…or why it’s so valuable for places working on tackling #highstreet vacancy to take a team inside empty units to work out how to get them back in use.
That’ll be the focus of the next in our series of guides and briefing notes, hoping they help local teams working on reducing the number of empty units and improving the mix of uses in their town or city centre.
Do let us know if you’re in a local council or BID team focused on this issue and would like a copy of this or one of the others.
They focus on arts & crafts, creative, culture and health & wellbeing as potential go-to uses for vacants, the power of community and business-led clean up operations, and ‘vinyling’ those long-term empties that are looking less than their best.
The latest draws on our experience down the years of getting inside empty units – especially the larger ones that have been like that for a while.
Our approach is to bring together a team of public and private sector specialists – council planners and building control/standards plus conservation officers (depending on the type of unit) with commercial architects, developers, #property agents and cultural organisation representatives – to go see.
Once inside the idea is they assess potential occupier options, barriers to getting the unit used again and how they can be overcome, and importantly, which stakeholders need step up to help make that happen. They can then feedback to the landlord and, if policy or regulation adjusts might help, to the wider ‘place partnership’ and on to government.
Our friends at Aberdeen Inspired are leading on some great pathfinding work around this approach as part of their award-winning Union Street upper floors project, and we’ll share insights from that in the guide.
If you’re running a similar team-based project getting inside vacant units in your place it’d be great to hear from you too…
