Fittingly, as I write this review, the city of Glasgow is at the centre of the world’s attention. Many of the world’s leaders have been drawn to the city to participate in the UN COP26 summit, and the city centre has become the focal point for thousands of people from around the world peacefully taking to the streets to raise awareness of an uncertain future and present inequalities. For a couple of weeks, Glasgow has formed the backdrop for critical decisions to address global challenges; a time when the city leaders have been quick to portray its credentials as a post-industrial, sustainable city. All of this would have been unimaginable to those, like me, growing up in Glasgow in the 1960s and 70s. Then a smog of despondency and disillusionment had enveloped the city, replacing the previous smoke-filled mists generated by industrial works and coal burning to heat homes. The urban landscape was marked by many pockets of demolished factories and tenements; discouraged by the aura of despair, young people and families were fleeing the city to the new towns or further afield.
The transformation to the contemporary city hosting the COP26 summit forms the context of Kintrea and Madgin’s account of Scotland’s largest city. Their edited volume brings together authors who are, or have been, based in the city to provide a series of thematic accounts of the shift from Glasgow’s industrial past to its modern form. For the most part, the chapters recount the dimensions of change and the policy shifts that have enabled such change to take place. Each chapter helps to paint a picture of remarkable visible transformation in the urban landscape: the creation of the most extensive urban motorway network in the UK (Docherty in Chapter 4); housing renewal innovation to replace the ‘brutal slums’ (Robertson, Chapter 7); its gamble to reuse historic buildings as part of the urban agenda (Madgin, Chapter 11); the city’s vision of a sustainable city (Naylor, Murtagh and Kippen, Chapter 13). Together these chapters provide an excellent narrative of how, over a period of only fifty years, the ‘dear green place’ has once again found a renewed sense of urban confidence and been widely viewed as an exemplar of post-industrial rebirth.
The significance of such change is captured very well in the first two chapters of the book. The economic revival associated with the shift to a service-led economy, undergirded by the city’s universities helping to raise skill levels, is sketched out in Patrick, Kennedy and Macleod’s analysis of the city’s economic base. In their assessment, Glasgow’s economic shift reflects its rebalancing of its economic base and its attraction of external capital as inward investment, whilst retaining its traditional entrepreneurialism in generating local, small business. Achieving this has been supported by innovative forms of civic leadership, from one of the first public-private partnerships in the UK (in 1986) to the Glasgow Economic Leadership Board driving forward the latest transformations. Alongside this, Collins and Levitt’s chapter is a powerful reminder of the public policy battles that had to be fought to make such transformation achievable. Using the lens of policy discourse and analysis of government archives, the first chapter of the book spells out how policy responses to enable the city’s transformation were driven by resistance within the city to ‘the sustained application of a highly discriminated policy agenda within Scotland” (p22). From the active embracing of the urban decline of Glasgow as a way to ‘level up’ across Scotland to the city authority’s adoption of neoliberal credentials to demonstrate its independence, this chapter offers a fascinating insight into how too many accounts of urban post-industrial change gloss over its contested nature.
Wrapped around these chapters are the introduction and conclusion, in which the editors seek to open up this complexity further: they seek to challenge the widely-used term ‘post-industrial’ to apply to ‘any topic in cities that share a certain kind of history’ (p. 14). Their argument, exemplified in many of the chapters of the book, is the approach of embedding a single narrative about a finite state. Glasgow is, they argue, neither in a finite state of being post-industrial, nor has the city been transformed in a single way. Many of the individual chapter authors also note that transformation has not yet finished, and where it did occur its reach was only partial. However, one of the few frustrating aspects to the book is the limited extent to which individual chapters engage with the post-industrial label applied to Glasgow, let alone considering it as problematic.
The central thread of this fascinating account of a single city has much wider applicability. It is a challenge to politicians, academics and media who use the idea of a ‘post-industrial’ city to represent a singular transformation from the industrial past. In between the communiques released from the conversations of global leaders and their officials at COP26, journalists have been scrambling to find other ways to fill the airwaves and social media with insights from the host city. I hope that many of them have taken the chance to read Transforming Glasgow to gain an appreciation of how this city has become a globally competitive city, seeking to be the sustainable city of the future.
As the leaders, officials, protestors, and others depart at the end of COP26 and the climate challenges faced by the world remain unresolved, this book provides a stark reminder that the notion of a ‘sustainable city’, just like the use of the label of a ‘post-industrial’ city, fails to capture the many different facets of a city and the incomplete nature of the transformation taking place.
