Kevin P. Gilday

SURF Awards Speech 2023

I had the pleasure of being the after-dinner speaker at this year’s SURF - Scotland's Regeneration Forum awards for Scottish community regeneration. Over 200 guests packed into the Grand Central ballroom heard details of all the inspiring projects that were nominated and celebrated the winners.

I decided to eschew the usual post-dinner light entertainment to make a speech that argued passionately for urban planning to be a tool of connection and for community participation to combat the growing disenfranchisement of neglected groups who are being seduced by far-right rhetoric and culture war conspiracies. What else can you do when you have the country’s great and good in front of you and a mic in your hand?

Full Text:

I think it’s important that we start by recognising what we all have in common in this room tonight. And that is power. Power, and privilege. We have the privilege of enjoying a dinner in this iconic hotel. We have the privilege of sharing each other’s warm company. We have the privilege of going home somewhere safe at the end of the evening.

That privilege breeds confidence, and assuredness, and power.

We may not feel like we have any real power in the world. We might look at our narrow little sphere of influence and ask what we can really change against the monolithic forces of late capitalism, and I understand that – I feel that too – every day. But we only need to look at the key word that has been repeated throughout the night to know that we can affect positive change on our environment. That word is regeneration.

Power is inherent in regeneration. Every time we take something that’s broken and fix it we are harnessing our power. Every time we replace something lacking with something better we are harnessing our power. Every time we put the needs of people ahead of the needs of capital we are harnessing our power.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell the people in this room, but urban planning is a powerful tool. It sculpts our daily lives. It is the unseen hand that guides us from the front door to our workplace to our shops to our social lives. It quietly conducts our ability to thrive or simply survive. And that is power.

Regeneration is the redistribution of that power. When done right it transfers it from an organisation to the community and empowers the people who live in that community to change it for the better. When it’s done wrong it creates a chasm, a discrepancy of power. It’s this discrepancy of power that leads to disenfranchised communities. And disenfranchised communities are the breeding ground for social problems that soon spiral out into wider civilisation.

I see it every day in my community. I live just up the road in Springburn, not too far away from this room geographically but a world away in terms of privilege and power. From the moment you step out the front door you are greeted with a built environment that is nothing short of oppressive. It’s unused spare ground, concrete flyovers, pavements parallel to motorways, dual carriageways ploughed through the heart of our geography. The cumulative effect is a feeling of neglect. A feeling of not being important, a feeling that has been internalised by generations of young people.

There is a huge unseen inequality in the time and money that is spent on planning our towns and cities. As you would expect, the working classes suffer disproportionately from this unequal distribution of resources and disregard for the environment they inhabit. They are pushed to the forgotten margins of a city or sequestered in dense inner-city areas. Little or no thought is given to the everyday experience of living in these places – the access to facilities, the proximity to busy roads, the means of travelling out.

Just minutes from my front door there’s a flyover. It was built in the 70s. Before that there were houses, shops, a pub – all inhabiting that space. Now there is concrete and a good hiding place for schoolchildren to drink.

It didn’t appear organically. It didn’t happen overnight. Its existence was a choice. A committee decided that the houses, the shops, the pub were of less value than the road they wanted to construct. A committee who were not residents of the area they were about to dismantle. This is the power of urban planning in action and the invisible influence it has over our lives.

I know those houses, shops and pub existed because I’ve researched the area, I’ve seen a photograph that proves it. For young people born there who have no idea of the history, that flyover is just another part of their everyday environment. A big concrete block of nothingness that reminds them they live in a place of low importance and that their personal importance should be seen as relative to that.

And that resignation is the origin point of so many of the social problems that go on to blight my community and others like it across the country.

But I’ve also been lucky enough to see what happens when we can properly engage with people, when that transfer of power occurs naturally. What happens when we tell people they are worth something and show it in our actions towards them. As an associate artist with the National Theatre of Scotland I was given the opportunity to find a way of engaging with my local community through art.

Now there are lots of very well-meaning art programmes that run across the country, I’m sure many people here will have examples from their own local area, but many of them fail in a number of simple ways – mainly that they are run by people who don’t know the area and that they don’t really include the people who live there either. How many times have we seen people bringing interpretative dance workshops to deprived communities? It’s not to say anything against interpretative dance by the way – as a poet I don’t have a leg to stand on – but it’s important to meet your audience where they are.

