From the city of gaps to the city of wellness: The case study of DOT TO DOT© community garden in Maryhill, Glasgow

Urban Farm DB summary

This case study examines DOT TO DOT©, a social innovation project run in the Maryhill area of Glasgow, Scotland, from 2017 to 2018 and funded by the EU's European Social Fund Aspiring Communities programme. A cross-disciplinary initiative involving intergenerational groups from the local creative community — social entrepreneurs, researchers, educators, and youth — it temporarily reused ecologically vacant sites, aiming to improve the lives of disadvantaged communities through regenerative design and live projects built with reclaimed waste materials. The experimental site was planned across three areas: (a) a Community Garden growing edible plants (phase 1), (b) a Remake Station (phase 2), and (c) a sensory woodland, combining somatic learning tools, research-by-doing, experimentation through reuse, and collaborative design modeling that integrated spatial, visual, quantitative, and qualitative data. The project states its aim as generating knowledge exchange and live demonstrations relevant to local community development, in support of integrated decision-making and bottom-up governance for healthy outdoor environments.