 Welcome, I'm Paul Sweeney, member of the Scottish Parliament and member of the Citizens Participation and Public Petitions Committee. I'd like to welcome you all to this special online edition of the Festival Politics 2021 in partnership with the Parliament's Think Tank Scotland's Futures Forum. This afternoon's panel is titled Resilient and Sustainable Cities and is in partnership with my alma mater, the University of Glasgow. We are delighted that so many people are able to join us online today and I look forward to hearing comments and questions from you as we get stuck into our discussion over the coming hour. So, to cut to the chase, are Scottish towns and cities about to be recreated as the ultimate in 15 to 20 minute neighbourhoods? How will we retrofit the Scottish tenement and where does cheap city transport come into the equation? This panel will aim to address all of these big questions in the next 60 minutes or so, so do stay with us. We are delighted that you are able to join us to take part and I would encourage all to use the event chat function to introduce yourself, stating your name and where you're from, and pose any questions that you'd like the panel to respond to and I'll make sure that I get them to the panellists. I'm very pleased to be joined by our three panellists to start with. It's councillor Anna Richardson, who is Glasgow City Council's convener for sustainability and carbon reduction. We have Duncan MacLennan, professor of public policy at the University of Glasgow, and professor of strategic urban management and finance at the University of St Andrews. Last but not least, we have Jenny Elliott, chartered landscape architect and urban designer. There will be, as I mentioned, an opportunity for our online audience to put questions and views to the panel throughout the event. If you'd like to make that contribution, please just put them into the question and answer box. We'll see it on the right hand side and make sure to state your first name and where you're from and we'll get through as many as possible. However, I'd like to kick things off by asking each of our panellists to summarise very concisely what we mean when we talk about a resilient and sustainable city. It sounds like a jargon that could mean anything, so let's drill into what it actually means. Give an example of what a sustainable city globally would look like, what's the benchmark, and what's the closest thing Glasgow has to a resilient city at the moment. I'll come first to councillor Richardson from Glasgow and then Duncan MacLennan and Jenny Elliott. councillor Richardson, I'd like to invite you to outline your initial thoughts. Thanks. I think that a sustainable and resilient city is one that is providing a good quality of life for all of its citizens across that city while having a low carbon footprint, while not having a negative impact on the climate. That's something that is really significant, especially in Glasgow, when we're looking at making our city more climate friendly. It also has to be one that is raising the living standards of all of our people and reducing inequality where we can. It's also going to have to be a city that adapts, that is flexible and able to deal with the change in climate. We know that our climate will change to an extent, no matter what we do now. We need to think about resilience in terms of how does that ensure that our communities and all of our services infrastructure can respond to that, so that when we're bringing in mitigation measures against emissions, we're also thinking about how we're adapting and making that a city that can look to the future and can adapt to that change in climate. When I think about what sustainability looks like in other cities across Europe and further afield, the ones that always draw my attention are the ones that have been really bold about addressing car use, about looking at how they get the transport right, how they make sustainable transport really straightforward for everybody and make that first choice for everybody. I'm thinking about a lot of cities that do that. I don't think that you can choose one and say that they've got it right. We need to be inspired by the cities that are taking the bold action that needs to happen, thinking, for example, about Paris and how they're consistently bringing in ever-bolder measures and how that's changing and how people move. I think that we can all take inspiration from what's happening elsewhere and apply that to our own cities. In terms of Glasgow, I think that we are showing that we have a willingness and a commitment to take that big action. As a city, we're already moving in the right direction. We're seeing that our carbon emissions are going down, but what we now need to do is shift the pace, go faster, go bigger, go bolder. I think that we're a city with the attitude that can do that and we'll be able to cope for that. I think that as well, we're a city that's really embedding social justice in everything that we do. That's coming through in our climate plan, that's coming through in the way that we're approaching reducing our carbon emissions. I think that's something that we can be quite proud of here in Glasgow. Okay, thanks very much for outlining your thoughts, Councilor Richardson. Duncan MacLennan, do you have any particular views on world-leading benchmark cities that we could look towards and where you think there's some good examples in Scotland at the moment? I think that if you look at a lot of the west European cities in Scandinavia and Germany, I think that they've made steady progress over a long period of time, embedding ideas about sustainability within communities. I think that they've also gotten citizens much closer to understanding what the real issues are to, in a sense, reach zero carbon and to have sustainable cities. We do have to have lots of ideas about climate science, we have to have lots of new technologies, but shifting the perceptions of citizens and what they accept and also really engaging this with communities from the bottom up. Where I think I see a real problem in Glasgow and Scottish cities, more or less all the rest of the world, is local authorities have lots of obligations, no powers and very little cash, so if we want sustainable cities, we're going to have to rethink fiscal Scotland, we're going to have to start building it from below. I agree with a lot of what Anna said. I actually don't like the idea of 15-minute neighbourhoods, but we can talk about that later because I think it's sloppy thinking. I think that, across the board, Anna has got it right in terms of what we have to be aiming for. In Scotland, I think that there are parts of a sustainable city that has done quite well issues about green space, issues about reduction of certain air pollution, but the fundamental issues about grasping, the big issues about carbon in the industrial sector, carbon in the domestic heating and transportation, we're not really any better than anywhere else and we're struggling to get there at the moment. I'm sorry that I'm not giving you a specific city, but I think it's a bad idea to do that. We have to look across the range of the experience and I agree with a lot of what Anna said, but not everything, so maybe we'll come back to that. That's fair enough. I don't want to get too neurotic about comparing ourselves to any one city. Jenny, would you like to come in and give us your thoughts? Maybe you want to pitch a particular example that you're particularly inspired by, but no pressure. Sure. Firstly, I agree with almost everything that Anna and Duncan have said already. When thinking about what made a sustainable and resilient city, I've been thinking along—there are a few points that may be surprising for those things as well—about its inclusive design and decision