City Making: Leadership
Maccreanor Lavington and New Practice continued the curation of their City Making series in Glasgow, under the theme of Leadership. The event was hosted by Stallan-Brand in their extraordinary studio space, the historic Oxford House, built in 1895 as Police Station & Barracks. The chair, Jane MacCuish of Maccreanor Lavington was delighted to be joined by a diverse panel of speakers including:
Becca Thomas, architect and co-founder of New Practice. Becca spoke passionately about her values driven activism and New Practice’s most recent “Waiting to Happen” campaign”. She and colleagues have been petitioning city leaders to act in improving safety for those on bikes or walking. The campaign is in memory of her young colleague Emma Burke Newman, who lost her life in a cycling accident at the start of 2023.
https://new-practice.co.uk/waiting-to-happen
Professor Marian Scott, is the professor of Environmental Statistics, in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow. Marian is the co-Principal Investigator of GALLANT a partnership between Glasgow City Council and the university, UK Research and Innovation and the Natural Environment Research Council. Through this work University researchers are helping the city move towards climate resilience whilst tackling health, social and economic inequalities. GALLANT uses Glasgow as a living lab to trial new sustainable solutions throughout the city and takes a whole-systems approach, whilst addressing the city’s key environmental challenges. Marion’s presentation was the perfect precursor to Kevin Logan’ s presentation.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/sustainablesolutions/ourprojects/gallant/
Kevin Logan, Director of Maccreanor Lavington’s Urban Studio spoke of the need to think holistically about our cities and their future, via whole systems thinking. Through a combination of strategic thinking, regenerative design approaches and illustrated by current projects, his call to the audience was to take leadership decisions that will make us good ancestors to future generations.
Paul Stallan, is the founding partner of Stallan Brand and synonymous with multiple key masterplans and projects in the city. His resilient design approach is driven by a desire to support social progression. Paul addressed the role and link between planning policy and its relationship with spatial planning at a city, regional and national scale. Paul has provided thought leadership across the city and brought his encyclopaedic knowledge of Glasgow to the conversation and debate.
Rhona Warwick Paterson spoke about creative leadership in the city. Glasgow is home to a thriving community of creatives and a rich history of innovation and creative intelligence. Rhona works across sculpture, poetry and performance. She offers feminist readings of the city particularly in the intuitive experiences of the built environment and how they are shaped and controlled and, in turn, how they shape us.
Her presentation included an invitation to the audience to engage with the clay deposits located beneath their seats. Her more recent research uses the material as a tool to explore the territory of risk and the place of migration between state and thought – a transitional space that uses making and process to explore heightened states of creativity. As the Founder of First Hand Studio, she is working with recent advances in the field of neuroscience to explore methods of material handling in relation to clay’s capacity to elevate consciousness, neurogenesis and theta wave activity.
https://www.firsthandstudio.co.uk/
Following the presentations, the audience entered a wide ranging conversation about the city, current challenges and opportunities. The audience brought together a mix of the City Council, public and private sector representatives, built environment professionals and creatives from multiple disciplines.
The City Making series is one that we have enjoyed presenting in Glasgow and both Maccreanor Lavington and New Practice continue to be committed to creating forums to support individuals and communities to thrive, by bringing together those engaged in City Making across a necessary wide spectrum of approaches.
A huge thank you to Paul Stallan and his staff for their generosity in hosting this event.
Find out more about our first City Making event here: https://www.maccreanorlavington.com/journal/detail/city-making-a-collaborative-process/
