Glasgow: A Typical Post-industrial City
4.4 Consolidation of the Old City but new Development at Random: the 1970s and 1980s
The plan proposed an inner motorway box—more than a ring—around a newly defined city centre and a number of roads forming a kind of grid and outer ring mainly to the south of the centre. This plan was accompanied by the ‘modest’
suggestion of demolishing the entire historical city centre and replacing it with free-standing blocks in the mode of Hilberseimer’s ideal city. Fortunately only small parts of this plan were implemented and the city centre remains largely intact. The original road plan was revised and modified in a number of stages (see Markus, 1993, p. 160). The final proposal of 1965 suggested an inner motorway ring which is fed by radial routes from all directions; there is also an outer ring (Fig. 4.22). In a first phase the northern and western sections of the inner ring formed by the M8 were built, bulldozing through the urban fabric between centre and the Park/Wood-lands area (Fig. 4.23). Today the road system, no longer exactly following the 1965 plan, is still being expanded, with a proposal for a southern tangent (the M74), and part of the 1965 plan, a motorway to the south-west through Pollok Park (the M77), has been implemented. The current condition is illustrated in Chapter 5.
Conclusions
Despite the large-scale and rigorously planned and ‘designed’ approach the overall outcome of comprehensive development and new housing estates at the city’s periphery is in many ways an unmitigated disaster. In social terms, many of the CDAs and peripheral estates are deprived areas. In urban design terms, the city has maintained some of its high-quality historical areas, specifically in the central linear area and some of the early inner suburbs, but these areas are now surrounded by repetitive and sprawling garden suburbs, ugly high-rise and poor-quality tenement development with poorly designed and randomly scattered tower blocks dominating much of the city’s skyline (Fig. 4.24). The city has lost much of its identity and about half its population but has hugely expanded in area as a result of the city boundary expansions of 1925 (inter-war housing schemes) and 1938 (mainly accommodating the peripheral estates).
During the inter-war and immediate post-war periods of urban transformation the city took on what today many call unsustainable characteristics.
4.4 Consolidation of the Old City but new Development at
‘renewal through conservation’ did not, however, find support then. But soon the conservation movement became consolidated through a number of actions (see Martin, 1993, pp. 167–84):
4–24. Today’s city skyline, Glasgow (view from Kelvindale looking north-west)
• The Scottish Civic Trust was set up in 1967.
• The Civic Amenity Act was passed by Parliament in 1967 giving statutory force to the designation of conservation areas.
• The Glasgow Corporation’s Amenity Liaison Committee was set up in 1972 to establish a dialogue between the Corporation and amenity societies.
• The report Conservation in Glasgow by Lord Esher, published in 1971, recommended among other policies nine additional conservation areas.
• The Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act of 1972 gave legal protection to almost 800 buildings of special architectural or historic interest in
Glasgow.
• The Planning Policy Report Conservation published by the Glasgow Corporation in 1974 introduced historic building grant aid and other conservation policies and proposals.
In parallel a programme of tenement rehabilitation was instigated. A storm in 1968 had caused serious damage to about 16,000 tenement properties, and the quickest way of providing habitable accommodation was to repair the existing building stock. In 1969 ASSIST, a research group at the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Architecture and Building Science, developed a tenement improvement programme for the installation of basic services, bathrooms and kitchens. In 1972 the first community-based housing association was established at central Govan. The Housing (Scotland) Act of 1974 enabled
housing associations registered with the Housing Corporation to obtain financial support for wholesale tenement rehabilitation programmes and introduced the concept of ‘action areas’. Between 1974 and 1990, Glaswegian housing associations renovated over 18,000 tenement flats (see Martin, 1993, pp. 184–6).
All this added up to an extensive programme of consolidation, repair and revitalisation of much of the remaining historical fabric in the central linear areas and some of the inner suburbs, and this in turn saved Glasgow’s image as an exceptional Victorian city. Next to the programme of the restoration of nineteenth-century tenements, the rehabilitation of the Merchant impressive as the quality and liveliness of the historical City and many other related projects are especially areas have much improved (Fig. 4.25a, b).
4–25. Consolidation of the historical areas of Glasgow that survived comprehensive development: (a) facade retention in the Merchant City; (b) tenement rehabilitation in Dennistoun
4–26. Glasgow’s new sheriff’s court south of the river
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).