Pollok Country Park
The Project
Glasgow City Council & Glasgow Life ⎮ Jan - April 2019
The core problematic of this project is to unlock the full potential of Pollok Country Park, a massive green space in the middle of Glasgow’s Southside, to the Glaswegian community. The final design proposal is an integrated and future-proof experience of the park based on the notion of hyperfunctionality.
The Process
Starting from a brief focused on enhancing access to the park, we quickly came to reframe the problem around encouraging access to the park. Our journey mapping and on-site research established a model widening our access brief to a problem much broader than solely that of accessibility. Access to the intellectual value and community value of the park were just as weak as
physical accessibility, thus explaining why the park was overlooked by Glasgow’s visitors and residents.
Given the nature of the park at the time of the project, access could also only be encouraged if the park was designed for a much wider audience than its usual visitor population : dog walkers and a white and retired population.
The co-design workshop we ran gave us the opportunity to validate these assumptions with our stakeholders and engage in the co-creation of a new offer for the park that would make it more broadly attractive and useful for the surrounding community. Concepts of events, local production and new activities emerged. My role was then to created an integrated
vision of the new park that would turn these concepts into a solid design proposal.
Meeting with the numerous stakeholders involved in the park’s transformation, we witnessed obvious collaboration difficulties that also suggested the need for a revised governance scheme.
The Design
Our design aims at hyperfunctionality, that is adaptability to different users, usefulness for the community and multipurpose, to attract various preferences. Our new park is overall future-proof, in the sense that it infused with the concepts of resilient usefulness, timeless appearance and evolutive emotional value.
We worked towards improving physical accessibility to enhance adaptability to a variety of users. To match different preferences, we created a zoning, each of the zones being adapted and desirable for different users. We worked on creating a complete day-out experience with an actualised choice of activities.
Inspired by the history of the park as a symbiotic self-sustained estate and as an horticultural enterprise, we developed a new vision of Pollok Country Park as an active zone of the Southside. We then ensured usefulness of the park for the community by developing a local market supporting the park’s and more generally the neighbourhood’s economy.
Rethinking the park’s governance was also vital, for representativity matters and
because it could be the key for emotional attachment between citizens and the park to last and continuously reinvent itself.
In the end, our proposal promotes social justice, by widening the park’s offer to new users ignored up to then. It suggests a sufficient internal economy, so the park isn’t a burden but is a solution for the city.
This project was realised with Catriona MacKenzie, Magda Szczepan & Lucy Luo. All illustrations are Eugenie Cartron’s property.