Cities are made up of overlapping material flows. At a time of rapid urbanisation, these flows are getting ever faster, denser and more complex. The construction industry accounts for 38% of total global emissions.

Test Unit is a summer school exploring cross-disciplinary approaches to city development. Through an intensive week we aim to turn talk into action by testing ideas in public space. Each year we inhabit a building or site and learn through engaging with ideas, materials, people and place.

Overview: A week long experiment in thinking through building, without models or drawings. How do mainstream cultures of construction impact on our shared experience of the city, and day-to-day possibilities of urban life?

Glasgow’s canal area is bringing its future into collective hands. But how to enact something that is yet to be imagined? Overview: Over the next 10 years the Glasgow Canal Co-op is expected to bring a much needed impact to Glasgow’s canal area.

Initial Brief The designer Paul Elliman said ‘a school is a building with a school in it’. Do we agree? Where next for creative education? What would independent creative learning, embedded in place and context, look, act and feel like?

How can the act of site responsive making be used as a tool for engagement? Initial Brief: Through sourcing local material we will use this as a tool to map/register the social, cultural and economic condition of the area and construct a new scenario for the occupation and use of the Phoenix Nursery site.

1. Money is a fiction 2. Dialogue is real 3. Maggots The Institute for Spontaneous Generation has been developed over the course of Test Unit to explore ways of building collaborative economies which question our current notion of wealth and value.

The Brief: ‘How could we could re-imagine the possibilities for Phoenix Nursery? How could design interventions communicate these possibilities? How can a two dimensional objects inhabit a three dimensional space?

Spatial Occupation Unit has been exploring the idea of the commons as a way of breaking down the false binary of public/private, and grappling with the possibility of growing more collective, self driven and co-owned models of occupying and developing urban space.

The urban bothy brought together a diverse range of participants representing community arts, local activism, landscape architecture, art, graphic design and architecture to conceive, develop and deliver a small place of reflection that could facilitate an overnight stay.