Gerry Hassan discusses the innovative Glasgow 2020 project.
What Glasgow? – The city, not the film. The city
is the film. – Oh come on. – I tell you. – Right then,
look. Renfield Street, marchers, banners, slogans.
Read the message, hear the chant. – Lights, Cameras!
Thinking about the future is part of being human. For as long as human beings have lived they have begun to think, dream, imagine, hope and worry about the future. Imagining different worlds has been a central creative theme in art, literature and film.
The world of ‘futurology’ is far removed from such accounts, however; it has its origins in the vast research spending of the US military-industrial complex in the second world war, when policy boffins such as Robert McNamara worked to produce detailed analysis of the effectiveness of bombing Japanese cities. Then in 1946 this new way of thinking about warfare gained focus with the establishment of the RAND Corporation, a federally funded research facility, which during the cold war developed ways of thinking about the future that included the theorising of nuclear weapons scenarios.[3] Analysts such as Herman Kahn began to develop some of the key tools of future thinking – for example scenario-building and visioning – and in 1967 the World Future Society was established.
Future thinking mostly takes place within the narrow and elitist world of those with power, influence and status. Governments, corporates and big institutions future scan, trying to identify possible new trends, discussing possible, probable and preferred futures, as well as unforeseen events that may unsettle their plans, with the aim of controlling the future as much as possible. This is not an open, democratic set of conversations; it is about those with power looking to maintain it and second-guess any challenges, or emerging threats or rivals. My argument is that the rest of us need to join in this debate.
In the last couple of years I have been involved in two major projects looking at a much wider sense of how we imagine the future: Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020. The Scotland 2020 project looked to overcome the prevalence of negative accounts of Scotland’s devolved government, and to identify positive possibilities through the idea of story; and from this came the impetus to set up a much more ambitious and daring project to test the public appetite for imagining the future through story, this time at the level of a city.[4] Glasgow 2020 had three dimensions: it was about the city of Glasgow; it was about cities generally; and it was about how we think about the future.
These three strands came together to make Glasgow 2020 something of a unique project and intervention, and as far as we know a world first – an attempt to reimagine the city through the idea of the stories people tell. It involved the support of virtually every public agency in the city – including the city council, Scottish Enterprise, the Health Board, the universities, art school and music academy, and the fire and police services. Each gained a perspective of the city they would not otherwise have been able to get (and none asked for a veto on its findings).
Glasgow is a fascinating city in which to attempt such an experiment. It is Scotland’s first city in terms of size, still being significantly larger than Edinburgh. It likes to see itself as a ‘big city’ – a place bigger and more important than its population or status might imply. It is a city that has undergone huge waves of expansion, growth, change, reinvention, challenge and decline. While its formal council area has seen a population decline from 1.1 million in the 1950s to 600,000 today, the wider Glasgow conurbation still contains 1.2 million people, and is one of the most vibrant and varied parts of Scotland and the UK. It has left behind its role as the Second City of Empire – when it made its wealth from transatlantic commerce and trade. It is now the Second City of Shopping – reflecting its retail power.
This is a city rich with stories and tales. Some of these can be problematic: the city is variously known as ‘the sick man of Europe’ and ‘the murder capital of Europe’. In the 1930s Glasgow gained opprobrium as ‘No Mean City’ – for its gang culture that was over-sensationalised in the novel of the same name. In the 1980s the city’s swagger and sense of importance saw this phrase reappropriated as part of Glasgow’s cultural reinvention, in the opening credits of the TV series Taggart. Then there is the football, which no discussion of the city can be without. The city has never been, as some have claimed, a ‘Belfast without the bombs’, but the sectarian divide between Celtic and Rangers undermines the efforts of the city authorities to promote images of the city as cosmopolitan, modern and welcoming.
Alongside all this there is the upbeat picture of the city: a place of culture, creativity and innovation, a city filled with vibrancy and buzz. This is a city of artists, writers, musicians, dreamers, and of Glasgow characters and humour: the place that gave the world Stanley Baxter, Lulu, Billy Connolly and so much more!
Glasgow 2020 aimed to look beyond these images and accounts, and to find perspectives of the city that opened up possibilities and addressed some of the fundamental questions about the future: what kind of city do you want to live in, what kind of values do you want your life and city to be shaped by, and, ambitiously, how can we begin to mark out a route map to get there?
An age of urban renaissance?
The Silver Tree was an impossibility in a rational landscape. It mocked our city, our civilisation, which was the most advanced in the history of the world. As it grew it reminded us of our morality, our limitations. All my life had been about the focusing of the will. In search of perfection, the architect had fused the human with the inhuman – but along with the wonderous buildings, there came this infernal tree!
This is, according to some analysts, a golden age for cities. Regeneration. Redevelopment. Renaissance. Across different societies and cities, skylines are changing, and the same faceless, shiny buildings are rising, often owned by the same corporations. A new era of cities located in the once ‘Third World’ – Dubai, Shanghai, Seoul – see themselves as the ‘hot’ places of tomorrow. The once dominant cities of the West are reinventing and redesigning themselves to stay ahead, anxious that complacency will mean they will lose their competitive edge.
