Test Unit: Turning talk into action

If you’ve met our smiley co-director Jess, you’ll know that she’s a bouncy ball of energy and enthusiasm. So when something has got her even more excited than normal, you know you’re on to a good thing.

Last year Jess visited Test Unit, a Glasgow-based summer school dedicated to exploring cross-disciplinary approaches to city development, and came back utterly transformed. The week-long event brings together some of the most inspiring minds in architecture, planning and the built environment to lead workshops that imagine alternative, radical futures for cities by using hands-on, collaborative building as a framework for experimentation. The next edition, which looks set to be a corker, runs between 17 and 23 June.

The aims of the workshops are both to solve hyper-specific issues faced around the Speirs Locks area in North Glasgow (a post-industrial stretch that was hard hit post-recession) and to play with ideas for cities more widely. The week culminates in a day-long, public-facing symposium where all the ideas learnt over the week can be critiqued, stretched and extrapolated upon among the community at large.

This year the line-up looks brain-expanding in the extreme. Assemble, the Turner Prize-winning, socially minded architecture collective, will be running a week-long experiment in thinking through building, without the use of models or drawings. The stint, called The Severed Hand, will ask how mainstream cultures of construction impact on our shared experience of the city and the day-to-day possibilities of urban life.

A Feral Studio, an itinerant programme of talks, workshops, hack-labs by the ever-incredible design educator/thinker/doer Neil McGuire, will question the future of design eduction; Baxendale will lead a workshop on the future of the Phoenix Nursery site and Rotterdam and Belgrade-based thinkers Stealth.unlimited will explore how we can take a co-operative approach to planning, building and running cities.

Test Unit offers an alternative approach to bringing change in cities. Do you believe the current system is failing? If so, why?

Agile City is based in a part of north Glasgow where regeneration is happening. Situated on the banks of the Forth and Clyde Canal, Speirs Locks used to be a major industrial powerhouse. Like many other places with a similar profile, the world changed faster than the place could and the good times came to an end. In the 1960s, the building of the M8 motorway effectively cut the local area off from the city centre, further damaging the quality of life and stalling development. In the last decade or so, the local council and Scottish Canals – amongst others – have been working to reinvigorate the area. Big improvements have been made to the infrastructure along the canal. A number of high-profile cultural tenants, including the National Theatre of Scotland, Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire, have set up camp in the area and The Whisky Bond, a 100,000sqft former warehouse is now home to hundreds of artists, designers, makers and creative businesses. In 2017, the Glasgow Canal Cooperative was established, bringing together cultural partners, urban sports groups, Glasgow City Council, Scottish Canals, the local residents’ association, and other local community groups, in an attempt to coordinate efforts to improve the area for the greater good. We’re making progress but the fact remains that our area and surrounding neighbourhoods still ranks high in the index of multiple deprivation. In the past decade or so, there’s been a lot of local community consultations, conversations and charrettes on how to improve the local environment, but very little action. It was hard to see any visible change.

How did this lead you to set up Test Unit?

When designing Test Unit we were inspired by the tech sector, where there is often a much more rapid, iterative design cycle – design, make, test directly with the audience and design again. The Google Design Sprint takes place over the course of one week – you just don’t get that with urban design and city development and so we felt there was an opportunity to design a programme that applies the quick-thinking sprint methodology to urban development, encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration and the production of tangible prototypes in a live context.

How has it evolved from the inaugural event in 2016?

In the first year, the issues we explored were probably more influenced by the interests of our practitioners, whereas our focus is now trying to align with what’s going on right in front of us. Each of the Units will still be open-ended and there are no pre-determined outcomes, but the issues and themes being explored are more closely aligned to real-life developments in and around Speirs Locks. And that’s the way we want to continue with Test Unit, so the programme as a whole has a longer-term relationship with the development of this area.

What is the value of putting people and education at the heart of regeneration?

In the case of Test Unit, we see value in bringing together a diverse group of creative people with a wide range of specialisms – we’re leveraging creative talent to generate a rich flow of ideas and solutions. We’ve had archaeologists, geographers and community workers take part alongside architects, graphic designers, planners, performance artists and researchers. We’ve had participants from all over the UK, the US, France, Malta, Germany, the Netherlands and beyond, coming together for a week to learn from each other, to learn from our group facilitators and to learn by doing, by applying their own knowledge and experience to the live issues in front of them. Everyone who’s taken part in Test Unit has mentioned the value of this peer-to-peer learning, and the value of diversity when it comes to generating ideas. It’s the opposite of four guys from a government agency, in shirts and ties, sitting in an office in another part of town, devising a plan for an area they’ve hardly spent any time in.

As you mention, the event is hugely successful in bringing together all sorts of people from different sectors. How do you begin to select a line-up of speakers and workshop leaders?

Inviting speakers and practitioners is the really fun part of Test Unit! It’s an opportunity to bring together some of the most innovative and exciting individuals and studios operating in the realm of alternative city development. We get to host people and studios who we want to learn and engage with but who will also provide an amazing experience for those who take part in the programme. We work in a very specific part of north Glasgow and we’re committed to developing the best solutions to the issues in that part of the city. At the same time, we’re determined to keep abreast of new approaches on a national and international level – Test Unit offers a means to directly connect with those practitioners who we think are leading the way and doing exciting things.  Glasgow’s always been an outward-looking city; that’s how we try to stay relevant.

What has informed this year’s selection?

This year, as last year, we’re keen that each Unit aligns with live issues and opportunities that exist locally, while still retaining an open-ended and exploratory nature that is informed by the skills and interests of all the contributors.  The vacant Phoenix Nursery site – a patch of derelict land opposite our building Civic House – will be the focal point of Baxendale’s group. At the heart of this group’s methodology is the concept of learning about a place by making within that place and with materials from that place, using an approach of Observe-React-Gather-Make. Rotterdam and Belgrade-based arts practice STEALTH.unlimited will lead a group exploring how decision-making and protocols are set-up within a co-operative structure – the theme of which has been informed by the local co-operative that has been set up recently. Assemble will be leading a week-long experiment in thinking through building, without drawings or models; an exercise in using our bodies for scale and our hands, eyes and each other to check and refine the approach. The Unit led by A Feral Studio will be responding to the current discussion around the future of formal arts education using as a provocation Paul Elliman’s declaration that ‘a school is just a building with a school in it’.

These themes are then further explored within the public events programme in which includes contributions from the Architecture Foundation, dpr-barcelona, Glasgow School of Art, Risotto, Glasgow Tool Library and Akiko Kobayashi. The events take place across a range of formats; rapid-paced Pecha Kucha talks, feisty Turncoats debates, creative workshops, lectures and panel discussions – with a view to stimulate ideas and discussions in a variety of ways.

Why is a proactive approach important?

It’s about turning talk into action and, as the name suggests, it’s about testing out ideas, activating a site, physically and visibly. It’s the opposite of the meeting room, locked up for the weekend after a six-hour meeting, the wall left covered in post-it notes. We gather a group of brilliant people, get outside and get our hands dirty over the course of one very collaborative, intense week and try to embed a sense of agency.