Asking the Community

The Save Bellfield campaign had an Open Day today in Portobello Library, asking for community thoughts and ideas about the best way to proceed with the proposed community buy-out. At the moment the team are putting together a feasibility study on how the building might be run in the interest of the local community, assuming a buy-out is successful. It is likely to be one of the first, if not the very first, urban community buy-out in Scotland and so it needs to have a good chance of a sustainable future. Interesting opportunity to chat to some of the people involved, and to find out what they are doing at the moment to assess the general cultural provisions currently available in Porty and how the Bellfield building might fit within that. It's no use getting public funds to simply divert activity from other places. Once again in the course of the conversations it struck me how useful it would be to have an ongoing local strategy for these things, keeping information up to date on the whole community and allowing the community to plan how it wants to use its spaces and buildings, rather than having to react when a developer appears on the scene wanting to knock down or redevelop a building. Of course that would mean local government would need to be much more local than it currently is. At present 'local' government in Scotland is amongst the least local in Europe.