This has had the cumulative effect in ‘the West’ of producing an identikit city that you can practically buy off the shelf. The urban formula of success – first tried and tested in places like Barcelona and Bilbao – has become an increasingly narrow one, with diminishing results. It reduces cities to participation in a kind of cultural arms race, competing with iconic buildings, galleries and museums, riverfront developments and squinty bridges. This is the model of development advocated in Richard Florida’s over-hyped The Rise of the Creative Class, a frequently referenced but rarely read book, which instrumentally appropriates ‘culture’, ‘creativity’ and ‘diversity’ for economic policy – an urban manifesto for the globally mobile and successful. In this model creativity and culture become nothing more than a commodified adjunct of economics.
At the 2007 ‘Imagining the City’ symposium held at the newly reopened Southbank Centre, two very different ideas of the future of cities were put forward. Richard Sennett offered a critique of the contemporary urban orthodoxy, and the grip of a monoculture that is shaped by tourism and finance; as he argued, a city shaped by such forces becomes a site of inequality: a lived-in space filled with lots of people doing well and lots of people struggling to survive. A very different model was put forward by Peter Head, Director of Sustainability at Arup (www.arup.com), a global design and business consulting firm. Head offered us a glimpse into the world of Arup in China, in a presentation of ghastly and near Hollywood-style sentimentality, with soft focus, dewy colours and ‘new age’ music. Head focused on the monster project for the new city of Dongtan, in which Arup are strategic partners with the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation. Dongtan is being built as an ‘ecocity’ in the Yangtze River delta, near Shanghai, and Arup see it as a potential ‘Chinese Manhattan’, or alternatively a ‘new Venice’: the beginning of ‘a new paradigm’ in cities. This project is part of the export of the identikit consumer city; it benefits western business interests and promotes consumerism, in a partnership in which both sides are able to ignore issues of democracy and equality – a lack of concern for such matters being a common bond between Leninist vanguardists and market fundamentalists. The bright green aspects of the project only add to its charm.
Dongtan is not all it appears, however; it has been called the equivalent of a ‘Potemkin eco-village’, an attempt by China to showcase its eco-conscience while all the time, down the road in Shanghai, 18-20 million people live without any environmental regulations.[6] There is also the issue of how a sustainable eco-city can be built upon the flatlands of a river delta, barely two metres above sea level: by the time the model city hits its target of 500,000 people in 2050, it could be an underwater city. The proposals clearly appalled Sennett but Head could find nothing to criticise in them.
The Dongtan example illustrates a number of wider issues about cities, development, politics and public debate. Firstly, there is the compromised nature of our political classes. The deal to bring about Dongtan was signed at No. 10 Downing Street with Tony Blair present. John Prescott, as Deputy Prime Minister, made several trips to Dongtan, and there have been rumours that his retirement may see him join Arup’s Board as a Non-Executive Director. The lack of discussion about such issues is highlighted in the uncritical way that this deal, and others like it, are presented in the media and public debate – from the Financial Times to Wired. People want to do business with China and want to get their feet in the door, and are prepared to compromise their ethics to achieve this. Dongtan is the ultimate in trying to have your cake and eat it: building a new Chinese city while dressing it in eco-camouflage.
Dongtan is an extreme example of tendencies in the mainstream city discourse, but it embodies the main outlines of the official-future view of the city. The presentation of this dominant vision may be sweetened with creative industry mood music, but it has little to do with the world of people, imagination and democracy.
The official future versus the world of mass imagination ….
‘Sur, what does GDP mean? Ah’ve just downloaded ma news page here, in it says that Scotland’s goat the highest GDP in the world. Is that good Sir or bad Sir?’
John Daly, Allowed, Able and Willing
The ‘official future’ is the place where the public discourses of government, public agencies, mainstream media and the corporate world coalesce into a relatively coherent worldview.[7] It increasingly points in one way – towards a model of the world centred on economic growth, determinism and the primacy of competition and markets. ‘The official future’ is a place filled with its own jargon, buzz words and bright, shiny documents, which promise an upbeat, glorious world of optimism and prosperity. Beneath this panglossian promise, however, there is an innate and deep-seated pessimism – which acknowledges that this is a soulless, friendless and loveless world. It is a world filled with such word games as ‘inviting people to do the step-change’: sadly, not a new dance craze, but an example – one of many – of consultant-class speak. The concepts of change inherent in this official future are imbued with words and values from business models and the primacy of economic development. Ideas of change that are social, cultural or ecological, or organic and community-centred, just don’t get a look in.
Given the power of this worldview in public discussions, most people feel they have little choice but to accept the ‘There is No Alternative’ mindset; and yet they do so with little real enthusiasm, and with a sense of resignation. There is a sense that ‘the official future’ has already been decided by forces more powerful than you and I – and this makes people feel like instrumental agents, and brings a feeling of powerlessness.
