What are we thinking about?

Posted on April 2, 2020November 26, 2020 by bob

Evolution through necessity and the human spirit. People are reconnecting with each other in non commercial activities. The animals are starting to breath once more, the rivers are cleaning themselves, the sea is regaining strength, asthmatics underneath the fly zones are breathing easier, the sky is bluer, the fish are restocking. Most animals are wandering freer, apart from us… What lessons need to be learned here and how quick do we need to learn them? Is that not the questions we need to be thinking about now, at least part of the time?.

At the local level
The city fathers are the ones who make the decisions for us, these days we call them the city council. And the incompetence demonstrated in the last 50 years can not be allowed to continue. Previous decisions created the Glasgow effect widening the poverty gap to creating disengagement for ordinary people whilst throwing cash and support to business. The decisions made today for the planned recovery of this crisis will affect our children grandchildren and great grandchildren for decades to come. Therefore it is an imperative and matter of survival that ordinary people are included and “prioritised” in these decisions over “business”.
The other extremely important imperative is getting ourselves involved and keeping control of the narrative of this dialogue.

The value and life of a park – Public discussion on our parks

Posted on September 23, 2018November 12, 2018 by bob

Every so often we are, if you even know about it, consulted by Glasgow City Council, about what we want in our public parks. At the last consultation I don’t remember the public agreeing that we should have much more in the way of lock-out festivals and expensive, ticketed, gigs, taking up great swathes of our park space over the summer period when we need the park most. The problem with these consultations is is that they just seem like exercises in get consensus to allow more commercialisation of the park.

The problem is as we see it is. The public do not just need consulted in these matters, we need to be involved in the discussion that leads to decisions. And to be involved in the discussion we need also to be aware of all of the facts relating to not only to the decisions made in our behalf, but also the longer term impact that these decisions will have on our green space.

The value of parks needs to be equated by more than the shallow monetary value put on them and the superficial business orientated consultations which add up to the same thing. The city administration and public need to start taking these thing seriously and understand the real value that is attached to our city parks.

When somebody tells you “Nobody uses it” “The parks have to pay for themselves” along with the sometimes pathetic excuses used to allow building on green space by developers and city administrators alike. We need to, (particularly our young who have most to lose,) be able to give them a cost benefit analysis on our green space and on how parks more than pay for themselves by:

Continue reading →