Urban wasteland being revamped with greenery

GALLANT - Glasgow as a Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation

Delivering a Climate Resilient City through City-University Partnership

The Thriving Glasgow Portrait

The Thriving Glasgow Project aims to answer the question:

How can Glasgow be a home to thriving people, in a thriving place, while respecting the wellbeing of all people and the health of the whole planet?

The City Council is being supported by the University of Glasgow to create its Portrait, which will help the City think about the current situation, and define its ambitions and aspirations. The insights from the Portrait process are being used to support Glasgow’s participation in the C40’s Thriving Cities Initiative and the GALLANT Programme which is a parntership between the University and Glasgow City Council.

Thriving Glasgow Portrait Timeline:

  • November 2021: Glasgow City Council Leader, Cllr Susan Aitken, launched Glasgow's participation in C40’s Thriving Cities Initiative during COP26. This signified the city’s ambition to move towards a green wellbeing economy in order to meet its ambitious social and environmental targets. An important step in the process of becoming a thriving city is the creation of a City Portrait, a tool for thinking about Glasgow in a holistic and innovative way.

  • January 2022 - April 2023: The GALLANT team organised a series of workshops to consult people from a diverse range of sectors and local communities on how best to co-produce a vision of what a thriving Glasgow would look like: The Thriving Glasgow Portrait.

  • November 2023: The final Thriving Glasgow Portrait report was launched at an event at Kelvingrove Museum, featuring 44 definitions collated from all workshops that state what Glasgow could look like in future. 

To read the report and explore the 44 definitions of the portrait, visit: www.glasgow-doughnut.co.uk.

The room at Kelvingrove Museum with full audience for the launch of the Thriving Glasgow portrait.The full panel standing in front of the stage at the Thriving Glasgow Portrait launch event at Kelvingrove Museum.

LEFT: The full hall at Kelvingrove Museum for the Thriving Glasgow Portrait launch event. RIGHT: The panellists and facilitators from the Thriving Glasgow Portrait launch event (LtoR: Cllr Susan Aitken [Glasgow City Council Leader], Prof Petra Meier [GALLANT Co-Principal Investigator], Aida Mas Baghaie [C40 Thriving Cities Initiative Senior Manager], Prof Chris Pearce [University of Glasgow Vice Principal], Dr Leonora Grcheva [DEAL City and Regions Lead], Dr Elaine Heslop [Director of Lucidity], Prof Jaime Toney [GALLANT Principal Investigator].

Basic summary of doughnut economics principles: Sustainable lifestyles are situated between an upper limit of permissible use (“Environmental ceiling”) and a lower limit of necessary use of environmental resources (“Social foundation”).What is a City Portrait?

City Portraits (as trialled in other pilot Thriving Cities such as Amsterdam, Portland and Philadelphia) are tools that downscale the concepts of Doughnut Economics to the city level and consider the city of Glasgow through four interconnected lenses: local, global, social and ecological.

As ‘Our Dear Green Place’, Glasgow depends on a healthy natural environment for its citizens to thrive, but as the largest city in Scotland, Glasgow also influences a multitude of social and ecological outcomes that reverberate across our increasingly connected world.

Who created the Portrait?

All of us! The Glasgow's City Portrait Project team have worked since 2021 to organise a series of workshops with participants from a diverse range of sectors, including community groups. 

By creating a portrait of Glasgow collaboratively, we are bringing multiple perspectives on the city to life. It allows us to identify the policy and operational levers that could trigger transformative progress and have the biggest impact on all four lenses. We are developing a shared vision of what ‘Thriving’ would mean for Glasgow, and are discussing how we can define and track our progress towards more meaningful measures of societal and planetary wellbeing.

With the report being launched in November 2023, the portrait will now continue to adapt and change as time goes on. By continually refining it, we can use it to inform the City’s policy development and also as input to an ambitious research endeavour that the University is undertaking with the City, the £10.2 million, five-year research programme GALLANT.

Glasgow's City Portrait Project Team

Led by Prof Petra Meier, who is also a Co-PI on the GALLANT programme and co-leads GALLANT's "Work Stream 1: Systems Thinking", which will be incorporating the Glasgow's City Portrait work and threading it through all of GALLANT's research.

Project Research Associates are Dr Annika Hjelmskog and Sarah Lester (please direct all queries to Sarah).

Project Manager for the first year of the project was Petra Baiba Olehno.