Glasgow 2020 set out to challenge this feeling, to explore the possibilities of people thinking, conceiving and developing their own futures. We called this a mass imagination exercise – drawing on the ideas of the 1940s mass observation surveys, but with the aim of something more pro-active. We ran a total of 38 events, nearly all of these in Glasgow, involving over 5000 local people – nearly one per cent of the city. We reached out across geographies, generations, identities and socio-economic backgrounds – from taxi drivers and hairdressers to journalists and entrepreneurs, from people living in social housing, to asylum seekers and commuters. This was an imagination exercise, not a consultation: animation, fun, humour, creativity and fuzziness were the main characteristics in our events. Discussions did not focus on people’s identities – as ‘single parents’ or ‘creative entrepreneurs’, etc; instead they developed a general, structured conversation about the future, using the techniques of philosophical inquiry. This meant that discussions that began with people stating their usual views on a subject typically ended up somewhere else.
A variety of public spaces were used. Some were everyday public spaces such as libraries, museums and community centres. Others were disruptive spaces – for example Glasgow-Edinburgh trains were taken over for two days; a Saturday of events was run in the city’s biggest art gallery and museum, Kelvingrove; and a boat equipped for a day as an office sailed up and down the River Clyde in stormy weather.
Tales of the city
Glasgow – Green City?
No since they built hooses on hauf the parks and ran a motorway
through what was left.
Glasgow – Clean City?
Graffiti City mibbe.
Or Chuggie City?
Aye you cannae walk down a street wioot gettin it stuck tae your
shoes.
Anne Donovan, Glasgow’s Pants
One of the central pillars of Glasgow 2020 was the power of story. Stories matter. People relate to and identify with the idea of story. Our lives, loves and world are made sense of by the various stories which make them up. Politics used to be shaped and defined by a set of over-arching and potent stories that offered to make sense of the world. The centre-left in Britain once had a story in socialism, along with an idea of how this was to come about through ‘the forward march’ of ‘the labour movement’. One of the fundamental changes of the Blair era has been the near complete disappearance of this story, and the subsequent Brown administration also seems unsure of its moral compass and mission.[8]
Cities are shaped by the myths and potencies of stories, as Armistead Maupin recognised in his famous Tales of the City set in 1970s San Francisco. Glasgow 2020 looked to encourage the non-institutional stories of the city to find their voice. We ran events where people, after their initial discussions, created characters who inhabited the city in 2020, and embryonic storylines; from these seeds many fullyfledged stories of the city of the future emerged.
There is a direct relationship between people’s disquiet about ‘the official future’ and the way they see public institutions, from government to the corporate sector. More and more people say that they suspect that the values which inform institutions are not the values they would like them to be informed by. People also suspect that the public face that these organisations present to the world, with all their talk of being sensitive and informed by the public, is not what really influences them.
This is not a perception that can be addressed by better communications or transparency. This is about something much deeper: an emerging values gap between people and institutions. There is a general sense that institutions have bought into a view of the world that has a set of values far removed from notions of public service and public duty, or from any sense of real consumer sensitivities and power. It is revealing that the scepticism that people feel is often articulated in hesitant and unsure ways – as if they wish they could be proved wrong by the facts. And the manner in which people state their views shows that the language of this doubt and disquiet – after the demise of socialism – has yet to find a full form.
In every event across Glasgow 2020 people expressed hope for themselves, their neighbourhoods and city. From the poorest to the most affluent areas, people had hope and showed that they had individual or neighbourhood ways they acted upon this. What was missing was the sense of a city-wide collective agency joining this up. Across the city this tale was shaped by gender. More women than men ‘did’ things. Women had tales of doing things to take hold of their lives, support their children and change their communities. Frequently they had a very different and more immediate idea of change and politics than the more conventional ideas expressed by many men, who tended to have a view of politics and social change which was rooted in others – i.e. politicians – bringing about change.
The seven cities of the future
And the film makers. The city’s teeming wi’ them! Everybody wants
to make their films about Glasgow these days. Or write books set
in Glasgow. And you wouldnae mind so much except it’s no your
old Glasgow they’re writing about. It’s this new European Glasgow.
Cosmopolitan Glasgow.
Kirsten Anderson, A Tale of Two Cities
From the range of discussions and activities of Glasgow 2020 seven very different cities of the future emerged. All these possible future cities – unlike utopias or dystopias – were already present in some way in the city of the present. The seven cities merely took different aspects of the present and accentuated them or crossfertilised them with other forces. They were:
The Two Speed City
The Soft City
The Dear Green City
The Slow City
The Lonely City
The Hard City
The Kaleidoscope City
This futures diverge widely. In the Two Speed City, the two halves of the city, evident now, become virtually separate, two distinct communities living side by side. In the Soft City, the city shaped by feminine values and nurturing comes to the fore, changing how both men and women act. In the Kaleidoscope City, the changing nature of the city – affected by everything from migration to sexual liberalism – radically alters the mainstream culture.