making, green infrastructure networks and habitat and embedding those within and throughout the city, and truly prioritising sustainable, low-carbon and active travel and making that the logical choice and feel safe and accessible, and in terms of resilience being—I guess resilience is perhaps defined in terms of being responsive and adaptive to change and I think particularly the last year and a half we've seen particularly—I'm biased. I'm an urban designer and particularly chartered landscape architect so a lot of my work is about public spaces, but seeing how public spaces have been used and their importance has really been demonstrated in recent times. How do we keep some of those things that we've learned from the last year and a half? Specific projects—I was torn between a whole lot. I agree with Anna, I think that Paris is doing fantastic work. The planning took over half the city with planted areas by 2030, including next to quite major landmarks, which is really what comes into that boldness that I think you need as well. Obviously, the High Line is a really well-known example in New York and that's a really fantastic project because it really embeds that green infrastructure within the city. In Scotland there's lots of great projects happening and Glasgow is doing fantastic work actually with the avenues project and also I think, I don't know if you've heard of Taunagrain, which is native in Ass, which is, I believe, it's the first neighbourhood that's being built at the moment that's been built around this idea that services are within a very short walk of five minutes and I think they're taking quite a longer term approach to building these neighbourhoods that are better connected to these services, which comes up a lot in this idea of the 50-minute city. Not one city in particular, but lots of good examples I think. Well, thanks Jenny, that's really interesting. I think I was just looking to see if we've got any comments yet, nothing yet, but feel free to jump in if you've got any thoughts on what the panels have said. I'll make it unashamedly Glasgow bias, so I think the point that Duncan raised was quite interesting. There's been a lot of really ambitious proposals coming through, for example, the Connectivity Commission, which was published for Glasgow in 2019, which outlined the idea of building this integrated transport system for the city. The one thing that has been quite stressful has been how do we actually deliver it as a city region, because we have numerous different council areas, we have divisions of power between Scottish Government, Scottish Government agencies, councils. It's a bit challenging to pull a team together to deliver these big infrastructure projects at pace, so I certainly found that landscape quite frustrating. After 21 years of devolution, have we got the mix right in terms of the power balance between cities and the central government to deliver these projects in Scotland? I'd be interested to invite some of your thoughts. Duncan, it was you who raised that issue with local government, so feel free to chip in. My comment was about Glasgow specifically, but it applies to all Scottish cities, even the ones that are properly cities. The issue in relation to something like Glasgow in terms of implementing the connectivity strategy—I'm on the economic commission for the Glasgow city region, so I'm trying to take a big picture view of what's happening. It strikes me that there are really fundamental strategic decisions for the parts of Scotland that aren't growing very quickly, as opposed to those that are growing quite quickly. If you're dealing with Edinburgh and the areas around about it, it's a different set of decisions that you have to take. It's about controlling and minimising the impact of the footprint of change. In the Glasgow context, you've got lots of vacant land close to the city centre. I know that Covid is encouraging people to get out of dense situations. That's not going to last long. Carbon tax, dealing with carbon, is really aiming at much denser neighbourhoods and using land close to city centres. That's going to be the effective solution for cities globally, is to use that space. In the west of Scotland, we have the problem that Western Bartonshire and Inverclyde are still declining in population. What do you do in terms of your big strategic infrastructure? There isn't a strategic infrastructure plan for the Glasgow city region, and part of it is the difficulty in politics. Sorry, Paul, I'm not getting at politicians here. It's a really tough decision, but we don't have resources to do everything in Scotland, not everybody. We're talking about a second industrial revolution or green industrial revolution. Things can't stay the same and us be creative. Resilience deals with changing places and sometimes having to change where we live. We don't really get that in our decision-taking in Scotland. We try to protect everywhere and we're not going to be able to do it if we take carbon seriously. That's why I want community and I want a lot of local power to make those decisions, because I don't think that they've been made by the Parliament. I was a special adviser to the three First Ministers and nobody made strategic spatial decisions. That's interesting. It's certainly a challenge to some of our political thinkers across parties in how we approach the system of governance in Scotland. Anna, I'd like to get your view as a councillor in Glasgow for several years and how you see the landscape. Would you see Glasgow compared to Greater Manchester or other or other city regions around Europe? How do you think that we can build greater resilience in our governance structures to deliver some of these big ambitious projects that we need to do? Do you think that it's good enough or do you think that we could do more in terms of building those institutions? I think that conversation definitely needs to continue around transport and how we make those strategic decisions. However, I will say that I'll never argue against local authorities having more powers or having more funding for us to decide what we do with that. One of the things that's become very clear in the work that I'm doing is that, as a local authority, we're often delivering on the ambitions that the Scottish Government puts in place, often with their funding. However, when we're delivering on those, we're the ones that are very much on the ground engaging with communities, whether that's as simple as changing a streetscape, whether that's implementing new strategy. We're delivering on the ground and having to make decisions about how we use the space in the city. Even within the ambitions that we have at the moment, we have to make choices about, yes, we have vacant derelict land, what will be used for housing, what needs to be used for open space, what needs to be used for food growing, what needs to be used for different amenities that communities will need. We have to have those conversations on that very local level and make those decisions. As politicians, we are very close to what's happening in communities. We have a strong understanding of where the barriers to delivery can be. Certainly, we're often having conversations with the Government about what powers would be more useful, what changes to legislation would help us, and would unlock the work that we need to get on with. More powers, more money, yes, of course. We'll take both of them. No problem. It's good to have some consensus breakout already. Jenny, if you've got projects that you've done in the past, do you think that it could have been more rapid? Maybe the community found it frustrating that they weren't able to pursue certain ideas more rapidly because of bureaucracy or certain decision making that wasn't fluid enough? Have you got experience of