Spacehive’s Chris Gourlay explains how community-focused creativity and collaboration can hold the key to urban revival.
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Q. What is Spacehive?
A. Spacehive is a crowdfunding platform that helps bring local places to life. From sprucing up your local high street, starting a community garden or creating a community festival – ideas to improve quality of life, or make people proud of where they are from. The platform acts as a springboard to help local people put these ideas forward, attract funding from local businesses and councils and get them off the ground.
Q. What has the pandemic meant for the business?
A. Despite all the challenges of the last year, there’s been a huge surge in community spirit. People have been reconnecting with their local area because they’re stuck in it. We’ve seen a real acceleration of this trend to start projects that make a difference – and for people to rally around them.
In the last year, we’ve had a four-fold increase in communities starting projects and we’ve doubled the amount of people contributing to each project on average. There’s a huge appetite from businesses, and from councils, to help make these things happen – and businesses now contribute to around 90% of projects.
As we come out of the pandemic, people are looking at the kind of changes we need to make in how we live and where we live. No one has all the answers, but if we can foster a more democratic and entrepreneurial culture of experimentation, where people test out ideas locally, we can then open this up as a way to improve places at scale.
Q. What lies behind the successful projects on the platf
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