General factors and dynamics of change

Since 1945, Glasgow experienced very significant economic restructuring and (planned) population deconcentration. From being one of the world’s leading industrial centres, specialising in heavy engineering (shipbuilding, locomotives) and related supply industries, Glasgow saw decline in its population – from 1.2 million in 1953 to fewer than 600,000 in 2001 – and in its manufacturing base. The post war period saw modernist-inspired housing developments both within the city’s 19th century tenemental industrial districts [eg Gorbals via the Comprehensive Development Areas (CDA) programme] and the development of high rise and medium density housing areas at the edges of the city. The city’s economy saw particular decline over the 1980s as the manufacturing base collapsed. However, since the mid-1990s, Glasgow has grown faster than the Scottish economy with very rapid service sector growth; in 2003 25% of the working age population work in finance and business services.

Glasgow is a European example par excellence of regeneration against a backdrop of severe structural economic and demographic change. The legacy of this is evident across the city with 40% of the city population resident in neighbourhoods of multiple deprivation.

Policy responses

Gorbals is an example of an inner neighbourhood, originally developed as a high density tenemental, heavy industrial community in the 19th century, that has been subject to (unsuccessful) comprehensive development-type, housing-led renewal in the 1970s and 1980s. More recently (1990s onwards) a broadly, integrated approach to regeneration has been developed that focuses on housing renewal, including private investment for housing and SME industrial space, development of the neighbourhood’s social capital and assistance to residents to access education, training and jobs – both within Gorbals and, increasingly, in Glasgow’s thriving and adjacent city centre.

Regeneration has developed in Glasgow over the past 50 years from public health-inspired slum-clearance to a more integrated approach based on both local and city-wide partnerships that focus on the economic development of the neighbourhoods. Some neighbourhoods, like Gorbals, are now in their 3rd generation of regeneration.

Regeneration in Glasgow is now based on partnership models at both the city-wide and neighbourhood levels that draw together major stakeholders involved in economic and social development, housing and community capacity building.

The study neighbourhood: Gorbals

The first regeneration of the Gorbals took place in the 1950s with slum-clearances and the second was the 'comprehensive development' in the 1960s and the building of new housing blocks which were to prove unfit for the wet Scottish climate. Following a prolonged campaign by the local community against the unacceptable housing conditions, the last of the damp housing blocks was demolished in 1993. As a result of these unsuccessful interventions, by 1991, the Gorbals was one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Glasgow with only 9,700 residents, of which 80% fell into Scot-land’s most deprived 10%.

Progress

In the 1990s, Glasgow District Council and Glasgow Development Agency (GDA - now SE Glasgow), with the support of Scottish Homes (the national housing agency), created a vision for the neighbourhood’s redevelopment. This was based on mixed tenure (i.e. privately owned and social rented housing); high quality housing served by a ran-ge of local shops, public services and leisure facilities. A masterplan for the Gorbals was developed as a part of the Crown Street Regeneration Project. Gorbals Initiative was established, to allow the local authority and the GDA to devolve economic development services to a local level and allow innovative responses to local issues.

The regeneration of the Gorbals is led by four key local organisations:

• Gorbals Initiative, leading on social and economic regeneration

• New Gorbals Housing Association, leading on social housing

• The Crown Street Regeneration Project, leading on the overall physical regenera-tion and interactions with private house builders

• (since 1999) Gorbals Social Inclusion Partnership (SIP) leading on community capacity building.

All of the above work closely with the local community, have resident representatives on their boards, and most have cross representation on their respective Boards of Management.

The regeneration of the Gorbals, although not fully completed yet, has been a success. The OECD has commented:

Glasgow has been remarkably successful at urban renewal and revitalisation, par-ticularly at a neighbourhood level. The changes which have taken place in the Govan and Gorbals neighbourhoods for example, neighbourhoods which in the past were extreme examples of social and economic deprivation and physical degradation but which offer some of the most positive and optimistic best practice examples of urban regeneration today.