DEMOS

It was The Big Dream on Saturday, which was the last public event in the Glasgow 2020 project. We took over a series of rooms in the recently reopened Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in the name of exciting public interest in thinking about and deliberating the future of Glasgow. There are a load of photos here, and explanations of a few of the things that were doing in each of the spaces.

If Glasgow 2020 has a core philosophy a the moment, it's that cities are the stories they tell about themselves. These stories influence how key decision makers and leaders try to shape the future. Problem is, tending to stem from journalists/marketers/the tourist board/city council, these stories are not democratically created. They become "official-stories" of the city's future, told by institutions. Glasgow 2020 has been an attempt to find "the non-institutional" view of the city, through different imagination exercises, that have taken place since last October.

Like more conventional futures exercises, we have focused on "the possible" and "the desirable". In the name of the former we have run several story-writing competitions and in the later we have run a campaign to collect wishes for 2020 across the city. We have tried to bring these together in workshops with over 25 different groups of people across the city ranging from single parents to hairdressers and public housing tenants. These discussions have also lead to the creation of stories, which have in turn been developed into polished stories by published authors. A good example of this is The Icarus Tree by Suhayl Saadi.

We hope that these processes and various other things we have tried (turning a boat into an office, site specific instillations about the future in porter-cabins, workshops on trains etc) will add up to a new non-institutional story of the city's future. The Big Dream was about testing some "prototype" non-institutional stories we have tried to stitch together, from the project so far..

For what it's worth, the most consistent reoccuring theme in the project, which isn't really recognised in the official story of Glasgow's future is gender. But more about that later.