And the audience in deprived areas are often disparate and diffuse. They do not congregate in one place and the few places were people do still meet – pubs, bingo halls, community centres – are often under threat. I knew from my own experience that there was only really one place we could get ourselves in front of the myriad different people of Springburn – and that was the shopping centre. A place where people from all walks of life pass through at some point throughout their week.

That was the genesis of my project the Bank of Springburn where we took over an old Santander bank unit in the shopping centre and turned it into a community art hub. For two months we opened this space up to the public with a range of events but also just as a place for people to meet and chat and be heard. A place to be present. We reclaimed this vacant space, one of many in the shopping centre, and brought it to life with the possibility of real interaction.

I programmed a range of weekend events that saw us bring live music, hip hop, poetry and comedy to the space. I ran a weekly writing workshop, giving people the skills to express themselves through art. But by far our most popular initiative was our poetry takeaway service. The idea here was that people could order a poem from me on any subject and I’d write it within half an hour while they got their shopping. I’d then give them a one-to-one reading of the poem before they took it home. A bespoke piece of art that existed just for them.

I was amazed how many important conversations it opened up. I had people asking me to write memorial poems for neighbours who had OD’d, anniversary poems for parents, happy birthday poems for best friends, manifestos for local organisations – it was all there. Real connection, real conversations being prompted by the reclaiming of space in a location where people could interact freely.

One day I had two guys come in. They were obviously nervous. The type of guys who probably hadn’t interacted with an arts space like this before, certainly the type of guys that hadn’t talked to a poet about their feelings before. I really respected them even coming in the door to have a chat. We had a cup of tea and one of them tells me that he’d like a poem for his daughter. That she was brilliant and creative and clever but she was lacking confidence in herself. His face lit up the minute he started talking about her. It was properly amazing.

Through talking to the guys I gleaned that they had met each other in prison. That they had become friends and were helping each other through the various trials of reintegrating back into society. It was a really important conversation for us all to have. Anyway, about fifteen minutes pass and they stick their head back in. I tell them that I’m still chipping away at the piece and it wasn’t quite finished yet. That’s when the other guy sheepishly steps forward. See, he had a daughter too and he didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity to have a poem dedicated to her.

He stepped out his comfort zone to give her a meaningful gift that she could treasure. It’s a small thing. But these small things count in life.

For a couple of months I took that power of a national organisation – the resources, the funding, the clout – and helped distribute in a community. And yes, some people just wanted a free cup of tea, and yes, some folk thought it was a real bank and yes there was a woman who came in every day to tell me the plot of Titanic… But that’s what real community work looks like. In doing so, we changed the built environment of our community and turned a void into something creative and nourishing.

I know that not every project can commit to interacting on such a micro level but when the process of regeneration is done with thoughtfulness and empathy it can’t help but generate conversation and connection. And connection is what we need more than anything right now.

Part of the remit of this speech was to give my ‘perspective on Scottish communities and society’. The organisers are probably already regretting that. The truth is that I don’t think it’s possible to approach that effectively without addressing things from a political viewpoint.

I truly think we are at a crossroads in society, not just in this country but worldwide. There is a civic tipping point looming that we need to address before it becomes a turning point. A silent epidemic that we need to take action to halt before it spreads any further.

I believe we’ve reached the endgame of fragmentation in our society. We risk losing whole swathes of the population to disenfranchisement. To conspiracy theories and far-right rhetoric. There is a schism appearing across our public life, a binary. Some people refer to it as a ‘culture war’ but it is no organic dispute, it has been created by a ruling class and parroted by their media. It has been exacerbated by rancid online discourse and petty point scoring. And it is the most urgent threat to our ability to create social cohesion and improve civilisation as a whole.

People are rejecting society, they are retreating away from life in order to hide away in conspiracies and arguments. These are people of all ages who are no longer actively participating in our communities. Scotland is not immune to this, in fact it is the perfect breeding ground for this kind of discontent. Our religious and political faultlines have been exploited to further separate the population and create disharmony. We are in the midst of seeing our society split in half over created issues and manufactured debates.

There are many factors that set the scene for this radicalisation. They target people who are exhausted by a constantly shifting political landscape, people who are living precariously, people who are isolated. The disenfranchisement of whole sections of the population makes them susceptible to this dangerous rhetoric. Conspiracy theories about covid and other world events, anti-immigrant and racist tropes, homophobia, transphobia, self-hatred and the idolising of fraudulent demagogues and vile misogynists like Andrew Tate.

These are the symptoms of a social disease brought on by a wide-scale neglect. This is the outcome of industrial scale loneliness. The only cure to this disease is connection.

