Hapworks_00 was a pilot creative coworking and event space occupying and animating a vacant unit at 7 Castle Street in Dundee City Centre from February 2024 to June 2025.
The space offered creative coworking, event space hire and hosted a diverse programme of events and workshops, animating the street and showcasing creative work in a visible city centre location. It demonstrated the role creative space and communities can play in the reimagining of our city centres, as well as testing new models for long-term space.
Hapworks_00 was facilitated by Creative Dundee and supported by Dundee City Council through their Vacant to Vibrant initiative and Creative Scotland's Recovery Fund for Cultural Organisations.
Key Outcomes
Activated an Empty Retail Unit: hosted over 85 events, welcoming more than 1,400 people to the space for workshops, film screenings, performances, talks, game jams and exhibitions.
Supported Freelancers and Micro-businesses: 57 coworking days resulted in 361 coworking visits, helping to build networks, foster collaborations and reduce isolation. Over £11,000 was invested in local businesses to animate and deliver the project.
Built New Creative Infrastructure: 5 Hapworks Takeovers supported groups to temporarily occupy a city centre unit providing space for development and experimentation, and platforming 65 creative practitioners.
Generated Evidence and Demonstrated Demand: Confirmed the significant gap in affordable creative space for individuals, startups, and community groups to make and share their work, and gathered critical data to inform future long-term spaces.
Key Impacts
Alternative uses for Vacant Space: Demonstrated the role that creative space and the creative sector could play in city centre regeneration.
Place Activation: Creative programming boosted footfall in the city centre, supporting nearby businesses and the evening economy, improving street vibrancy and perception of safety.
Community Wealth Building: Provided a visible city centre platform for creative practitioners and micro-businesses to share their work and foster new collaborations.
Collective Knowledge: A focal point for the wider Hapworks project, bringing together long-term creative space stakeholders and progressing conversations with the property sector about long-term space and generating practical insights for future cross-sector partnerships.
"We currently work in a studio space that is hidden away, inaccessible to the public and at times unsafe, but it feels like we don’t have many options. I believe Dundee has so much potential but without better access to long term space creative businesses will not survive.”
Next Steps
Hapworks_00 opened up conversations about possible long-term space and we are excited to move forward and collaborate to explore these opportunities. To instigate lasting change, the creative sector, local authorities and city partners, and the property sector must come together to re-evalute current systems, continue to test new ways of making vacant space accessible to creative communities, and collectively attract the investment needed to support existing creative spaces and the creation of new ones.
Our report Foundations for Growth: Creative Space Infrastructure in Dundee proposes some next steps to making this happen.
Hapworks has been enabled by Creative Dundee with support from Creative Scotland’s Recovery Fund for Cultural Organisations and Dundee City Council’s Vacant to Vibrant initiative.
© Hapworks 2024
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