A fundamental difference emerged between these seven cities of the future and the way the official future portrays the city. The official version of the city emphasises factors such as shopping, tourism and culture alongside economic and cultural regeneration. It is shaped by the importance of sectors and promoting them as a dynamic manifestation of the creative city. But across the Glasgow 2020 project very few individuals talked for very long in such ways. This is partly because people just take these things for granted as part of modern life; and partly because they recognise that shopping and tourism et al are not part of what makes a city unique because everywhere has that. Instead, the manner by which people talked about the city and the future was informed by addressing questions about the meaning and purpose of life, and the question of values – what kind of values people would like to see their city represent.
Running through all of this was the question of what vessels and sense of agency people can create, that they themselves can own. Glasgow 2020 offered the beginnings of a road map on how to begin to tentatively answer this huge question. It showed that people have the capacities, creativities and imagination to think deeply and profoundly about their city and the future. The book of the project, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, contains a collection of stories about the future which emerged from our events. It also contains a critique of the way we think about cities, and lessons and implications for thinking about the future.
A number of independent initiatives spun out of the project. The seven cities of the future that emerged were summarised into individual postcards and distributed around the city as part of the Scottish Executive’s Six Cities Festival. A music album of the same name, The Dreaming City, brought together the work of nine musicians and groups, who took some of the stories and used them to create new artistic pieces of work.[9] The resulting album involved the artists creating a series of musical landscapes which were about Glasgow and Scotland, but evoked a distant, magical or imagined city in a far-off land.
Assemblies of hope
While beneath this ball Glasgow swings
With bass rhythms and cathedral rings
Franz Ferdinand and Barrowland kings
Country and western under angel wings
John Maclean and his George Square noise
Charms Gregory’s Girl and the Glasgow Boys
Jim Carruth, St Mungo’s Mirrorball
Glasgow 2020 suggested as one possible answer to the issue of agency the idea of ‘assemblies of hope’. These are fluid, flowing networks bringing together an array of people – alchemists, campaigners, imaginers – people with ideas, creative energies and the desire to do something. Their aim would be to develop dialogues that don’t normally happen, to cross boundaries and divides, to aid individual action into collective action, and to support communities of interest into communities of action. These assemblies – and there are already in existence many nascent ones – would not define people as mere props of economic policy. For them, human action, interaction, art and creativity have worth on their own terms, and should not be seen as instrumental and subordinated to the needs of economic determinism. Many of us feel increasingly squashed and pressurised by the inexorable logic and insatiable appetite of the market, and by being defined by economic logic. The aim is to create spaces, zones, discussions, deliberations and ways of being which aid us to define ourselves in different ways.
The reality of much of city life and public space is the all-pervasive pressure of consumerism, advertising and the hustle and bustle of a fast life. There are few places within cities where an individual is not defined as a consumer. A more daring notion of city spaces would perhaps see the encouragement of ‘quiet zones’, in the manner found on some train carriages; these would be advertising, brand-free zones, where people could go to find a slower, gentler, more contemplative mood. Imagine the positive effect for the first major city in the UK that began such a process: of recognising that life wasn’t all about getting faster, smarter and leaner, and arguing that ‘life in the slow lane’ had some advantages.
The city and the left
‘Change?’
The word echoed in Jack’s head. He felt the money in his clenched fist and thought he probably had enough for an Underground ticket, a day spent dozing round the clockwork orange.
Ewan Gault, That Change is Nothing
The Glasgow 2020 project was a unique and wonderful project; it was a pleasure and privilege to watch it flourish and grow. Its rich tapestry of ideas, insights, processes and findings showed that people do increasingly question the current orthodoxies in policy, politics and society. The old-fashioned wisdoms of the right – of the market as the solution and government and the state as the problem – and of the left – of the state and government as the solution and the market as the problem – are increasingly out of touch with the challenges of modern society and the planet. The conventional left and right are united in a narrow economistic view of the world; they have similar ideas of human nature, and similarly restricted notions of progress, founded on materialist values; both are oblivious to the coming environmental crisis. This is an age where mainstream politics across the Western world operate in an increasingly narrow bandwidth. The language, values and priorities of the official future have become an intolerant, inflexible orthodoxy, with little room for manoeuvre or dissent. The power and hold of this worldview is directly linked to the demise of the Soviet bloc, Soviet Union and socialism in 1989-91: from this set of events a belief in the possibilities of another kind of social order has been discredited. In this vacuum a newly confident and triumphalist ideological perspective has arisen about the attractiveness and appeal of a certain kind of capitalist economy and order: one which is increasingly divided into winners and losers; which celebrates wealth, status and power; and which is shaped by massive structural inequalities, with poverty sitting side-by-side with wealth undreamt of in human history.
