Throughout Scotland water is becoming increasingly prominent within our urban landscapes. Globally the rights of rivers are being incorporated into legal legislation, but Scotland has not followed suit. I have been interested in the ‘hard engineering’ approach to flood management in Scotland. These infrastructures to mitigate flooding are expensive, contaminate water, and are retrospective in their construction. In light of escalating weather conditions attributed to Global warming, there in a growing sense of fear surrounding flooding, stemming from the destructive effects it can have on the infrastructures we have built.
I designed and facilitated a workshop to create a space for people to reflect on the relationships they have with water within cities. Using a combination of flow sourced in Scotland that can be used in building, and scrap waste found floating in the river, I asked participants to assemble a small scale model of a ‘Doocot’. Essentially a community game of pigeon kidnap with the goal of capturing your neighbours birds, the Doocot community are an established collective who come together, building their own ‘habitats’ or ‘dwellings’ using found materials and actively benefit from the non-human world. This game gives these individuals a strong connection to the city as well as their competing neighbours. The aesthetic and ethos of the Doocot in this workshop thus plays with the semantics of a floating home, references Glasgow’s iconography, symbolises communities working together, aligns with the theme of habitat and exemplifies symbiosis between ‘Human’ and ‘Nature’.
As a group, participants released their creations to live on the water. Through playful interaction, this engagement session called participants to think about their relationships with water within our cities, celebrate the river, and recognise how Glasgow too may have to adapt its built infrastructures.