Connected Communities Foodscapes

FOODSCAPES was an AHRC Connected Communities project (2013) that explored the use of art as a way of opening up discussion about food. Participants in the project included Knowle West Media Centre, The Matthew Tree Project (TMTP), the Edible Landscapes Movement (ELM), UWE Bristol, University of Southampton, the James Hutton Institute and Paul Hurley (artist-in-residence). Together, we explored how arts intervention and cultural engagement can help address food, food poverty, and sustainable communities. As co-designed action research, the project also examined how arts intervention can enhance interchange between community organisations and research institutions. Throughout Foodscapes there was an attempt to integrate the research questions, arts programming and evaluative activities into the actual process of the work, so that these activities could become entwined and, it is hoped, more meaningful for all involved

The dreaming city

This book documents the story of Glasgow 2020 - an 18 month project to imagine the future of Glasgow through the creativity and imagination of its people - drawing out key lessons for cities around the world, and bringing together a collection of eleven short stories about Glasgow\u27s future generated during the project

BCN_LDN 2020: comparing and contrasting two urban success stories

This collection of essays is the result of a collaboration between Demos and the Barcelona think-tank Fundaci? Ramon Trias Fargas. Over the last fifteen years London and Barcelona have epitomised the story of the \u27resurgent city\u27 but now face a set of challenges without easy answers. BCN_LDN 2020 brings together a range of essays that acknowledge the achievements of recent policy making, but provide a critical reflection on the success stories that we hear from both cities and explore directions for future urban politics

Learning with Community: Developing Citizen-Led Housing

Creating a flourishing city and delivering the Sustainable Development Goals in urban development is a complex challenge because of the interconnectedness between the different goals as well as the diverse perspectives and prioritisation of values among stakeholders. To navigate through this complexity and effectively orchestrate changes at the scales needed, innovation programmes have to be co-produced by and with stakeholders. Effective co-production requires mindful leadership and skilful facilitation. We introduce a learning framework which helps innovators and change programme leaders to facilitate an integrated approach to stakeholder engagement, so they can lead their project effectively and stimulate desired, community-led transformation. We examine the conceptual underpinnings of the framework, drawing from evidence in the literature about motivation and decision theories, co-production, learning, and resilient agency. We then describe how this framework has been developed in a case study of a citizen- led housing project in Knowle West, Bristol, UK and how the solution developed responds to the urban challenge themes of the Urban ID project: mobility & accessibility, health & happiness, equality & inclusion, carbon-neutral city, and environment & ecology. We highlight the importance of framing co- production as a learning journey and the need for the effective facilitation of both the behavioural processes of getting things done and the learning facilitation processes which enable people to change their minds and behaviours. These lead to the argument that mindful leadership in both thought and action and the development of a collaborative learning infrastructure are important success factors for co- production in Living Labs

Live Concert Performance: An Ecological Approach

For the last decade we have been engaged in the study of the history, economics, and sociology of live music in Britain. In this article we will consider the value of “ecology” as an analytic concept (rather than just a buzzword) and compare an ecological account of the setting in which music happens to the use of previous spatial metaphors, from Durkheim’s milieus to Straw’s scenes. To illustrate our argument, we present case studies of three Scottish concerts: one in a small-scale venue (Glasgow’s King Tut’s), one in a mid-size venue (Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall), and one in a large-scale venue, the 12,000-seater SSE Hydro

Local connectivity and synaptic dynamics in mouse and human neocortex.

We present a unique, extensive, and open synaptic physiology analysis platform and dataset. Through its application, we reveal principles that relate cell type to synaptic properties and intralaminar circuit organization in the mouse and human cortex. The dynamics of excitatory synapses align with the postsynaptic cell subclass, whereas inhibitory synapse dynamics partly align with presynaptic cell subclass but with considerable overlap. Synaptic properties are heterogeneous in most subclass-to-subclass connections. The two main axes of heterogeneity are strength and variability. Cell subclasses divide along the variability axis, whereas the strength axis accounts for substantial heterogeneity within the subclass. In the human cortex, excitatory-to-excitatory synaptic dynamics are distinct from those in the mouse cortex and vary with depth across layers 2 and 3

Human neocortical expansion involves glutamatergic neuron diversification

The neocortex is disproportionately expanded in human compared with mouse1,2, both in its total volume relative to subcortical structures and in the proportion occupied by supragranular layers composed of neurons that selectively make connections within the neocortex and with other telencephalic structures. Single-cell transcriptomic analyses of human and mouse neocortex show an increased diversity of glutamatergic neuron types in supragranular layers in human neocortex and pronounced gradients as a function of cortical depth3. Here, to probe the functional and anatomical correlates of this transcriptomic diversity, we developed a robust platform combining patch clamp recording, biocytin staining and single-cell RNA-sequencing (Patch-seq) to examine neurosurgically resected human tissues. We demonstrate a strong correspondence between morphological, physiological and transcriptomic phenotypes of five human glutamatergic supragranular neuron types. These were enriched in but not restricted to layers, with one type varying continuously in all phenotypes across layers 2 and 3. The deep portion of layer 3 contained highly distinctive cell types, two of which express a neurofilament protein that labels long-range projection neurons in primates that are selectively depleted in Alzheimer’s disease4,5. Together, these results demonstrate the explanatory power of transcriptomic cell-type classification, provide a structural underpinning for increased complexity of cortical function in humans, and implicate discrete transcriptomic neuron types as selectively vulnerable in disease

Human neocortical expansion involves glutamatergic neuron diversification.

The neocortex is disproportionately expanded in human compared with mouse1,2, both in its total volume relative to subcortical structures and in the proportion occupied by supragranular layers composed of neurons that selectively make connections within the neocortex and with other telencephalic structures. Single-cell transcriptomic analyses of human and mouse neocortex show an increased diversity of glutamatergic neuron types in supragranular layers in human neocortex and pronounced gradients as a function of cortical depth3. Here, to probe the functional and anatomical correlates of this transcriptomic diversity, we developed a robust platform combining patch clamp recording, biocytin staining and single-cell RNA-sequencing (Patch-seq) to examine neurosurgically resected human tissues. We demonstrate a strong correspondence between morphological, physiological and transcriptomic phenotypes of five human glutamatergic supragranular neuron types. These were enriched in but not restricted to layers, with one type varying continuously in all phenotypes across layers 2 and 3. The deep portion of layer 3 contained highly distinctive cell types, two of which express a neurofilament protein that labels long-range projection neurons in primates that are selectively depleted in Alzheimer\u27s disease4,5. Together, these results demonstrate the explanatory power of transcriptomic cell-type classification, provide a structural underpinning for increased complexity of cortical function in humans, and implicate discrete transcriptomic neuron types as selectively vulnerable in disease