One of the great tragedies of the last decade and a half is that so many, many people have gone along with this warped, flawed and horrid view of the world. Figures from the centre-left across the Western world have become the leading cheerleaders of this perspective: from Clinton, both Bill and Hillary, to Blair and Brown. People in leading positions in public institutions in the UK, US and Europe have embraced the language and mindset of this world. They have given sustenance to the notion that we live in an age where ‘There Is No Alternative’ , where words such as ‘knowledge economy’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘step change’ are bandied about without any critical understanding.
The Glasgow 2020 project shows that people don’t want this state of affairs, and nor do they believe in their hearts and souls in the official future. They recognise that the world on offer is a pretty unattractive, soulless and pessimistic one, where every person is a potential economic threat and competitor, rather than a friend and neighbour. They recognise that relationships have to be about more than economic logic, and that we cannot go about the world viewing everything else – other cities, countries and institutions – as threats that we need to trash and undermine.
There is a very definite message of optimism and hope within the Glasgow 2020 project. Firstly, there is this deep-seated lack of faith in the values, aims and aspirations of the official future. Secondly, there is a profound sense of creativity, imagination and play, something which is not touched upon or recognised in mainstream debates. If we are to live in future societies that we can identify with, connect with, and feel some sense of ownership of, we need to fundamentally change direction as a society. This has to be centred on a concept of progress, and a version of the future, that we wish to nourish. Once upon a long time ago the left had a sense of certainty, even arrogance, on such positions. Now it has a sense of doubt, silence and unease.
Throughout human history cities have been places where different versions of humanity have contested a multitude of versions of the social order and the future. The city has been a place of social change, upheaval and dislocation, the place of capitalism’s greatest triumphs and potential demise. For the left, historically, it has been a place where it feels more at home, and has more to say. But we now need a very different model of a city: one that renews an idealistic, optimistic and forwardlooking idea of humanity and the future. One that is imbued with a green sensitivity and an ecological concept of the planet. We cannot leave the utopian imagination to the free market modernists, unchallenged.
We have reached a nadir in the official conceptions through which public agencies, corporates and developers think of cities. Our cities are the product of an age that is filled with talk of change, innovation and diversity, but is defined by conformity and fixed mindsets. We have to dare to dream of cities and communities in which people live, work, love and interact in ways which nurture and nourish the best in all of us, rather than play to our worst and most base instincts.
Notes
1. Edwin Morgan, ‘A City’, in H. Whyte (ed.), Mungo’s Tongues Glasgow
Poems 1630-1990, Mainstream 1993, p262.
2. Maggie Bell, No Mean City (Theme to Taggart), www.taggartfanclub.
co.uk/nomean.htm.
3. On RAND and the American military-industrial complex see
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are
Seduced By War, Oxford University Press 2005.
4. Gerry Hassan, Eddie Gibb and Lydia Howland (eds), Scotland 2020:
Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation, Demos 2005; Gerry Hassan,
Melissa Mean and Charlie Tims, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, Demos 2007.
5. From The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass
Imagination. Hereafter all quotations without citations are taken from
this collection.
Gerry Hassan discusses the innovative Glasgow 2020 project.
Edwin Morgan1
Maggie Bell2
Thinking about the future is part of being human. For as long as human beings have lived they have begun to think, dream, imagine, hope and worry about the future. Imagining different worlds has been a central creative theme in art, literature and film.
The world of ‘futurology’ is far removed from such accounts, however; it has its origins in the vast research spending of the US military-industrial complex in the second world war, when policy boffins such as Robert McNamara worked to produce detailed analysis of the effectiveness of bombing Japanese cities. Then in 1946 this new way of thinking about warfare gained focus with the establishment of the RAND Corporation, a federally funded research facility, which during the cold war developed ways of thinking about the future that included the theorising of nuclear weapons scenarios.[3] Analysts such as Herman Kahn began to develop some of the key tools of future thinking – for example scenario-building and visioning – and in 1967 the World Future Society was established.
Future thinking mostly takes place within the narrow and elitist world of those with power, influence and status. Governments, corporates and big institutions future scan, trying to identify possible new trends, discussing possible, probable and preferred futures, as well as unforeseen events that may unsettle their plans, with the aim of controlling the future as much as possible. This is not an open, democratic set of conversations; it is about those with power looking to maintain it and second-guess any challenges, or emerging threats or rivals. My argument is that the rest of us need to join in this debate.
In the last couple of years I have been involved in two major projects looking at a much wider sense of how we imagine the future: Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020. The Scotland 2020 project looked to overcome the prevalence of negative accounts of Scotland’s devolved government, and to identify positive possibilities through the idea of story; and from this came the impetus to set up a much more ambitious and daring project to test the public appetite for imagining the future through story, this time at the level of a city.[4] Glasgow 2020 had three dimensions: it was about the city of Glasgow; it was about cities generally; and it was about how we think about the future.
These three strands came together to make Glasgow 2020 something of a unique project and intervention, and as far as we know a world first – an attempt to reimagine the city through the idea of the stories people tell. It involved the support of virtually every public agency in the city – including the city council, Scottish Enterprise, the Health Board, the universities, art school and music academy, and the fire and police services. Each gained a perspective of the city they would not otherwise have been able to get (and none asked for a veto on its findings).
