes normalized and i think then that conversation around parking will slowly end i hope thank you for your response it's both victorian and i've got a few questions now for you and unsurprisingly um that to do with the detail of the grand scheme um and i'm just going to look at my questions here that you've already asked us some of these one of them is interesting it asks about obviously given the deadline which is a week friday the 20th do you need to have quotes in place because someone actually says that the uh the guidance notes say applicants to ensure they complete the tender process for the initial work is the letter i think we're going to have to be a little bit flexible over that letter of the law that um it's realistic costs in place so if somebody comes in and says you know kind of i'm going to build a parklet for 50 quid then no but um we realize that it's pretty unlikely that somebody's going to be able to get all the quotes in place we would hope that they could over the next few weeks though so it'll be it's a rate of process thereafter okay a couple of geographically specific ones here um around could the funding apply for instance to the city centre can i ask you that first yeah i can't say we would like to put in neighborhoods only as a kind of sub-tier to this uh the funding from scottish government is very specific it's for the neighborhood town centres in the city and not for the city centre there's other mechanisms in the city centre clear answer thanks very much and one more would the animated spaces grant be appropriate for connecting the states uh through pathways crossings and cycle paths yeah it's more focused around town centres so it could be something that connects to a town centre it's very much in the um the funding from scottish government is about supporting town centres so it could be things that improve access to a town centre for instance but um not between linking other neighborhood estates for instance okay thanks and one final one for you and i suppose someone you know going back to one of the initial questions about prioritizing deprived areas and neighborhoods of the city is is there a waiting in favor of deprived areas is there anything you'd like to say on that one yes well part of the kind of weighting of the criteria of applicants is is applications as is in a deprived area so yes they get stronger waiting okay okay we've had we've had lots of other questions coming in but but many of them i think on those same same themes about de-prioritizing the motor card in some instances actually providing their support for the motorcar which befits as i said in my opening remarks with the broader issue of the the city's development transport strategy and anne quite rightly um raised that in your answer to a previous question about wanting to see an integrated transport plan and in many ways this fits in with that in terms of the connectivity of people and places i said um we're just running ahead of time i'm going to come up with some final remarks now and give everyone maybe a five minute uh uh reprieve at the end of this session it's good it's good to keep time better to end early if we can the the enemy of these events is is silence we've had lots of questions but i think probably we can leave things at this point um first of all thank you all for participating for uh five fantastic speakers uh for dear friends of landor who have been involved with us on a journey around communities connection connecting together and with transport for um hosting today's uh event for you especially for almost 100 people who have maintained your presence were down down just below 70 but given that you were not uh with knowledge not given especially long notice for this it's been great to get all of you on to this call um just in that light um the you know just to confirm that the closing date for this grant fund is a week friday um the 20th of november um fully acknowledge how very tight a time scale that is and hopefully you and answer some of your questions and concerns in relation to that um but without making a definitive promise we would hope that this kind of grant program will be repeated next year as part of the broader places for people approach um there's not absolute promise there but certainly an intention to try to do so um yeah i was just gonna add and hopefully we'll give you all a little bit better notice of it um we will let people know as soon as we know to give as good a long lead-in time as possible but um it is a kind of food for thought for yourselves for future years if you have any ideas then um it's always good to kind of work them up sorry fantastic thank you i was gonna make a point there that nothing is wasted um if some of the ideas that you generate aren't ready for next for a week friday if some of them having been put forward are not successful keep them in the bottom drawer dust them off and come back next year in fact use them as perhaps as advocacy tools the thing you want to say in your neighborhoods anyway through whatever other methods off themselves the capital works for this program needs to be finished by around september of next year and i've just remind everyone that the united nations climate change conference cop 26 arrives next november exactly a year's time here in glasgow and it's a great opportunity for the city to be foregrounding the best of what we do and particularly about how communities are engaged in the climate and carbon issues that are the issues of our time i often say that if the spotlight of the world will be upon glasgow next november with cop so much so will the gays of glaswegians be upon their city too and we need to prove that we can do the big things in terms of strategy and policy and the important smaller activities on a neighborhood basis which this fund precisely addresses one final thing you've seen in the chat box www.glasgow.golf dot uk forward slash gtcap is the website to go to with guidance on the application and so forth please after this call reflect on what you've heard generate ideas draw upon those things which you know so well already within your neighborhoods and with the communities that you're part of put glass put your applications forward if you are not successful if you are not in time as i said as ewan's noted uh we could look again to another opportunity for you in due course so thanks for joining us today i'm going to formally end the webinar at that point and have a good rest of the day thank you everyone you

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Length: 83min 54sec (5034 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020