Richard Young, with the North Limestone Community Development Corporation, presents on their work to transform a disinvested neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky. Showcasing the power to rehabilitate neighborhoods by asking what the neighborhood wants and needs, and then delivering.

Summer Auerbach talks about the Louisville Independent Business Alliance, a company that promotes buying locally. She speaks about how shopping locally will better benefit the local economy and how shopping in chain stores will destroy local businesses. 

Sean Roy Parker touches on a very contemporary issue of an alternative economy. With businesses like eBay, Airbnb and Gumtree already onboard with the 'sharing economy' how can individuals collaboratively work together on a smaller platform to create a sustainable future?

Iulia Falcan shares the concept of circular economy, refering broadly to reducing waste as much as possible on one side, and developing long lasting and re-usable day-to-day products on the other, thus limiting the negative impact that waste has on the natural environment.  

The concept of circular economy encompasses many phenomena, of varying degrees of complexity, that allow even the most seemingly disengaged person to have a positive impact on the environment.

Dipping your toe into the sea of knowledge on ways towards environmental sustainability can be overwhelming. However, be assured that there are many small changes anyone can make that will have a positive impact!

What if you could travel for free or significantly reduced cost and deepen your connections with your destination, yourself, and your family?  With his presentation, Rich Patterson explains how home exchanging allows this.

TAKTAL is an agency that initiates the creative use of space. In 2015, TAKTAL established research platform Agile City to explore grassroots approaches to urban development. 

One of the outcomes of this project is Test Unit, an annual art, design and architecture Summer School. Its aims are to turn talk into action by prototyping ideas in public space. This year’s theme is Occupying the Post-Industrial City. More information can be found at agile-city.com/test-unit

Abigale Neate Wilson explains the importance of discussing and creating methods to implimate alternative economies in todays world.

Ailie Rutherford’s collaborative practice is grounded in the places she works. Inviting people to become co-producers of works that activate local public space, she interrogates the way we form communities and connect to each other, working with people to exchange knowledge and collectively imagine alternatives to the way we live now. Her current work The People’s Bank of Govanhill evolved from a residency at Govanhill Baths, Glasgow to become a long term collaborative research project on community currency. In an area frequently described as deprived, the project takes Govanhill’s existing alternative economy as its starting point, considering the diversity and richness of the local community as a form of wealth.

Sharing spaces, skills and things can help make life, work and leisure more affordable and effective. Go Get Gorbals is a new website to find things that you need and advertise things that you have. It will be released in June 2017. 

Need something for your project, home, event or work? 

Have a skill or thing which you can offer your local community?

Need or Have a space you can share?

Sarah Diver Lang of Icecream architecture is working with New Gorbals Housing Association and the Gorbals community to develop online and face-to-face support which helps local organisations, individuals and groups give, share or request skills, spaces and resources among one another for free or in return for something else.