Reflecting on: Living well locally
27 November 2025: Community organisers, artists and city planners gathered at North Edinburgh Arts (NEA) to explore how cultural activities can contribute to creating sustainable and regenerative communities.
We collaborated with Living Well Locally – a cross-disciplinary cohort with members from the fields of culture and placemaking – to develop this Green Tease.
Living Well Locally was established at SPRINGBOARD 2023, when Culture for Climate Scotland provided the opportunity for a group of interested people to discuss the role of culture in placemaking and the development of 20-minute neighbourhoods. The group has been meeting regularly since and has convened two workshops.
For this Green Tease, we worked with the following members of Living Well Locally to explore how cultural activities can contribute to regenerative communities:
- Kate Wimpress, Director, North Edinburgh Arts
- Lesley Anne Rose, Co-Founder and Creative Director, Open Road
- Pippa Cook, Architectural Assistant, Collective Architecture
- Rebecca Dillon-Robinson, Senior Urban Designer, Ramboll
Culture and community
The event began when Kate Wimpress welcomed attendees to NEA, a creative and community hub for the North of Edinburgh. NEA was granted full community ownership of the venue and half-acre garden in 2022 through a community asset transfer from the City of Edinburgh Council, supported by the Scottish Land Fund.
Kate described NEA’s vision to become the de-facto ‘town square’ where people meet, hear and share news, support one another, develop ideas, celebrate and console. A place where people connect, feel a part of and contribute to something bigger.
What is place?
‘Place is where people, location and resources combine to create a sense of identity and purpose, and is at the heart of addressing the needs and realising the full potential of communities.’ Scottish Government Place Principle
Rebecca Dillon-Robinson and Pippa Cook shared their knowledge of the place-based policy framework in Scotland and the Place Standard Tool.
The place-based policy framework in Scotland is rooted in:
- The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- The National Performance Framework, which set a vision for collective wellbeing aligned with the SDGs.
- Responding to the National Performance Framework, the Place and Wellbeing Collaborative developed a list of what every place needs for people to thrive: a set of outcomes for every place to enable wellbeing. The resulting Place and Wellbeing Outcomes fall into five overarching themes of movement, spaces, resources, civic and stewardship.
- The Place Standard, which breaks down these five themes into 14 categories. The associated Place Standard tool is used to provide a structure for people to have a conversation about place.
The Improvement Service outlines The differences between the Place and Wellbeing Outcomes and the Place Standard Tool in a YouTube video (2:19 minutes). The Place Standard Tool has been adapted for a variety of uses including a children and young people’s version and one focused on climate impacts in place. At a prior Living Well Locally cohort workshop, attendees felt that culture was invisibly woven through the whole Place Standard Tool, but that culture could also have a category of its own.
Pippa Cook outlined that conversations that use the Place Standard Tool are opportunities to:
- Build a sense of community and togetherness through collective activity.
- Demonstrate the value of culture in place.
- Foster regenerative mindsets through creative engagement.
She quoted Designing Regenerative Cultures, a book written by Daniel Christian Wahl and published by Triarchy Press:
‘Creating regenerative systems is not simply a technical, economic, ecological or social shift: it has to go hand-in-hand with an underlying shift in the way we think about ourselves, our relationships with one another and life as a whole.’
Creative mapping of place
Next, we heard a variety of case studies of creative mapping in Scotland:
- Eleanor White, Senior culture/SHIFT Officer at Culture for Climate Scotland, shared examples of artist-led projects. Riverside Topographies – a project devised by 16Collective – included photographic and walking explorations of Govan Graving Docks, and Art Walk Projects’ Footprints, which was an artist-led walking and cycling map for East Edinburgh (Portobello and Leith) and Musselburgh.
- Tamsin Grainger, Edinburgh-based freelance artist, described her process in creating an original, stitched map of the Granton Burn, from hill to sea.
- Pippa Cook shared Trails + Tales, – a large-scale arts and heritage engagement project across East Dunbartonshire– which led to the development of a series of local walking trails and specially commissioned site-specific artworks across 11 towns and villages.
- Rebecca Dillon-Robinson gave examples from her experience as an Urban Designer of what aspects of place you can map (eg where people gather, what land use patterns there are).
Credit: Tamsin Grainger, The Granton Burn, November 2025.
After the creative mapping exercise led by Rebecca Dillon-Robinson, participants shared their reflections and questions for further discussion:
- How do we redress the power imbalance of whose voices are heard in place planning?
- How do we make space for what is lost in the process of regeneration?
- How do we centre the voices of the pre-existing communities and sustain the character of place through regeneration projects?
The role of culture in place
The Green Tease ended with collective exploration of an additional six questions, centred around ideas of place stewardship, the value of culture in place and actioning this interdisciplinary way of working.
- How do we practically establish collaborative place-based practice?
- How can cultural practitioners ensure they are equal collaborative partners?
- How do we communicate the value of culture in place?
- How do we embed culture in place-based practice?
- What are the barriers to actioning this way of working?
- How do we ensure culture is part of place-based practice?
Participant responses to these questions will feed into a toolkit written by Rebecca Dillon-Robinson on behalf of the Living Well Locally cohort. The toolkit will be published on our website in due course.
Further resources
- For further information about the Green Tease presentations, please review the Living well locally Green Tease – November 2025 slide deck in our Dropbox.
- Explore the Place Standard Tool with a Climate Lens to consider the future of climate-impacted places.
- Watch SPRINGBOARD 2025: Place-based work driving transformational change to find out more about the role of cultural collaboration in establishing just and resilient places.
About Green Tease
This event took place as part of the Green Tease events series and network, a project organised by Culture for Climate Scotland, bringing together people from arts and environmental backgrounds to discuss, share expertise and collaborate. Green Tease forms part of our culture/SHIFT programme.