Below is a selection of photos taken in Summer 2011 with a group of people who gathered to discuss the area around Speirs Locks and potential future developments.

Creative collaboration and innovation are key qualities underpinning the renewal of Speirs Locks as a creative and cultural neighbourhood of the city of Glasgow. As part of the Scottish Sustainable Communities Initiative, a collaborative action plan for the area was developed by David Barrie. The purpose of this report was to build on the masterplan and public space work by 7N Architects and Rankin Fraser Landscape Architects, entitled 'Growing the Place' and look in more detail at the 'people' and enterprise dimension of placemaking in this part o the city.

The David Barrie work, 'Growing the People; is a result of a creative collaboration between local communities and partners, and experts from across Europe. The plan focuses on three areas of action: social innovation, crreative entrepreneurship and strategic entrepreneurship. The emphasis is on growing the conditions for people to collaborate and contribute to shaping the identity of the area. The action plan report can be downloaded below. A short film on the process was also produced. The film is also available to view below.

Spiers Locks from Architecture + Design Scotland on Vimeo.

If you would like to contribute to the discussion, please get in touch with Diarmaid Lawlor, A+DS Head of Urbanism. diarmaid.lawlor@ads.org.uk

New approaches to manufacturing are set to take hold in Scotland over the coming decade, approaches that challenge the basic assumptions of production through the application of new affordable manufacturing technologies & ways of working.

- Centralized factories replaced by distributed workshops

- Global centralization replaced by highly adaptive local cottage industries

Technologies like CNC Routing, Cutting & Drilling have been around for decades. What is interesting is how these technologies have been steadily transferred from industry to the garden shed with a burgeoning ‘tech shop’ scene in the United States and the development of CNC into laser and plasma cutting.

The emergence of cheap DIY 3D printers offer mass customization & potentially the democratization of design that breaks free from traditional assumptions of designer & client.

A new generation of small makers promises to bring these sophisticated means of production into the home, applying it to everything from making church benches, to printing jewellery; from making toys to printing whole houses.

This sophisticated making culture is sustained through social media networking, swapping, sharing, co-operating and collaborating. All community building techniques that goes hand in hand with the powerful concept of a global village of local makers.

Having access to the means of fabrication has the potential to democratize design and transform the entire life cycle of the things we use daily – from conceptualization, design, manufacturing and recycling. The disruption of the orderly production cycle is profound, creating new values, changing how we associate commercialization with wider social & ethical impacts.

Notions of intellectual property are being challenged; ‘Open source,’ where you can build on someone else’s work, in return for publishing your work under the same license and sharing back any changes.‘Hacking’ clubs that encourage people to dismantle, understand and ‘mod’ existing products with new and additive functions.

‘Fablab’ is a concept developed by Neil Gershenfeld Director at The Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. It provides a hub to learn and share ideas, techniques and skills openly. It has grown to be a global network of over thirty workshops from as far afield as Afghanistan, Amsterdam, South Africa, Iceland, USA and Manchester.

‘Crowd funding’ provides a way to raise get funding for ideas from a wide range of people who share an interest, it works well with the concepts of open source and rapid prototyping.

These are all ideas that suit the nimbleness of being innovative and small. They all have a place in Scotland’s industrial revolution 2.0. They all have a place in places which are collaborative, places which seek new creative futures, places like Speirs Locks.

Skirmishes Limited and The Lighthouse with funding from Creative Scotland will be opening Scotland’s first fablab space in Glasgow next Spring 2012, it’s called MAKlab.

We’re excited by the prospect of developing a decentralized network of fabrication facilities that with the assistance of local creative networks will provide the platform to explore 21st century entrepreneurialism with tangible local and global community benefits. Learning from this de centralised experience of making and doing will have value for the future of collaborative working, for places like Speirs Locks. The future is open.

MAKLab aims to give everyone from school children through to entrepreneurs, the capability to turn their ideas and concepts into reality.

Bruce Newlands, Feb 2012

Speirs Locks: Sharing The Place: Tim Wright Voxpop from Inner Ear on Vimeo.

Knowledge management expert and crowd sourcing social media consultant Tim Wright reveals what has impressed him about the scale and ambition of the urban regeneration plans for Speirs Locks.

Speirs Locks: Sharing The Place Podcast Episode 4 - Walking Tour with Suzy Glass by Inner Ear on Mixcloud

Speirs Locks Walking Tours: Sarah Frood from Inner Ear on Vimeo.

To find out what creative practitioners want from a collaborative working space arts, culture and digital media consultant Rohan Gunatillake lead three walking tour interviews around the Speirs Locks area of Glasgow which were recorded as part of the Sharing The Place series exploring urban regeneration and the creative industries.

This interview is with Sarah Frood, co-founder of community orientated urban development consultancy Ice Cream Architecture.

This video is a summary of key points from the discussion. Watch other videos, listen to more podcasts and hear the full length audio recording of this interview, learn about what's happening in Speirs Locks, have your say and get involved on the Sharing The Place blog: sharingtheplace.posterous.com.