Glasgow is a fascinating city in which to attempt such an experiment. It is Scotland’s first city in terms of size, still being significantly larger than Edinburgh. It likes to see itself as a ‘big city’ – a place bigger and more important than its population or status might imply. It is a city that has undergone huge waves of expansion, growth, change, reinvention, challenge and decline. While its formal council area has seen a population decline from 1.1 million in the 1950s to 600,000 today, the wider Glasgow conurbation still contains 1.2 million people, and is one of the most vibrant and varied parts of Scotland and the UK. It has left behind its role as the Second City of Empire – when it made its wealth from transatlantic commerce and trade. It is now the Second City of Shopping – reflecting its retail power.
This is a city rich with stories and tales. Some of these can be problematic: the city is variously known as ‘the sick man of Europe’ and ‘the murder capital of Europe’. In the 1930s Glasgow gained opprobrium as ‘No Mean City’ – for its gang culture that was over-sensationalised in the novel of the same name. In the 1980s the city’s swagger and sense of importance saw this phrase reappropriated as part of Glasgow’s cultural reinvention, in the opening credits of the TV series Taggart. Then there is the football, which no discussion of the city can be without. The city has never been, as some have claimed, a ‘Belfast without the bombs’, but the sectarian divide between Celtic and Rangers undermines the efforts of the city authorities to promote images of the city as cosmopolitan, modern and welcoming.
Alongside all this there is the upbeat picture of the city: a place of culture, creativity and innovation, a city filled with vibrancy and buzz. This is a city of artists, writers, musicians, dreamers, and of Glasgow characters and humour: the place that gave the world Stanley Baxter, Lulu, Billy Connolly and so much more!
Glasgow 2020 aimed to look beyond these images and accounts, and to find perspectives of the city that opened up possibilities and addressed some of the fundamental questions about the future: what kind of city do you want to live in, what kind of values do you want your life and city to be shaped by, and, ambitiously, how can we begin to mark out a route map to get there?
An age of urban renaissance?
Suhayl Saadi, The Icarus Tree5
This is, according to some analysts, a golden age for cities. Regeneration. Redevelopment. Renaissance. Across different societies and cities, skylines are changing, and the same faceless, shiny buildings are rising, often owned by the same corporations. A new era of cities located in the once ‘Third World’ – Dubai, Shanghai, Seoul – see themselves as the ‘hot’ places of tomorrow. The once dominant cities of the West are reinventing and redesigning themselves to stay ahead, anxious that complacency will mean they will lose their competitive edge.
This has had the cumulative effect in ‘the West’ of producing an identikit city that you can practically buy off the shelf. The urban formula of success – first tried and tested in places like Barcelona and Bilbao – has become an increasingly narrow one, with diminishing results. It reduces cities to participation in a kind of cultural arms race, competing with iconic buildings, galleries and museums, riverfront developments and squinty bridges. This is the model of development advocated in Richard Florida’s over-hyped The Rise of the Creative Class, a frequently referenced but rarely read book, which instrumentally appropriates ‘culture’, ‘creativity’ and ‘diversity’ for economic policy – an urban manifesto for the globally mobile and successful. In this model creativity and culture become nothing more than a commodified adjunct of economics.
At the 2007 ‘Imagining the City’ symposium held at the newly reopened Southbank Centre, two very different ideas of the future of cities were put forward. Richard Sennett offered a critique of the contemporary urban orthodoxy, and the grip of a monoculture that is shaped by tourism and finance; as he argued, a city shaped by such forces becomes a site of inequality: a lived-in space filled with lots of people doing well and lots of people struggling to survive. A very different model was put forward by Peter Head, Director of Sustainability at Arup (www.arup.com), a global design and business consulting firm. Head offered us a glimpse into the world of Arup in China, in a presentation of ghastly and near Hollywood-style sentimentality, with soft focus, dewy colours and ‘new age’ music. Head focused on the monster project for the new city of Dongtan, in which Arup are strategic partners with the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation. Dongtan is being built as an ‘ecocity’ in the Yangtze River delta, near Shanghai, and Arup see it as a potential ‘Chinese Manhattan’, or alternatively a ‘new Venice’: the beginning of ‘a new paradigm’ in cities. This project is part of the export of the identikit consumer city; it benefits western business interests and promotes consumerism, in a partnership in which both sides are able to ignore issues of democracy and equality – a lack of concern for such matters being a common bond between Leninist vanguardists and market fundamentalists. The bright green aspects of the project only add to its charm.
Dongtan is not all it appears, however; it has been called the equivalent of a ‘Potemkin eco-village’, an attempt by China to showcase its eco-conscience while all the time, down the road in Shanghai, 18-20 million people live without any environmental regulations.[6] There is also the issue of how a sustainable eco-city can be built upon the flatlands of a river delta, barely two metres above sea level: by the time the model city hits its target of 500,000 people in 2050, it could be an underwater city. The proposals clearly appalled Sennett but Head could find nothing to criticise in them.
