Making Better Places to Live Well: Collaborative Approaches to Place
For the second seminar of the 2026–2027 Big Picture Thinking Seminar Series, we were joined by Diarmaid Lawlor, Associate Director at Scottish Futures Trust and former Director of Place at Architecture and Design Scotland. The session took us through reflections from the field, four themes from the current public service reform conversation, and a practical approach to collaborative, place-based work.
Starting from the reality of places as they are
Diarmaid opened not with theory but with stories from his own life; his father’s pub in County Wexford, which became “the centre of a lot of people’s universe,” and the two-up, two-down cottages built across rural Ireland using standard components and gang labour: ordinary people, organising together, with no specialist knowledge required.
The thread running through all of it was contradictions, and the texture of real life. “If we’re going to get into this stuff about collaboration and places,” he said, “we have to start with the reality of places as they are; not some idea somewhere else, and roll with the texture, opportunities and challenges of places.”
Place as a “meanwhile mechanism”
Diarmaid picked up four themes from a recent RSA conversation with Katie Kelly and Jim McCormick on public service reform. None of the themes, he was keen to emphasise, are about political structures. They are about the way life is lived, and the stuff we can get on with while the structures move around.
- Shape: services following the shape of life, not the other way around.
- Following the money: doing the brilliant stuff on the ground while pushing hard for the macro environment to join up (he cited work in Victoria, Australia, where funding comes to places as a joined-up bundle rather than siloed streams).
- Sharing the data: respectfully and safely, so people don’t have to tell their story over and over again at “too many wrong doors.”
- Shifting power: not just handing things to communities to deliver, but genuinely sharing resource, responsibility and the way of working.
Place, Diarmaid argued, is one of the most powerful “meanwhile mechanisms” we have. We can start now, adjusting the shape of services to the shape of life, convening different conversations, pushing money to follow place-based needs, without waiting for the political geography to be sorted first.
What good place-based work actually looks like
A story from an intergenerational community meeting in Selkirk brought this to life; a 10-year-old boy who arrived with notes, and who, over the course of a few minutes, critiqued the allocation of local resources, suggested where a new school should actually be built, and raised the scandalous price of carrots. His three points captured, Diarmaid said, what good place-based practice looks like: critique of resource allocation, intervention in critical local infrastructure, and meanwhile actions on the basics. The full story is well worth hearing in Diarmaid’s own telling, it’s one of the highlights of the recording.
The best mandate for place-based work
Diarmaid returned several times to a line from Jim McCormick’s Edinburgh Poverty Commission: that to end poverty in the city, the single biggest transformation would be to make the experience of seeking help less painful, less complex, more humane, and more compassionate. For Diarmaid, this is one of the best mandates for place-based work there is. It demands different relationships, honesty around trust, transparency on resources, and real challenge about whether we are spending the right money in the right way.
From a parallel commission on the specific contribution of the voluntary and community sector, four conditions emerged that these organisations are particularly brilliant at creating: a safe base, voices heard, meaningful relationships, and real choices. Place is one of the clearest ways to create and sustain those conditions.
Resources
Diarmaid has kindly shared his slides from the session, and the recording is available via the link below.
Up next: our December Big Picture Thinking seminar is on Thursday 12
November, 2-4pm, when Kirsten Gow is joining us for Understanding Place:How a better understanding of place can shape more meaningful policy, services and support for rural and island communities. Register on Eventbrite.