Glasgow: A Typical Post-industrial City
4.5 The City Today
4–27. Out-of-town retail park development: (a) The Forge (aerial photo reproduced with kind permission of Glasgow Development Agency. © Scottish Enterprise); (b) Clydebank Shopping Centre
The consolidation of the historical fabric did not, however, coincide with a return to traditional planning and design principles for new development. There was no return to the grid structure and the perimeter block development principle, which both achieve the integration of disparate and incremental projects. Many new schemes, including important public buildings and flagship projects of the city, remain isolated events. There was no strategic plan, no design framework for the integration of individual projects, and many of them float in no man’s land and do not contribute to the activation of public streets and squares (Fig. 4.26).
Later, during the 1980s and as a consequence of the Thatcherite enterprise culture philosophy, strategic planning disappeared altogether from the vocabulary of urban development to make way for a laissez-faire attitude in which the city is shaped by market forces. The main argument was that control of market forces would not permit them to function effectively and would, therefore, stifle urban development (Hall, 1988, pp. 359ff). So they were frequently left to do whatever they wanted to do. In parallel, much retail moved out of urban districts into out-of-town or in-between-town parks (Fig. 4.27a, b) or, fighting to survive in the city centre, disappeared into introverted shopping malls (Fig. 4.28a, b) with dead service zones fronting public streets and squares.
Many commercial and industrial enterprises moved into business and industrial parks, often in enterprise zones (Fig. 4.29) outside the city boundary, and people moved out as well. Even some university departments and related industries moved into science parks. The disentanglement of uses, separating out into individual isolated places even more radically than at previous stages of urban development, left many urban areas even less activated and generated even more need for transport. And as population densities shrank, the most suitable form of transport was frequently the car.
Housing too contributed to the dispersal of the city. The public sector had ceased to build new housing, the private sector generated semi-detached or terraced family housing around culs-de-sac, ‘lollipop’ housing of very low density and often at the very edge of the city, which as a result continued to sprawl (Fig. 4.30a, b).
4–28. Inner-city retail development: (a) St Enoch Centre at Howard Street; (b) the Buchanan Galleries model
4–29. Enterprise zone at Port Glasgow
Uneven Population Density and Sprawl
With the exception of the historical high-density areas, the urban fabric is thinly spread over a vast area (Fig. 4.31). The overall gross population density of Glasgow (city boundary) is not particularly low (about 58.5 persons per hectare over the 60% of the city area that is developed; Glasgow City Council, 1995) but is rather unevenly distributed. The historical areas of the West End and some districts in the south reach gross population densities of up to 129 pph but suburban areas may reach densities as low as 10 pph (Glasgow City Council, 1995) (Fig. 4.32). This indicates that in some areas there is considerable spare capacity or, seen the other way round, that there is a considerable amount of land that could be transformed into green open space to become part of the city’s hinterland if the population density in the developed areas were to be increased to the average of 60 pph which is considered to be the required threshold value. I shall return to the question of density when investigating a more sustainable structure for the conurbation of Glasgow in Chapter 5.
Functional Zoning
Many of the city’s services and facilities, and with them workplaces, are concentrated in the relatively small city centre, which is surrounded by housing areas which are to a very large extent mono-use areas, dormitory places; the exceptions again are the historical districts. Despite the surplus capacity of the city much of the new private-sector housing is built on greenfield sites, frequently at the edge of the city or conurbation (Fig. 4.33) rather than on brownfield sites and gap sites in inner suburban areas, and this contributes to further sprawl of the city and car dependency of the citizens.