frustration that you might have encountered that could be better? I think that definitely having community involvement in projects and big projects like that is really critical. Having that from really early in that process, right at the start, communities have a chance to voice how things are shaped and ideally to help to shape them in tandem with Government and local authorities in that respect. I agree with—we're probably all on a similar page with a lot of the things that have been discussed. In terms of some of these bigger projects, especially if we are trying to move towards more 15-minute cities or 20-minute neighbourhoods, whichever terminology you want to go with, the two things that I'm mindful of are about making sure that you don't further entrench inequality and other ways to do that in a way that is actually good in terms of social justice and is not just gentrifying one area and having a negative impact as a result, but also as well about accessibility and ensuring that our built environment and our cities are prioritising accessibility. A lot of those projects that I've worked on have been done with public spaces and the everyday streets that you might go out your front door and walk to the shop. Those projects have the importance of those spaces being recognised as the difference between if you feel less mobile or perhaps you're an older resident and you need to have good quality pavement, wide pavements so that you're not going to get jostled on your way to the shop. The quality of public realm and the quality of all the spaces on our city do you have these everyday impacts on the way that we live our lives and whether that's choosing to take a sustainable travel mode or not or choosing the level of independence that you have as you get older. All of those things have a huge impact on the way that we live our lives and it's through things like community engagement early in the process that you can start to understand the city from that kind of, I guess in the tech world it would be called user experience and kind of UX design, but for the city how is this working for everybody and genuinely everybody whether they're 3 or 93 in that process as well. It's really close to my heart anyway. Definitely and I think we probably underestimate the impact that it has on wellbeing and psychology and especially when viewed through more prosperous neighbourhoods versus more deprived neighbourhoods so I think there's definitely a power imbalance there. I've got a couple of comments so I'll just read them out, one from Scott Davis he's saying, Duncan is correct so you've got support on the audience, Duncan. Resilience talks about how civil society should transform and adapt, the truth is that our political, social and economics need to first urgently transform. Communities should be resourced to allow local-based solutions to emerge, not copying cities and he also says, how can we ask the communities to transform and adapt when they have no agency? Airbnb of Edinburgh city council and therefore local neighbourhoods over a barrel and neighbourhoods have little to no say on the future of their places that institutional disparity needs addressed so that's something to ponder. I was struck Duncan by your comment that you didn't think 15 minute neighbourhoods or 15 minute city was a useful way of thinking of things so that's quite a challenge to one of the questions I've got here. People refer to the ultimate being this 15 minute city, how can we achieve it without worsening the existing inequalities between neighbourhoods within cities? I'm just interested that you were a bit sceptic about this kind of catchphrase or the buzzword these days of 15 minute, 20 minute neighbourhoods. Chuck, fire away, see what you think about that. Well let me make two quick points and then give you three reasons why I have a concern about it. First quick point is as an academic who's done quite a lot of work on cities and worked in government as well as academia, even I could do an effect of a highly accessible neighbourhood in the 7th or 14th hour on Desmond in Paris. So I don't think, I mean you have to make some decisions but it's quite easy to do. You could do it in the west end of Glasgow, you can do it in the stock bridge in Edinburgh really easily. You go out to Castle Milk and there's a different challenge there. If you go to the Grand Ensemble in the edge of Paris, it's a different challenge so that you have to be really careful about thinking about what you're doing. The first really important thing I think is I actually think the essential concept of the idea in Paris and the advocate is wrong about how the economy of cities operates. Now we want to take account of natural capital. I'm not going, I'm not saying we'd do anything other than wellbeing on natural capital but you can throw issues about productivity and what drives the logic of employment locations out the window and that's what that analysis does. Firms gather together in places where there are effective interactions and our high accessibility points to the labour market of the city as a whole. You can't solve the jobs issue in 15 minute neighbourhoods, that's the first point. The second point is if we look at facilities, you can't have what we call higher order goods, you know the sort of things that are big, you need a big market, a big threshold to make them operate, you can't have them in it, you can have grocery stores in every neighbourhood and a whole range of facilities, you can't have everything. You can't do it, it's just not consistent with the logic of how cities specially organise, whether it's American or European or Australasian cities, so that's my first objection. The actual delivery of the idea, I think, who's neighbourhood are we talking about? I've done work on children's perceptions, old people's perceptions of neighbourhoods. They have a different perception of where the neighbourhood is and what it is. Who's neighbourhood are we talking about? Where are we going to put the centre of the neighbourhood that we're talking about? These are all actual questions you have to answer if you're going to deliver this, as we'll say, well, this is a good thing. I fully agree that people should have much accessibility to good services and good infrastructures as possible, but I do think that this completely, analysis completely ignores the supply side of these things. I did a back of them calculation of what you would require to invest in neighbourhood infrastructure in Glasgow to deliver the Parisian idea of an effect neighbourhood. You would actually have to spend three times the amount every year of the total value of the existing city deal, in other words, you'd have to be spending about £2 billion a year to reach those service levels in neighbourhoods in Glasgow within about 10 years. I don't think that's realistic, so I don't want a language that's going to let people down. What I do say is that we have to commit to doing our best to make services accessible, particularly for poor people. We do have to get people out of cars and onto bikes, but I think that printing an idea that is actually really half-baked, and I think that the Scottish Government and bureaucrats—I'm never going to get research contract again—should have thought this through much harder before they actually pushed out the solution. I really agree with the aims of this, but it's not very good in terms of understanding the geography of how the economy of a city operates. I would also add that the state never did a great job in identifying the services and structures that should be in neighbourhoods when we had big public housing investment. Who's going to determine what the neighbourhood service makes? It's a critical element in the city. If you read Jane Jacobs or anybody else, there's evolution within