Sharing The Place was produced by Inner Ear for ISIS and Architecture and Design Scotland.

Recently, Nesta, the Design Council and architecture 00 decided to look a bit closer at the issue of conditionmaking for people doing things together, just like the example in Speirs Locks. They looked at case studies across the world where initiators, local oriented solutions and creative partnerships fused to generate new businesses and services for communities. They describe this phenomenon in terms of a ’Civic Economy’. A civic economy is open, and social. It fuses the culture of the participatory ideas of modern times like web 2.0 and civic purpose. In other words, it is an economy based on different types of community working together to do things. The research identifies eight challenges to develop this civic economy:

Recognising the protagonists: civic entrepreneurs

• The initiators in this form of economy can be found in the private, public and third sectors. They are people who want to do something. The key challenge os to put in place a way of recognising who they are and supporting them.

Participation beyond consultation: inviting citizen co production

• The civic economy puts engagement with the public at its core. Instead of seeing citizens as consumers of goods and services, it sees them as co- producers, people who have a stake in making the place their own. The key challenge is to build trust with people, to share decisionmaking: engagement and empowerment.

Financial co investment: diversifying funding streams

• The civic economy works on cocktails of funding and finance, from a variety of source. It may be private equity and venture capital, it may be philanthropic capital, it may be sweat equity or structural initiatives like social impact bonds. In short, the cocktails that form and work relate to what the place needs, and building a plausible case for a variety of investors to invest, including citizens. The key challenge is to develop visible and plausible locally oriented finance models.

Re using existing assets: recognising latent opportunities

• In many places, many assets are underused or even discarded. Buildings are empty. Civic amenities are under used. People with time and talent are not connected into networks where their talents could be used and developed. The challenge here is to see that building the civic economy is not predicated on ‘building a new’. Rather, it is re-valuing what already exists, and developing well informed briefs at local level to lead how these assets are used, and what other assets might be needed.

The experience of place: setting physical and social conditions

• Places work best if people buy into the story of that place. There is a reason to be there. There is some meaning. This is about the built environment in concert with the software and decisionmaking structures of a place. The challenge is to create places that are truly participative, where people shape the places through their actions.

An open ended approach: frameworks for emergence

• A problem of twentieth century thinking is argueably a desire for quick fixes. This leads to closed system thinking, where everything is considered in terms of how it can be controlled and managed. Whilst this has served well in many instances, it also prevents the possibilities of emergence, where things start to unfold over time. The key challenge here is to develop a culture of prototyping, to test and learn from failures, to inform future decisionmaking, where places are laboratories for learning.

Generating change through networks: the scaling challenge

• New ventures in the civic economy may often look local; in practice, they tend to be highly networked, or at least part of a broader movement to which they look to for inspiration and know how. The key challenge is to facilitate networks of people, real time, virtual and in different places, to enable sharing of ideas, formation of markets and practice.

Recognising where value lies: the metrics of change

• To create fertile ground for the civic economy, localities need to recognise that if they seek genuine community resilience, well being and belonging, this should affect how things are done across their operations. This implies the need for creative approaches to procurement, commissioning and how performance is understood and measured.

Each aspect of the civic economy set out above brings challenges and opportunities. Speirs Locks is a place, which through its initiatives in establishing a Community Investment Company at the Glue Factory, or its partnerships with Glasgow City Council on MAD Projects [make a difference] or its willingness to engage with different types of creative industry, entrepreneurship and firm formation is a place where the civic economy can prosper. This could support and enable the distinctiveness described by Ann Markusen to shape how this place develops in the future.

To explore these issues further, we will take each of the civic economy challenges in turn and explore them from the perspective of experts and people on the ground, taking the specific context of Speirs Locks into consideration.

Diarmaid Lawlor, January 2012

Speirs Locks: Sharing The Place Podcast Episode 3 - Round Table Discussion by Inner Ear on Mixcloud

What makes a place? People.

The spatial framework that we create, individually and collectively matters. In this context, the values that underpin this process of creation matter. Values are constituted by the group that are doing the action, with others. This is about enabling the conditions for diversity, safety and tolerance, spatially and socially.

John Thackara in 'New design Cities' suggests that 'content is something you do, not something you buy or look at'. It happens when people engage in space. Content is about the product of creativity, of work, of living, learning and wellbeing. Enabling content is about allowing things to emerge, and setting a framework for things to organise.

The process of place is about participation; engaging with people, engaging with spaces. It is about collaboration, working together with the resources we have to get things done. It is about pragmatism, actions which have meaningful effect for citizens, for which we are accountable.

The Freiburg Charter sets out 12 principles for better placemaking which move across the spatial dimension of place, content and process. The driving objective is to enable a sense of civitas: people places.

Diarmaid Lawlor, January 2012

Speirs Locks: Sharing The Place Podcast Episode 2 - Collaboration by Inner Ear on Mixcloud