The reassertion of the Commons paradigm transformed the political landscape in which Scotland’s recent independence referendum took place.  Its groundswell is still growing and translating into significant changes in political decisions and policy practice drawing on a discourse of mutuality in contrast to that of markets (McApline 2014).  All of this has meant a rapid reconfiguration of how, where and with whom people learn and the rate at which learning and doing interact.   These changes also challenge assumptions about who frames, directs and assesses learning. Of particular importance has been the dynamic interaction of learning across social media and social spaces. This context provides a rich case study into the multi layered intersection of urban networks and their capacity to “speak” (Sassen 2013). 

However, what is broadly viewed as a grassroots movement should not be seen as separate or unrelated to institutional change within public services.  Both interact as public sector workers carry learning form their professional lives into their civic participation and vice versa. Within this meshwork of activities are several disjunctures, gaps and slippages,  it is not a utopian project but a loose alliance of initiatives that converse within the constraints that austerity (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014)  and its range of  neo-liberal eventualities intensify (Dorling 2014).  

Whilst much of this activity exemplifies social pedagogy (Hämäläinen 2012), the term itself is not widely understood or glossed to account for it.  The term social pedagogy, however, is gaining increasing air time in government offices and briefing rooms as policymakers wrestle with the problems of effecting cultural change within services and increasingly draw on Nordic social and economic models in order to do so. Similarly hybrid use of cafes and pavement space exemplifies design features of placemaking (Gehl 2010) without the explicit direction of architects and city planners who are at much earlier stages of incorporating it into their changing practices.  The ways in which commoning activity anticipates rather than reacts to policy formation can be examined for its potential as open source (Sassen 2012) policy development .  The hybrid use of cafes as social, economic and political spaces, their capacity to act as nodes within flows of social media activity, the new ways that social media is being projected on and carved into public spaces and private building facades make post referendum Scottish urban spaces at once texts (Bennet 1990) from which citizens learn and spaces that are actively being reshaped as a learning process.

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