That’s where everyone in this room comes in. We need to use whatever small amount of power we have to foster these connections. We are privileged enough to have this power, it’s our duty to use it well. Like I said earlier – it’s the small things that matter. It could be one project, one area, one person, one child. But change is change. These projects we’ve honoured tonight are part of a larger social tapestry. Progress is always incremental, but each regenerative step brings us closer to a society where no-one is left to fester and find kinship in the dark reaches of the internet. Power still resides in the hands of people, it’s up to us – politicians, policy makers, organisations, artists – to remind the people of that fact and help facilitate its use with positivity.

And it’s not just organisations that have this power. More and more it feels like community groups are discovering their own agency. Their ability to change their locale for the better and actively improve the lives of the people in their neighbourhood. It’s not about waiting for someone else to do it, unfortunately we know that means we’ll be waiting for a long time. It’s about discovering our own power and making the changes we can for ourselves.

Projects fail when they fail to see the people behind the numbers. When lives become an abstract nuisance rather than the rationale. When we dehumanise people, when we see them as unimportant – or even expendable – then we are no longer working for the common good but against it.

I’d like to read a poem for you now, a piece that is rooted in my community of Springburn. Its issues, its traumas, its resilience. It’s about the way we see working class lives and the truth behind that abstraction. It’s called Excess (Noun).

Excess (noun)

We have too much round here
An excess in these parts
More than our fair share
And enough to spare
Mortality

It seeps from our taps
A slow dancing poison
Climbs perilous out the window
Of the high flats
Dives for fag doubts
Outside the shopping centre
A surplus of this mortality

This city breathes it in
A profusion of cessation
Particles plunged into the air
From ancient factory pipes
Laden with asbestos
An industrial nightmare
Oblivious to the winds of change

Down the road they have just enough
But here we are inundated
This ‘Glasgow effect’
That turns beloved sons
To drug addict statistics
That strips a diet down
To tins and boxes
A glut of mortality

Your maw would always claim she didn’t have a favourite. But it was definitely you. We could tell as she put you in the ground. Our dear green place, fertilised with the bodies of the forgotten. Your membership to that Tuesday morning Methadone crew. Nerves jangling, until one day they didn’t.

And no-one can tell us why
Why we keep dying
Why there’s a funeral parlour in every scheme
Why our wake outfits
Hang heavy with expectation
On the back of bedroom doors

So we learn to wallow in the waiting
Biding time til our turn
Scanning the Evening Times obituaries
Memorialising colleagues and classmates
Faces revealing themselves
From foggy memory
Like a brass rubbing

‘Right enough, the big man wasn’t looking too good last I saw him’

They don’t seem to have an answer
As to why it resides here
Our ASBO neighbour
Aggressively lurking at the close door
Funny how this excess
Sits neatly in a postcode like a stray
And for the life of you
For the life of us
No-one can say why

And what should I say to the teenage mothers pushing firstborns in second hand prams? Babies fed on mould and spores. Expectancy stunted. A life interrupted, by this exorbitant mortality.

And I wait every day
For this invisible force
To add me to the graph
An outlier
Marking the trend
Beside family and friends
Our little crosses
Recorded on a whiteboard
A sociologist’s nightmare

And I dispute the details
Of my mother’s death certificate
That did not record poverty,
A lifetime of it,
As cause

But round here
They call it excess mortality
They call it inevitable
They call it life
If they had the courage
They would call it what it is –
They would call it
Genocide

Sorry for finishing on a heavy note. I know that people have come here to eat, to drink, to celebrate. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to be the spectre at the feast and remind everyone what it is we’re doing this for. We have power in this room and we need to make sure we’re reminding ourselves to concentrate it in positive ways.

We are in a seemingly perpetual crisis. Everything is strained, everything is at odds, everything is struggle. I feel that too. I know how hard it is to even get out of bed some days. To confront the horror of the news. But connection and empathy and love are, as always, our only way out. We need to demonstrate that from the top down and from the ground up. We need to cultivate a mutual respect that will help us to bring equality to forgotten areas and joy back to people’s lives.

Connection is the cure and we have the power to proliferate it. Let’s leave here tonight with a renewed intention when we hear the word regeneration. A promise to take a feature that’s failing the community and turn it into something beautifully functional. Something to generate connection. A small thing. The kind that makes a difference.

SURF Awards, 07/12/23, Grand Central Hotel, Glasgow