neighbourhoods. It comes from below, it comes from businesses and so on. That's not the sense that I get. The Parisian experiment is very much an ideological position on cities and it's very much a top-down view of what you do, and I don't agree with that. Neither ideologically nor technically. Right, fair enough, Duncan. That's a fairly robust response to that. A question from Andy and Glasgow has been asked, what do you mean, Duncan, by we need to build from below? I think that you might be referencing that, but Jane Jacobs is a very seminal author on some of the urban planning stuff back from the 60s. Given the context of the lockdown that's been strapped for cash, how do we build from below realistically? I did a report last summer for David Hume Institute. It was called Scotland at Better Places and it was drafted in the basis of listening to roughly 700 people talk about what they would want and their lived experiences, and I hope I didn't disturb what they said too much, but what came through really clearly is we've got experience of putting in place in Glasgow, this is really obvious, we've put in place community institutions and community organisations, community-based housing associations are the best example probably of this. Ope, that may be a lost Duncan there, he's been cut off when he's prime, but we'll bring him back in when he gets back online. It was interesting that he was talking about community-based housing associations because I suppose that's something that's pioneered in Glasgow. I suppose that Glasgow's story over the last century has been going from a very compact city to a quite sprawling city with less people living in the city centre, so I just wanted to get your view about the idea of the 15-minute neighbourhood and some of the structural challenges that Glasgow faces given it over the past 50 years or so, the city's kind of been bred more thinly across a wider surface area. Now we're talking about this idea of redensifying the city, so just to get some of your thoughts around that, have that been all right? Yeah, absolutely. I think when we talk about 20-minute neighbourhoods in 15-minute cities, these are just ways of, I think, reiterating two basic points about city life, which can be really positive, which are about density and mixed use. If you're thinking about a 15-minute or 20-minute city, I think that sometimes we can get a bit caught up in exactly what we mean by that and exactly what has to be within those neighbourhoods, and actually what we need to be thinking about is the real benefit of a city when you get the density right and when you get the land use right and when you get that mixture of activities happening. That's city life and that's what brings vibrancy, and that's what people want to live in cities for. I think that the 15-minute city idea is really just trying to emphasise that. Certainly, I think that exactly what Duncan was saying about certain parts of cities almost lend themselves to this. I'm in the south side of Glasgow but I'm thinking of parts of the west end as well. During lockdown, citizens were almost living that 20-minute neighbourhood themselves because anything they could walk or cycle to they were using, they were suddenly using the local corner shops rather than going to the out-of-town supermarket or wherever they would usually have travelled because people were really reducing their journeys right down where possible. We were seeing that some places are, I think, as Duncan said, naturally already almost on the road to that. All we need to do is a little bit of a nudge in terms of reducing the amount of space that's given over to cars, for example, so that we've got more space for the urban greening and for all the good landscape work that Jenny was talking about to enable people to use the street in more social ways again, without worrying about pollution, without worrying about traffic safety. In some neighbourhoods, we're really almost there and we just need to do a little bit of more creative street design. However, we've got this really big problem that Duncan was talking about as well about areas of Glasgow where we have this conversation. They don't have the choice of a supermarket because they don't have a supermarket. They maybe don't have good access to affordable fresh food within their community. They maybe don't even have the transport links that they need to be getting to those higher-order services that Duncan was talking about. We can't leave those neighbourhoods behind. We can't create this where it's easy and leave other neighbourhoods behind. The approach that we're taking in Glasgow is around liveable neighbourhoods. We have committed over 10 years to going out to every single community within the city and looking at what that concept means for them and what we can do. It's primarily about connections. It's about walking, cycling and wheeling becoming easier. It's about seeing where we can make those neighbourhoods more appealing so that people are able to enjoy the streets and are able to get where they need to and create more independence. The thinking around children and the elderly, if we design streets and neighbourhoods that fit their needs, I'm pretty certain that they'll fit everyone else's needs as well. I'm really interested in how we can use that children's perspective or those people who have mobility issues and how we can really make neighbourhoods that work for them. I think that that would be a really positive approach to that, but within those communities we know that not everything is there for them and we need to tackle that and we need to make sure that when we're bringing in those policies we're not just focusing on the quick wins or the easy areas because I think that that will exacerbate inequality and that's something that's unacceptable. We have to be lifting the parts of Glasgow up as we do this. I really don't think that we can apply 15-minute city as the only solution to things. It's simply one way of looking around those ideas of how do we make dense, vibrant neighbourhoods, how do we stop that sprawl that makes it harder to enable people to live sustainably, that makes people lock in perhaps two car households because they don't have other opportunities there for them. How do we start to think about the way we build cities with that climate perspective because of that density but again giving people those options and giving them really nice places to live. That's my perspective on a lot of these issues and how they start to tie together. Thanks very much, Anna. I suppose that it is a challenge because you can contrast a neighbourhood like Deniston or Partick to someone like Rob Royston. If you're looking from a Glasgow perspective and just say that the demand for those neighbourhoods speaks for itself, the most desirable communities seem to still be those ones that should retain that density, that spark of vibrancy which the Victorians laid out with such vision 100 odd years ago. Jenny, I'm just curious about that idea about laying out landscapes or laying out streetscapes that are loved and are sustainable. You see so often bits of landscaping that are done almost as a half and afterthought and they're often dilapidated very quickly. They're very maintenance intensive, not very efficient and they aren't well used because they're just seen as something that's nice and a top-down drawing but they don't work in the same way that a really lovely well-thought-out neighbourhood such as the Meadows in Edinburgh or Kelvin Grove Park in Glasgow works because it's a very dense neighbourhood packed around a park which delights someone as they arrive in it from a dense city. Just to get your view of what we can build that idea of beauty and green space within that, what this idea of it millitating towards a denser city