
Postcard from a Pop Up Shop
Pop Up shop. There’s something about seeing a sign for a pop up shop that tickles your fancy.The Pop up shop has been seen as a great way to reinvigorate town centres and let new businesses test the market in an affordable, low-risk way. Now we have Shop Share - an even cheaper and lower […]

Power of Pop Up
We like pop ups at Can Do Places. Pop up shops, pop up cafes, pop up restaurants, they all bring innovation and vitality to our towns, so we were really interested in a unique project aimed at revitalising Airdrie’s town centre and which has helped dozens of aspiring local entrepreneurs set up in business. Very […]

Postcard from Local Vs Global
When we created the first Local Vs Global (a town centre regeneration story) and hit ‘publish’ on Eventbrite, little did we realise this first Enterprise Talk Oot would sell out in four days. Ok, we were not using some vast hall but taking up an A+DS kind offer of their workshop space in Edinburgh, but […]

Postcard about Town Centre Regeneration
Town Centre regeneration is a hot topic these days. We’ve had Mary Portas of tv fame doing her version of retail led town centre regeneration. We have had the Scottish Government’s Community and Enterprise Town Centre Report followed by the Town Centre First principle and Action plan and then we have the books. The many, […]

Postcard from a Megabus
It seems that some of our Can Do Places people get inspiration and Town Centre Ideas, not just from the events we run, but on the journey to and from those events. Jill Davies, for instance, project manager with Coupar Angus Development Trust, said she often gets ideas in the Megabus travelling down from Perth. […]

Postcard from a Stalled Space
It’s the last thing you’d expect to see just off an unremarkable stretch of the busy Cathcart Road on the South Side of Glasgow. But there they were - a bunch of young folk having a barbecue on a Gorbals gap site, beside the remains of an Alexander “Greek” Thomson church. What was going on? […]

Postcard from Neilston
The small town of Neilston (pop. 6000 approx) in East Renfrewshire made the headlines recently when it was declared to be Scotland’s most desirable place to live. This was based on a study by the Centre for Economic and Business Research which considered factors such as good schools, green spaces and communting times. What the […]

Postcard from Sirolli
At our packed Can Do Places event ‘Collaborate or Perish’ in January, we were joined by Ernesto Sirolli. Ernesto is the founder of the Sirolli Institute, the global authority on bottom-up economic development. Ernesto is not your man for benchmarking, key performance indicators or other metrics of what he calls “the dismal science” (economics) as […]

Postcard from a Farmers’ Market
Great and inspiring programme on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Kitchen Cafe” about Scotland’s farmers’ markets and their future. Presenter Clare English spoke to (among other excellent contributors) sheep farmer, Jim Fairlie who was responsible for setting up Scotland’s first farmers’ market which launched in Perth in 1999 with 12 stall holders. Jim recalled that his “eureka” […]

Postcard from Bike Town: Update
Just three months ago, our Postcard from the Healthy n Happy Community Development Trust (covering Cambuslang and Rutherglen, near Glasgow), highlighted the launch of their Bike Town project, aimed at encouraging local people to get on their bikes and at turning Cam/Glen into such a bike friendly area that cycling visitors would be streaming to […]