The Dongtan example illustrates a number of wider issues about cities, development, politics and public debate. Firstly, there is the compromised nature of our political classes. The deal to bring about Dongtan was signed at No. 10 Downing Street with Tony Blair present. John Prescott, as Deputy Prime Minister, made several trips to Dongtan, and there have been rumours that his retirement may see him join Arup’s Board as a Non-Executive Director. The lack of discussion about such issues is highlighted in the uncritical way that this deal, and others like it, are presented in the media and public debate – from the Financial Times to Wired. People want to do business with China and want to get their feet in the door, and are prepared to compromise their ethics to achieve this. Dongtan is the ultimate in trying to have your cake and eat it: building a new Chinese city while dressing it in eco-camouflage.
Dongtan is an extreme example of tendencies in the mainstream city discourse, but it embodies the main outlines of the official-future view of the city. The presentation of this dominant vision may be sweetened with creative industry mood music, but it has little to do with the world of people, imagination and democracy.
The official future versus the world of mass imagination ….
John Daly, Allowed, Able and Willing
The ‘official future’ is the place where the public discourses of government, public agencies, mainstream media and the corporate world coalesce into a relatively coherent worldview.[7] It increasingly points in one way – towards a model of the world centred on economic growth, determinism and the primacy of competition and markets. ‘The official future’ is a place filled with its own jargon, buzz words and bright, shiny documents, which promise an upbeat, glorious world of optimism and prosperity. Beneath this panglossian promise, however, there is an innate and deep-seated pessimism – which acknowledges that this is a soulless, friendless and loveless world. It is a world filled with such word games as ‘inviting people to do the step-change’: sadly, not a new dance craze, but an example – one of many – of consultant-class speak. The concepts of change inherent in this official future are imbued with words and values from business models and the primacy of economic development. Ideas of change that are social, cultural or ecological, or organic and community-centred, just don’t get a look in.
Given the power of this worldview in public discussions, most people feel they have little choice but to accept the ‘There is No Alternative’ mindset; and yet they do so with little real enthusiasm, and with a sense of resignation. There is a sense that ‘the official future’ has already been decided by forces more powerful than you and I – and this makes people feel like instrumental agents, and brings a feeling of powerlessness.
Glasgow 2020 set out to challenge this feeling, to explore the possibilities of people thinking, conceiving and developing their own futures. We called this a mass imagination exercise – drawing on the ideas of the 1940s mass observation surveys, but with the aim of something more pro-active. We ran a total of 38 events, nearly all of these in Glasgow, involving over 5000 local people – nearly one per cent of the city. We reached out across geographies, generations, identities and socio-economic backgrounds – from taxi drivers and hairdressers to journalists and entrepreneurs, from people living in social housing, to asylum seekers and commuters. This was an imagination exercise, not a consultation: animation, fun, humour, creativity and fuzziness were the main characteristics in our events. Discussions did not focus on people’s identities – as ‘single parents’ or ‘creative entrepreneurs’, etc; instead they developed a general, structured conversation about the future, using the techniques of philosophical inquiry. This meant that discussions that began with people stating their usual views on a subject typically ended up somewhere else.
A variety of public spaces were used. Some were everyday public spaces such as libraries, museums and community centres. Others were disruptive spaces – for example Glasgow-Edinburgh trains were taken over for two days; a Saturday of events was run in the city’s biggest art gallery and museum, Kelvingrove; and a boat equipped for a day as an office sailed up and down the River Clyde in stormy weather.
Tales of the city
Anne Donovan, Glasgow’s Pants
One of the central pillars of Glasgow 2020 was the power of story. Stories matter. People relate to and identify with the idea of story. Our lives, loves and world are made sense of by the various stories which make them up. Politics used to be shaped and defined by a set of over-arching and potent stories that offered to make sense of the world. The centre-left in Britain once had a story in socialism, along with an idea of how this was to come about through ‘the forward march’ of ‘the labour movement’. One of the fundamental changes of the Blair era has been the near complete disappearance of this story, and the subsequent Brown administration also seems unsure of its moral compass and mission.[8]
Cities are shaped by the myths and potencies of stories, as Armistead Maupin recognised in his famous Tales of the City set in 1970s San Francisco. Glasgow 2020 looked to encourage the non-institutional stories of the city to find their voice. We ran events where people, after their initial discussions, created characters who inhabited the city in 2020, and embryonic storylines; from these seeds many fullyfledged stories of the city of the future emerged.
There is a direct relationship between people’s disquiet about ‘the official future’ and the way they see public institutions, from government to the corporate sector. More and more people say that they suspect that the values which inform institutions are not the values they would like them to be informed by. People also suspect that the public face that these organisations present to the world, with all their talk of being sensitive and informed by the public, is not what really influences them.