environment is. I think those spaces, I think there's some really interesting examples that you used just then as well and green infrastructure and creating those kind of, not just for people, also kind of habitats of biodiversity as well is really important and actually can really, you know, there's a lot of as well-established research about the importance of green infrastructure and parks on human health and wellbeing. It's kind of, it's very well known obviously that integrating this kind of green infrastructure in our cities is a really good thing and I think for me the really interesting question is like how do we make that happen in reality and not just in the Meadows in Edinburgh where there's a whole host of kind of historical reasons that that's ended up the way it has done but I think for me what's quite interesting is we have the cities that we have at the moment and how do we go from where we are here to where we want to be and I think the 15 minute city or 20 minute neighbourhood to whichever term you want to use, I think, in a slight disagreement with Duncan, I'm really sorry, is that I think actually that's something good to aim for and it's perhaps not, yeah, it's not going to be possible in every place at all but I think if you take that definition of a 15 minute city as I think I've written down a few points that seem to come up a lot around good active travel infrastructure, public realm, green space enhancement, traffic reduction, providing necessary services with an easy reach and more dense housing and use of land, actually those are just those are good good aspirations and whilst it might not be possible everywhere I think there's something good to strive for and but you'll write some places that's much easier to do than others there might be for example some of those places where you're saying perhaps it you know the maintenance isn't right or there's other reasons that it's not as successful where there has been in green infrastructure put in. There's a whole host of different reasons that could have been I think there's speaking as a landscape architect and urban designer I think there's a lot of fantastic landscape architect out there who would love to get their hands on a street that perhaps isn't performing or public space that isn't performing so well and you know they know how to make it how to do some really great design to make it work really well how to embed kind of community engagement in that process to make sure it's meeting people's needs as well but I think often budgets obviously of course are a problem I'm actually doing a PhD at the moment on this topic so it's something that's quite close to my heart but it's like how do we actually what are the barriers to making those better places in practice and how can we how can we get there how can we work out where the kind of the stumbling blocks are so we can get over them and I think it's going to be different in every single in every single place each place has its own own kind of history its own community its own way of working so it's kind of hard to answer in generalities but I think yeah I think there's a lot of things we can try and do from yeah in making sure we have that community engagement early in the process having that mix of kind of top-down leadership and a really strong vision that's whether it's a 15 minute city you're aiming for or whatever the the kind of those principles you're aiming for and what a good place looks like you need some like strong top-down leadership and budgets to be able to do it as well as that kind of bottom-up kind of evolution of place that naturally happens and ways we can make those two things work really well together I think is where there's a probably a sweet spot in the middle maybe but that's just my take on it yeah that's really interesting when you mentioned that the thing that sprung to mind in my head was the clay pit say the Scottish Canals Lab project in the north of Glasgow where they've redeveloped this fourth link like canal and there's been huge levels of community engagement and there's like local leadership on it and I think that's been a really good example and I think you know it's one of these things where you see a microcosm of good practice that you wonder how do you scale it how do you create the resilience of the institutions to drive across across a region or a city you know aren't just being a sort of one-off project and I think that's one of the maybe the challenges we need to think at when we do see something working really well how do you make how do you capture what made it well it worked well and try and build that into a set of rules that are then everyone works to us you know easier said than done though and I've been interested to get your view on like how we might look at doing that in Glasgow I suppose there's been the avenues project there's been some of the active travel initiatives in the city particularly during the pandemic some have been really successful and others maybe have been a bit more controversial but just be interested to get your take on like how you see is building that kind of community led approach to sort of driving projects rather than just being seen as something is happening to a community and everybody's kind of like just kind of like we'll we'll see how it works are a bit skeptical about whether it will be successful or not I think one of the things that really leads to success is when people feel that they're consulted they're heard and then there's activity as a result of that so clay pits being a reality the fact that all of those community organisers everybody that was involved in that can walk through that and point and say we did this we did this together and I think that that is what spurs people on to feel that it's worth getting engaged with their communities whether that's through community councils or or organisations or just in informal campaign groups and I think that's something that in Glasgow we really need to show people that when they engage with us when they work with us we will deliver on those aspirations that they have and I think that's one of the opportunities we have through livable neighbourhoods and through a lot of the act of travel work that we're doing obviously that's not the only type of project that's happening but certainly when you talk to people about their own streets and about what they want them to look like yes that will be controversial and Paul you refer to you know spaces for people I think was an incredible success despite a huge number of challenges not to mention the fact that we delivered that during a pandemic and unheard of to do so and absolutely unheard of to deliver that scale of change on our streets with no consultation because we were in emergency measures and we treated the pandemic as such when it came to our our street design as well you know so that was very very challenging but it did open up conversations and now we need to to continue to build on those and to really engage with people about what they want those streets to look like and what they want their their city to to function like and how their their neighbourhoods can can be part of that so I do think when it comes to engaging with our communities we need to really be listening to them and then we need to show that because of the engagement we've had with them we are now delivering something that means something to them I think that's that's absolutely the heart of it thanks very much Hannah Duncan well I've got you because I know you've been you're dialing in from rural Nova Scotia so I know that the line's a bit ropey so we'll try and capture you while you're here just listening so I'm able to hear some of that conversation just about like engagement I know that you were saying that this is critical to Bill from below how