THE GLASGOW DOUGHNUT

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What could this look like?

Thriving Glasgow Definition

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Explore a shared vision for a greener, fairer, prosperous Glasgow - the Thriving Glasgow Doughnut.

Glasgow Digital Doughnut Organisations
The Thriving Glasgow Doughnut presents a vision for the future of a greener, fairer, prosperous Glasgow. It is a future where the people, wildlife, and ecology of Glasgow are all able to thrive, and to thrive in ways that help us mitigate and adapt to the global climate crisis. The Glasgow Doughnut downscales to the city-level the global principles of Doughnut Economics – a conceptual framework which aims to answer the question, ‘how can we meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet?’

The Glasgow Doughnut provides detail on four distinct, but interconnected, perspectives on wellbeing, viewed through four lenses:
  • The Local-Social lens asks: How can all the people of Glasgow thrive?
  • The Local-Ecological lens asks: How can Glasgow be as generous as the wildland next door?
  • The Global-Ecological lens asks: How can Glasgow respect the health of the whole planet?
  • The Global-Social lens asks: How can Glasgow respect the wellbeing of all people?
Each of these lenses relates to the others, and shows that activities in Glasgow have a strong relationship with global wellbeing, both in social and ecological terms. The Glasgow Doughnut is intended to be viewed as a holistic, whole-system vision of what thriving would look like in all four lenses, with each being equally important.

To create a shared vision of a thriving future, we engaged in a year-long, wide-ranging engagement process with policy officers, elected officials, local citizens, scientists, private and third sector organisations. We co-developed 44 Thriving Glasgow definitions across these four lenses. Click on the different domains of the Doughnut to explore the definitions and what stakeholders said this might look like in Glasgow. This is just a start of the process and we encourage everyone to make use of the Glasgow Doughnut to work up their own ideas of what progress would look like and think about what is needed to help us get there.

What is clear is that for rapid progress, we need change in enough parts of the system to set in motion positive mutually reinforcing processes, whereby progress in one domain makes it easier to make advances in another – this means action by everyone, everywhere, all at once! In August 2023, the Thriving Definitions were adopted by Glasgow City Council to guide their future work. We hope that similarly, many Glasgow organisations, businesses and individuals will use this framework to articulate their individual and collective contributions to a greener, thriving Glasgow, identify action pathways, and use it to forge new alliances to accelerate action across the whole system.

For more detail on the research, policy context, and future steps, please download the Thriving Glasgow Portrait report and check out the solutions GALLANT is working on by visiting our project website.

Thanks to Donut Team (students at the University of Glasgow) for building the initial version of the application.