Despite the government U-turn regarding the location of retail (PPG6) and
public transport (PPG13), out-of-town retailing is still mushrooming, providing for those who are mobile, specifically those with a car, and ignoring those who are less mobile and the more than 60% of the population without a car. As a result, many
4–30. ‘Lollipop’ housing, frequently at the edge of the city. (a) case study estate layout from A Design Guide for Residential Areas, Essex County Council, 1973 (reproduced by kind permission of Essex County Council); (b) a recent housing scheme off Kelvindale Road, Glasgow
high street retail outlets are closing (Fig. 4.34) and more local provision, including schools, is lost, which in turn exacerbates the need to travel to further away facilities. In the city centre the concentration of city-wide activities and workplaces leads to serious congestion and pollution; some of the central streets are said to be the most polluted in Europe (Fig. 4.35).
Highway planning is still ongoing despite the worldwide experience that providing more roads does not, in the medium to long term, solve the problem of congestion but generates more traffic. Furthermore, as in the past, highway planning is carried out without an integrated view of districts and their role, and there does not seem to be co-ordination with public transport planning, park- and-ride and other efforts to keep cars out of the dense city centre areas and to minimise car dependency in other urban areas.
4–31. The sprawling city: aerial photograph of Garntyre looking east (aerial photograph, reproduced with kind permission of the Glasgow Development Agency.© Scottish Enterprise)
4–32. Uneven distribution of population in Glasgow, today’s boundaries including Rutherglen (based on Glasgow City Council, 1995)
4–33. Continuing development of greenfield sites
4–34. High street shops boarded up: eastern end of Great Western Road
4–35. Congested and polluted city centre roads: Renfield Street
4–36. The most deprived areas of Glasgow (based on Glasgow City Council, 1995)
4–37. Rehabilitation of the peripheral Easterhouse estate
Social Stratification
The social stratification of the city continues. The city is an agglomeration of ghettos for the rich and ghettos for the poor, with the rich and mobile in advantaged areas which they can afford and the poor and badly mobile in disadvantaged areas because they cannot afford to live anywhere else. Many of the tenement housing areas developed around the 1930s and many of the CDAs are today part of seriously deprived areas (Fig. 4.36). There are ongoing programmes of rehabilitation of peripheral estates and other problem areas (Fig.
4.37), but improvement is carried out without much of a study of the costs and benefits in the long term and without tackling the structural and socio-economic problems of these areas effectively (Reed, 1993, pp. 219ff). It can therefore be expected that much of the improvement carried out over the past two or so decades will have no long-term effect and that in the end the old problems will prevail. In some areas deprivation and dilapidation are so intense that demolition is seen as the only answer, without taking into account that with demolition the problem is only shifted elsewhere rather than solved.
Spatial and Formal Incoherence
In terms of form and image Glasgow is well structured and well designed, with legible paths, districts and monuments, only in historical areas. Other areas suffer from a mixture of poor spatial structure, poor architecture and poor landscaping, and accordingly are imageless and without identity, and indistinguishable from other city areas (Fig. 4.38).
Conclusions
Many believe that a city with such characteristics is not sustainable. Calls for visions and strategies are becoming louder, planning and design groups are being mobilised and debates are being organised to look at the city comprehensively and investigate strategies that might improve form and structure as well as the socio-economic conditions (e.g. University of Strathclyde River Clyde Conference 1996; GIA River Clyde workshop 1996;
City of Glasgow Planning Department, design framework for Partick Riverside, etc.).
Needless to say, Glasgow is not the only city with such problems; in fact many cities in the UK have much worse problems and also lack Glasgow’s remarkable qualities developed during the Victorian era. Glasgow has been selected to represent the post-industrial city for the very simple reason that it is
‘at hand’.
Chapter 5 will discuss which city model can be applied to improve the considerable structural, functional, formal and image problems of such a city.
The purpose of this discussion is to exemplify the viability of one of the macro- structures investigated in Chapter 3 and the applicability of the generally valid micro-structure of the city or conurbation to improve the existing, or generate a new, hierarchy of provision centres linked by a transport network.
4–38. Formal and spatial chaos north of Glasgow city centre:
Gamgad, Springbum, Sighthill (aerial photograph, reproduced with kind permission of the Glasgow Development Agency. © Scottish Enterprise)
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