practical this might be in the context of you know significant funding constraints how do we be more innovative about building a a city economy it's not necessarily you know dependent on top-down financing can we do things that are a bit more innovative from below to sort of use public assets to generate wealth for local communities and yes we can apologies I felt like a bad boy who said something awful and then ran away I hope I don't disappear too quickly I think that I was really saying that the fiscal powers of cities need to be much bigger and they probably have to think about city regions in terms of collaborator projects in other words the basic fiscal structure in Scotland stinks in terms of making good infrastructure and investment decisions for cities and I think that that relates also to the range of taxes that are available to local authorities nobody's looking at this and all the political parties refuse to look at it but they ought to have a consensus that they will all look at it because this is a major weakener for Scotland cities and therefore for all of Scotland that all the decisions and all the resources basically lie I'm not saying that Scottish Government does things by the way that's a different issue the fact that cities don't get the chance to raise and use the resources that's the first thing second thing in relation to delivering I kind of agree with Anna that I was being tough in 15 minute neighbourhoods because I don't see it as a rolled out solution I see it as an idea that informs you in some places but that's not the way the professions are talking about it nor indeed the the government statement about it is this is the solution and I'm saying no it isn't if we're talking in generality what would make a difference and I agree with I started off my remarks by saying I did think it was really important to have accessible infrastructures and services for everybody and especially poor people and we should have implemented a lot more of the Christie commission and we wouldn't have been stripped down in many of these poorer places that we have so good ideas Christie commission didn't get implemented 15 minute neighbourhoods good idea will it get implemented two things really need I'll believe it will be the solution when I see a neighbourhood investment strategy for the metropolitan region what is the neighbourhood investment strategy for infrastructure and service infrastructure that it's going to deliver all these good new projects that Jenny's talking about the avenues is great no we're near enough what about all the other places there where's the strategy what's the time period and secondly within that when Wendy Alexander took the community planning bill through Parliament it wasn't actually about bureaucrats from all the major agencies in the council sitting talking to each other it was actually about a platform for communities with plans and ideas to talk to those who were more centrally located in the council and at a national level I left Scotland for about eight years after I worked in government that's a good idea you can people forget what you did so I do think I was astonished when I came back about what community planning had been if we want real power in neighbourhoods and a real say rethink what you're doing in community planning and actually make it about communities not just a discussion between you know Scottish futures trust of the council or a national health that's all right and that discussion has to take place but who's talking to the communities in that context nobody it's an interesting challenge and I mean a recent example which I encountered was actually in Garnett hill where an avenues project was planned to be built up into Woodlands and Woodside and because the M8 is falling down at Cowcaddon's basically this project has had to be cancelled because the Scottish Government wanted to come in and rebuild the or Transport Scotland wanted to come in and rebuild this motorway so it's a bit of an unfortunate tension where it shows that actually when the chips are down you know national trunk road priorities will trump local communities and it still seems to that power and balance certainly my experience in the last few months so I think yeah you're right I think maybe there is a potential challenge there that we need to rebalance power in favour of local communities and give them more agency I just wanted to touch and move towards this idea of retrofit and I suppose tying that idea of local empowerment and one of the most important and significant examples of community empowerment in Scotland in the last few decades has been the creation of the community housing associations which can have come out of the tenement demolitions in Glasgow mainly in the 1970s so communities like Govan and Deniston resisted the demolition of their tenements and they've stood the test of time I think it's fair to say that actually building a source peripheral housing scheme was a bad decision for Scotland and maintaining the tenement communities has been important but of course much of Scotland's cities were built in this very rapid period of industrial expansion between the 1850s and 1914 how do we actually deal with the legacy of you know as Anna will know 76,000 free 1919 homes in Glasgow we're facing a maintenance backlog at which I believe is estimated to be 3 billion pounds you know the climate emergency is going to increase the pressure on the maintenance of these buildings and it's you know the urban centres of our great cities how do we tackle that big challenge how do we build the sort of infrastructure the policy around it to respond to I suppose that's a big issue to finance we know notoriously people to hate their factors you know they're not they're not responsive enough maybe the legislation around tenements isn't good enough how do we design good legislation to sort of deal with a major issue that we're going to face in the next couple of decades so maybe open up with you Anna just to see what you think sorry it's probably only going to take longer in a few minutes to answer but maybe if you do your best to sort of touch on some of the issues yeah I'll try and skirt on it very briefly and housing's not part of my portfolio so I'm not the one that's leading on trying to tackle these but certainly I represent a very highly tenemented word it's one of the densest in Glasgow so I'm very aware of some of the challenges around factoring around as you say maintenance we have a problem with maintenance now because of years in which maintenance hasn't happened on a routine basis for you know many of these private owners or private landlords so absolutely that's very challenging now to to make sure that all tenements are being brought up to the standard they need to be and how do we manage that if they're privately owned what role does does public funding have within that and that's certainly something a challenge for us as a council but we also need to talk about not just maintaining the status quo but bringing those tenements into a state that is ready for a decarbonised city that's a huge challenge you'll be well aware of the the pilot scheme that's going on at the moment over in the south side and within the dreary road tenement and that's starting to unpick some of those challenges but that's being done in research circumstances that's being done in with nobody living in that property in that set of properties how are we going to then upscale some of the lessons from that into all the tenements across the city I think that is a huge challenge and you know we need to to try and refine our learning from that project and then think about how we we move forward with it but it certainly is a huge challenge but on the other hand while tenements might be a bit leaky in terms of heat coming out of them