One of the best aspects of what we do at COP26andbeyond is working with, and learning from, some incredible people and organisations that share our aims of informing, engaging and inspiring people to take action over climate change.

We have shared views on COP26 from different angles - Vikrant Srivastava in India, Kevin Mtai in Kenya, Kirsty Platt in Scotland, all our friends and colleagues at IARI in Italy, MOCK COP, Global Engineering Futures, Earth Action Hub, Iron & Earth, the POP Movement - and we have some great plans for more ideas from South Korea, Bhutan, Chile…

But COP26 will be hosted in Glasgow. We are lucky to be able to share this blog by Anne Johnstone - have a look at the video that goes with it - about the fantastic and ambitious plans for a big event just a mile away, put together by After the Pandemic. If they’ll have us, we’ll be there!

After The Pandemic

After the Pandemic is an accelerator for change, incubating and enabling creative projects that impact our society, cities and the environment for the better.

The initiative develops ideas through the collaboration of local communities, creative practitioners and like-minded organisations, in order to create, fund and deliver:

Cultural & arts installations, programmes and content.
Educational toolkits, design schools and research.
Events, community engagement and outreach.

Our mission is to RETHINK, REIMAGINE and REDESIGN the world around us to be greener, more resilient and more vibrant.

After the Pandemic was co-founded in April 2020 by Lateral North, Fergus Bruce and Laura McHard, and launched on 8th May 2020 as a response to the coronavirus pandemic, the climate emergency and other converging challenges. Since launching, After the Pandemic has delivered and enabled over 40 projects with another 10 in the pipeline. We have hosted events and workshops, including a week-long design summer school in June 2020 showcasing 20 projects from students, community groups, visual and spoken word artists amongst others, and the ATP Symposium in November 2020, featuring 32 speakers from New Zealand, New York, Spain, Italy and throughout Scotland. We have seen extensive engagement at local, national and international level - from presenting work on BBC Radio Scotland’s The Afternoon Show to being featured on German TV channel ARD, with the piece being watched over 1 million times.

When COP26 was postponed to November 2021, we saw an opportunity. Many of the ideas submitted for our summer school involved access, or the lack of it, to land. Glasgow has a huge problem with vacant and derelict land. It has the highest concentration of vacant and derelict land of any local authority in Scotland, particularly in the north and east of the city, where the average Glaswegian citizen lives within 100m of a vacant or derelict site. Many of these sites have featured on Scotland’s vacant and derelict land register for decades and are located in areas of multiple deprivation, negatively impacting on the areas and on the health and wellbeing of their residents.

Wouldn’t it be great, we thought, to get access to a piece of vacant and derelict land and show the potential for these sites to provide space for cultural, creative and community-focused activity in the run up to and during COP26?

Top of our wish-list was City Wharf, an area of vacant and derelict land immediately adjacent to the west of Kingston Bridge, which carries the M8 motorway across the River Clyde and through the heart of Glasgow. The site is equi-distant between the city centre and the SEC, where COP26 will take place. The site is also located in an area of Glasgow that played an integral role in the city’s rise to prominence after the Industrial Revolution as the centre of the shipbuilding industry. After a bit of detective work, we identified the landowner, Dandara, and managed to get a meeting with them.

We pitched the idea of using part of the site as a ‘meanwhile’ use in the run up to and during COP26 focusing on community-based activities. To our utter delight, Dandara loved this idea and agreed to give us permission to use 3,000 sq m of the site until the end of November 2021.

So what is it we’re actually doing? It’s fair to say that things have evolved considerably from our original idea, which was something along the lines of ‘let’s find a bit of vacant and derelict land and build something on it, maybe a zero carbon house.’ That is actually going to happen on our site, but it’s now one of a multitude of things!

The site will be a physical manifestation of our five principles, which are: Inclusive Communities; Dear Greenest Place; Learn and Grow; Local for Global and Design Forward. There will be a series of pavilions, each designed around a principle and providing space for workshops, presentations, play, exhibitions and performance. Street art will play a huge role in bringing the space to life and making it vibrant and colourful, as well as communicating messages. The structures will be designed to be open and porous - partly to retain the benefit of being an outdoor space when we are still likely to be experiencing some degree of social distancing, but also to encourage people to move around the site and experience as many of the different elements present as possible. The event will also be delivered digitally, for greater inclusion and engagement.

But most importantly, what will you experience if you come to our site in November, or engage with us online? We hope to highlight how innovation, creativity and design can address the climate emergency and challenges brought on by the pandemic, at a local level. We hope that it will be just the start of a journey, where people are inspired, motivated and empowered to go back to their own communities and challenge inequalities or create something unique and wonderful. We hope to foster many new relationships and connections, allowing people to share their stories and experiences with others all over the world. And by doing all of these things, we hope to create a legacy that transforms Glasgow long after COP26 has been and gone.