“Growing daisies through the slabs”: Examining community invites for creatively co-produced local transformation

Place-based community resilience projects are increasingly harnessing creativity to promote local resilience in response to social and environmental risks. To achieve this, co-production methods have become a popular way to develop the necessary relationships between communities and local governing institutions for equitable transformation. This paper investigated a co-produced community resilience initiative commissioned in North Lanarkshire, Scotland. The initiative utilised creativity to inform place-based transformation, with communities invited by local government to co-produce a series of creative activities that informed local change. Our investigation occurred between January 2022 and November 2023 to examine the influence community members have within these “invited spaces” to overcome institutional inaction and enact changes to the local systems that govern them. We found that community members were able to establish meaningful relationships with institutional actors who mutually desired system change. Creative co-production helped build community capacity to influence institutional norms and processes by developing new knowledge that was filtered upstream to senior decision-makers. However, community proposals for change were sometimes re-scoped to what was considered institutionally achievable and realistic by those connected to structural power who remained bound by the state. While institutional changes (e.g. the design of a local policy strategy) were evidenced, there was limited influence over the overarching economic norms and processes that primarily drive and reinforce local social and environmental vulnerability. Future community projects developed from this place-based initiative continue to promote longer term community-institutional relationship building via creative co-production. As community influence permeates upstream, this may lead to a critical mass of systemic transformation.