especially if we're retaining the bay windows and you know all the features that people love about the high ceilings etc what they do enable is very high quality high density living and that is a huge sustainability bonus for our city that we do still have a large number of our population living within streets that are very well designed are very walkable do still have that sense of community about them and do enable us to to get a lot of people moved around the city using public transport using active travel because they are close together I think we've got a huge opportunity there but on the flip side of course we have a huge challenge with the fabric of the buildings as well thanks very much for that Anna I've got a question from flora and she says I think around 28 percent of people in Scotland live in tenements which is probably well above the UK average if probably I don't know how it compares to other European countries but quite a significant percentage living in communal tenement buildings what are local authorities doing to make sure that tenement dwellers aren't penalised when it comes to things like electric car charging alternatives to gas boilers and access to green space so quite big range of issues to tackle there but maybe some thoughts on maybe how Glasgow is thinking about that yeah absolutely they're all quite desperate issues and they are absolutely all very significant challenges that we need to be thinking about in terms of the EV charging that's something that we need to be very clear with the public about that while I think the the impression of each be charging up till now has been you know it's easy to get a grant you've got a driveway you can charge your vehicle overnight everything's very simple if you have a driveway but that's not the reality for a huge number of our citizens so we need to be thinking about how do people fuel those vehicles when they move to EV and that's going to have to be not just the council putting in rapid chargers but it's also got to be about all the other organisations businesses companies that expect vehicle journeys to be made they need to be thinking about how they're managing that whether that's in your gym car park or supermarket and anywhere that you go and park your vehicle we have to think about how they're managing their charging network it can't just be the council that does that but what we need to do is make sure that there's enough EV charging facilities within areas that it's it's a relatively straightforward journey to get there to plug in to do a rapid charge or a top-up but certainly I think that the model that is being rolled out for the more suburban properties around you plug your car in overnight and you leave it there isn't going to work for people in tenements because we just we know what it's like you often have to to go looking for a park and space you know in several streets away you don't have that reliability of knowing exactly where you can charge there are some some options out there around chargers that work well on street but even so I think we need to talk very seriously about how people charge and what their charging habits are and how that the private sector can really help us out with that as well and to maintain that network in terms of green spaces that's perhaps more one for Jenny if you you want to throw it towards her or I'm happy to contribute to that as well no worries well Jenny I suppose it is quite attention because you know dense tenement neighbourhoods they offer challenges particularly in space you know we've seen challenges around car parking conflicts as per notorious in tenement communities for example but huge opportunities as well I guess there's things around you know greater community of services you know you could even have such things like a shared kitchen space shared growing space and shared laundry facilities you know might be able to pull more of these things together and make it more energy efficient and utilise space more efficiently so just interested some of the thoughts of the opportunities of maybe tenement communities and how we can actually retrofit tenements to realise a much more sustainable model of living that's not so you know atomised that everyone has all their own duplicate equipment in the one close you know and so my area of expertise is probably last tenement specifically but more on kind of the spaces in between the buildings and and definitely in those more kind of denser city areas including where there are tenements as well like you're saying there's I mean there's a whole host of ways that I think the spaces outside the building can actually support those communities and make it a nicer place to live more generally so I mean you've mentioned a few examples there but there's also things like bike ownership like it's it's often hard if you live in a lot of tenements and like trying to carry a bike on your shoulder up to the top flat isn't always you know the most practical or having somewhere to put a buggy is not always that easy like there's a lot of what's this a huge amount of benefits of having denser living and living in tenements like you know a lot of the social benefits as well something that I wonder about is like how can we help support the like delivering on those benefits so whether it's having ensuring the space for shared bike parking integrated into like the street adjacent perhaps you lose one car parking space but you end up having like a and you know one of the bike shelters that allows people then to more easily access their bike I think there's ways that our built environment can better support tenements and make sure that actually some of this that's not a disadvantage in any way in terms of living in a more dense area compared to a less dense area that has a driveway or something so I think there's a few different ways that that can that you can kind of build on that and shared communal green spaces are another really great example one of the perks of living somewhere that is more dense is that you you know you bump into your neighbors a lot more there's a lot more potential there for forming those social connections and if you can do that through really quality green space and then then that's that's fantastic thanks very much Jenny some some interesting opportunities so it's not all it's not all pessimism Duncan I suppose we tried to get your thoughts on you know how do we tackle the the issue of the legacy of Glasgow particularly but the rest of Scotland's tenemental communities how do we retrofit these buildings for the future what opportunities are around the financing and economics of it in particular given we've got this three billion pound meeting his backlog how are we going to tackle it it can't just simply be up to the the tenants of the mortgage holders can it well I think you mentioned the development of housing associations and tenemental buildings through the 1970s I actually started working in housing in university of Glasgow in 1974 so I think there's a couple of key lessons from the period you refer to that can be thought about in principle now the tenement renewal programme took place the housing association and other private grant led activity because there was a strict implementation of the standards of the 1974 housing scotland act it defined how you needed to improve or repair a dwelling and it was enforced really strictly in Glasgow Edinburgh enforced it much more lightly and its tenement stock ran behind in terms of upgrading ran behind Glasgow and indeed indeed for a long period of time so going forward on being concerned about carbon we need new standards for our housing in terms of energy and insulation and everything else everyone agrees that and we can think of the archetypes and the costs associated with them the second thing that would come out