Equal Rights for All
“Equal Rights For All” forms a sub-project of my wider ‘If Place Mirrors Who We Are, What Does It Reflect?’ exploration of land use and different management approaches across Scotland. Working with Steve Connelly, Morag Paterson, and Culture for Climate Scotland, we undertook a collaborative ‘GreenTease’ workshop with some 40 participants, seeking to consider the tensions and competitions between different users of place in an environment of trust.
Before the workshop, I wanted to summarise my 3 years of creative research on land use and management around Scotland as clearly and concisely as possible, so I asked myself, “What Three Words Describe Land Use In Scotland Today?”. The following three words came closest to purveying what I had witnessed.
- IMPOVERISHED – that many of Scotland’s land uses and management approaches, be they urban or rural, have become siloed, specialised, commoditised and simplified
- DOMINIONED – that land use and management in Scotland are dominated by human needs over and above other users of any place
- GLIMMERS – a reflection of the hundreds of exemplars of amazing individuals, communities and organisations (the ‘quiet voices’) I had witnessed delivering new thinking towards a positive future for all users of place.
Having clarified my observations, I wanted to understand if my own observations reflected those of other people. With this in mind I asked the same question of the workshop participants in advance of the event, without informing them of my own thoughts. I gathered their responses into the following word cloud.
Wordcloud formed in response to the provocation “What Three Words Describe Land Use in Scotland Today?”
The experimental workshop centred around the provocation “Equal Rights For All…” with respect to place. We sequentialy posed three apparently simple questions, namely
- Who Should Have Rights?
- What Rights?
- How Should They Be Delivered?
The questions were first contemplated as individuals, then discussed in small groups before reconvening around a ‘fireside’ as a whole. All voices were given the opportunity to speak, with a principle that ‘there is no such thing as a bad idea’. What transpired was a series of unexpected philosophical discussions about place.
As we gathered the combined thoughts together following the event, my over-riding observation (others may have differing opinions) was that the discussions could be collated into a ‘Charter of Rights’ for all users of place. With this in mind I gathered them together in the visual form below.
Charter of Rights – by Ted Leeming. Based on, and with thanks to, the discussions and contributions of the GreenTease workshop participants of November 2024
Whilst inspired by the findings, I felt that unless you had been present on the day, it took a level of interpretation to summarise the observations. So, with the generous support of the GSA Biosphere, a further workshop to hone the thinking, and collaborating with the wonderful illustrator Maia Thomas, we created the following infographic.
The more people who consider the issues discussed in the workshop the better. As such please feel free to download, use, and share the Charter of Rights below (licence free for non-commercial purposes) far and wide, with anyone you feel will learn from, enjoy and engage with its content.
Charter of Rights For All Things, Now and Yet To Be – Maia Thomas & Ted Leeming
