Play with your food: Subverting the Golf Course

Food deserts - neighborhoods with limited access to affordable, nutritious food - represent a complex intersection of urban planning, economics, and social inequality. Across the UK, 1.2 million people live in these areas, typically defined as neighborhoods of 5,000-15,000 people served by two or fewer large supermarkets.

Glasgow sits at the epicentre of many of these challenges. Eight out of ten of Scotland's food deserts are located within the city. This coincides with significant amounts of underutilized land - Glasgow contains approximately 939 hectares of Vacant and Derelict Land, affecting 56% of its population who live within 500 meters of these spaces.

Urban agriculture has emerged as one response, with Glasgow supporting a network of at least 60 community gardens spanning approximately 17 acres. These initiatives often repurpose underutilized areas, demonstrating community capacity for land activation. However, persistent tensions around land costs and ownership continue to constrain grassroots projects. Temporary interventions, while valuable, raise critical questions about building longevity into land-based approaches beyond short-term solutions.

Ruchill, a district in north Glasgow home to approximately 10,700 residents, exemplifies these intersecting challenges. The area developed around the Forth and Clyde Canal during the 19th century as working-class housing for canal and factory workers. Despite being characterised as a food desert - served by just two convenience stores - the area has a vibrant community passionate about keeping community assets.

The former Ruchill Golf Course represents both recreational heritage and community vision. This 48-acre municipal site, established in 1928 as a 9-hole course, has remained closed since 2019 due to financial challenges. In consultation with 16 local residents, one person shared: "I've always loved having Ruchill Golf Course in my life, and it has been for nearly 70 years. We still need this open green space for the community to use." Their suggestions - nature reserves, orchards, children's play areas, wildlife habitats, cafes - reveal understanding of how land can serve multiple community functions.

The golf course exists within a network of stalled community assets. The Ruchill Community Centre, closed since 2020 with fluctuating renovation costs, continues to inspire weekly community protests demonstrating passionate community engagement. The Golf Course Pavilion currently serves as a temporary youth centre, though it's long term future is still a question mark. 

This project serves as a testing ground for how land can begin to spatialise differently, using seed bombs as experimental tools. Seed bombs - clay balls filled with native seeds and soil - have a radical history in urban contexts, used by guerrilla gardeners in 1980s New York to activate vacant lots stalled by bureaucratic processes.

The intervention explores an edge-based logic, occupying the periphery of the golf course to test how food production might coexist with other uses, rather than determining a single future for the space. This approach allows existing informal uses to continue while introducing new programs along the boundaries. Former sand traps could become herb gardens, maintenance paths could transform into educational routes, and the pavilion could serve as a shared space bridging multiple user groups.

A phased approach enables gradual transformation that responds to community needs and available resources: establishing food forest areas through ecological intervention, expanding growing infrastructure, creating connection networks through paths and pavilions, extending the Golf House for shared programming, and potentially transforming the Community Centre into a community hub. This incremental logic allows for testing and adaptation while building toward more permanent interventions.

By connecting food production with education and play, the project explores how a formerly monofunctional recreational space might address food access while preserving green character. This approach tests how careful spatial interventions can create new possibilities for connection and growth, offering a framework that could be replicated across Glasgow's network of vacant spaces to build longevity beyond temporary solutions.