of it is this was a huge job for Glasgow city which had a lot more staff then than it has now and it would never have achieved it without the help of the housing corporation at that time so the question is capacity to do this and this really worries me about big initiatives in Scotland local authorities staffing for thinking and delivering and strategic management is so stripped down big programs like this are going to be really difficult so they need a legislative framework about the standards the need capabilities of staff in terms of finance poor people if you want to have good quality homes for poor people i did a review of such programs for OECD and the world bank at different times in my career you never get it unless you provide subsidies of 65 to 70 percent of the cost of a building poor people can't afford decent housing and that's even truer now than it was when i did that work so we're going to have to increase the size into the affordable housing program in scotland i think it needs to be roughly doubled to make progress into upgrading costs unless there are special funds as i know there is in line for this experimental phase but i think that Glasgow has the right vision about what it's doing with its tenement stock and should be really commended your other european cities will be saying oh look at sustainable Glasgow place in other words that's a great initiative you have to think more carefully through what the employment effects i was involved in persuading people in Glasgow amongst us to vote for the Glasgow housing transfer but within government there was a huge amount of work done by the labour government of that type to make sure the employment agencies and training agencies had skills and apprenticeships lined up to be employed by the i think we've lost them again but we'll continue that but one question actually from Graeme and Dumfries is asking about if there are any feasible schemes to implement district heating projects within our cities in large towns um i don't know either Jenny or Anna if you've got any thoughts on i don't know particularly maybe in Glasgow if there are our pilots planned around district heating i think there was one in the athlete's village in Dalmaroc but i'm not sure if there's any more proposed i suppose it's a big opportunity particularly for tenement communities um Anna do you have any thoughts at all yeah absolutely there is district heating as you say already in Glasgow but we need to roll that out on a far bigger scale we need to utilise the the heat that's in the the cloud um and we need to look at taking heat off for example our recycling renewable energy centre over at polymody because that is you know it's managing our residual waste through you know from our general waste collections and we're already generating electricity there that's helping to to go back into the grid and so on but it generates heat as well and we need to find ways of connecting that up and using that heat because that's what's going to maximise the the climate impact or that the climate benefit of of having that waste treatment plant there and so yeah absolutely it's something that's being looked at with University of Strathclyde it's being worked up through our own council policies as well and we're certainly um district heating will have to be part of the solution um especially to densely populated parts of the city um as well as heat pumps heat pumps are also individual heat pumps are also going to be important but district heating really has to be part of the solution great thanks very much we look forward to hearing more about those proposals for Glasgow certainly in the coming weeks and months or months and years probably maybe not weeks is very ambitious but uh maybe we'll hear more about during a cop that may be an opportunity but I just wanted to say um thank you all for your contributions to the event and before we close um hopefully we'll get Duncan back but um I'd just like to give each of our panellists a minute just to sum up quite the the wide-ranging issues raised in the discussion so um Jenny can I start with you and then I'll I'll move to Anna and then hopefully we'll get Duncan back before the the end thanks Jenny sure and thanks so much for having me this has been really really interesting and um I think some of the key things that um I get in some up of some of the things that I was mentioning earlier around kind of the importance of public spaces about how it's really those kind of everyday and like experience like lived experience of the city is really important particularly if we're moving towards more sustainable cities it influences the kind of the choices you make as an individual but also the importance of that kind of top down and bottom up and generally as a society kind of a city deciding how do we want to use our urban spaces like that's because that's how we can decide how like how we want to fund them what's important what do we want our city to ultimately look like and then trying to work together to try and achieve that because actually I think some of the ideas of the 15 minute city you know they may seem idealistic in some ways but at the same time there's a lot of evidence that actually by investing in quality public space in the city in this way actually it's it kind of pays for itself in the long term through public health through the economics you know better spaces for cafes to spill out into the public like it all kind of it works long term so just yeah just a note say thank you and thanks for having me as part of this debate thanks very much Jenny Anna would you like to just offer a summation of what your thoughts and reflections were yeah I think what's been really harding about this hour is we've been talking about climate but it's been quite tangential we've been talking about people's lives we've been talking about inequality about poverty we've talked about children we've talked to older people we've talked about bringing communities together about social interaction and to me that's what climate action should be talking about and often we have climate conversations around the technology around the innovation that is needed from a technical perspective to decarbonise but actually what I find most exciting is when we're talking about what these climate solutions can bring to our people to our communities and how we just really improve people's lives along the way and so I feel it's been that kind of conversation this afternoon yeah thanks very much Anna and thanks Jenny I think it has been a really useful discussion that's broken into a whole number of dimensions that interact in our everyday lives our wellbeing sense of you know how much private we have in our community's engagement and you know that there's a lot of issues around class and inequality that we need to unpack there as well so I think we've just not just done some of the issues we need to tackle as a country in the coming years so thanks very much for your insights today it's been really useful and I'm sorry unfortunately Duncan's not going to be able to join us for his summation but I think his contribution today has been really useful we must end there and I'd just like to thank you all for joining us today and making such a significant contribution to our panel that was brought to you in partnership with the University of Glasgow again thanks to our panel Jenny Elliott, Duncan MacLennan and councillor Anna Richardson for giving up your time this afternoon to take part it may take this opportunity to remind you that we have one more festival panel before we bring this year's festival to a close and that is on the subject of prioritising mental health which starts at 6 p.m. this evening so in an hour's time and I do hope you can join those discussions so thanks very much for your attention