This is not a perception that can be addressed by better communications or transparency. This is about something much deeper: an emerging values gap between people and institutions. There is a general sense that institutions have bought into a view of the world that has a set of values far removed from notions of public service and public duty, or from any sense of real consumer sensitivities and power. It is revealing that the scepticism that people feel is often articulated in hesitant and unsure ways – as if they wish they could be proved wrong by the facts. And the manner in which people state their views shows that the language of this doubt and disquiet – after the demise of socialism – has yet to find a full form.
In every event across Glasgow 2020 people expressed hope for themselves, their neighbourhoods and city. From the poorest to the most affluent areas, people had hope and showed that they had individual or neighbourhood ways they acted upon this. What was missing was the sense of a city-wide collective agency joining this up. Across the city this tale was shaped by gender. More women than men ‘did’ things. Women had tales of doing things to take hold of their lives, support their children and change their communities. Frequently they had a very different and more immediate idea of change and politics than the more conventional ideas expressed by many men, who tended to have a view of politics and social change which was rooted in others – i.e. politicians – bringing about change.
The seven cities of the future
Kirsten Anderson, A Tale of Two Cities
From the range of discussions and activities of Glasgow 2020 seven very different cities of the future emerged. All these possible future cities – unlike utopias or dystopias – were already present in some way in the city of the present. The seven cities merely took different aspects of the present and accentuated them or crossfertilised them with other forces. They were:
This futures diverge widely. In the Two Speed City, the two halves of the city, evident now, become virtually separate, two distinct communities living side by side. In the Soft City, the city shaped by feminine values and nurturing comes to the fore, changing how both men and women act. In the Kaleidoscope City, the changing nature of the city – affected by everything from migration to sexual liberalism – radically alters the mainstream culture.
A fundamental difference emerged between these seven cities of the future and the way the official future portrays the city. The official version of the city emphasises factors such as shopping, tourism and culture alongside economic and cultural regeneration. It is shaped by the importance of sectors and promoting them as a dynamic manifestation of the creative city. But across the Glasgow 2020 project very few individuals talked for very long in such ways. This is partly because people just take these things for granted as part of modern life; and partly because they recognise that shopping and tourism et al are not part of what makes a city unique because everywhere has that. Instead, the manner by which people talked about the city and the future was informed by addressing questions about the meaning and purpose of life, and the question of values – what kind of values people would like to see their city represent.
Running through all of this was the question of what vessels and sense of agency people can create, that they themselves can own. Glasgow 2020 offered the beginnings of a road map on how to begin to tentatively answer this huge question. It showed that people have the capacities, creativities and imagination to think deeply and profoundly about their city and the future. The book of the project, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, contains a collection of stories about the future which emerged from our events. It also contains a critique of the way we think about cities, and lessons and implications for thinking about the future.
A number of independent initiatives spun out of the project. The seven cities of the future that emerged were summarised into individual postcards and distributed around the city as part of the Scottish Executive’s Six Cities Festival. A music album of the same name, The Dreaming City, brought together the work of nine musicians and groups, who took some of the stories and used them to create new artistic pieces of work.[9] The resulting album involved the artists creating a series of musical landscapes which were about Glasgow and Scotland, but evoked a distant, magical or imagined city in a far-off land.
Assemblies of hope
Jim Carruth, St Mungo’s Mirrorball
Glasgow 2020 suggested as one possible answer to the issue of agency the idea of ‘assemblies of hope’. These are fluid, flowing networks bringing together an array of people – alchemists, campaigners, imaginers – people with ideas, creative energies and the desire to do something. Their aim would be to develop dialogues that don’t normally happen, to cross boundaries and divides, to aid individual action into collective action, and to support communities of interest into communities of action. These assemblies – and there are already in existence many nascent ones – would not define people as mere props of economic policy. For them, human action, interaction, art and creativity have worth on their own terms, and should not be seen as instrumental and subordinated to the needs of economic determinism. Many of us feel increasingly squashed and pressurised by the inexorable logic and insatiable appetite of the market, and by being defined by economic logic. The aim is to create spaces, zones, discussions, deliberations and ways of being which aid us to define ourselves in different ways.
The reality of much of city life and public space is the all-pervasive pressure of consumerism, advertising and the hustle and bustle of a fast life. There are few places within cities where an individual is not defined as a consumer. A more daring notion of city spaces would perhaps see the encouragement of ‘quiet zones’, in the manner found on some train carriages; these would be advertising, brand-free zones, where people could go to find a slower, gentler, more contemplative mood. Imagine the positive effect for the first major city in the UK that began such a process: of recognising that life wasn’t all about getting faster, smarter and leaner, and arguing that ‘life in the slow lane’ had some advantages.
The city and the left
Ewan Gault, That Change is Nothing
The Glasgow 2020 project was a unique and wonderful project; it was a pleasure and privilege to watch it flourish and grow. Its rich tapestry of ideas, insights, processes and findings showed that people do increasingly question the current orthodoxies in policy, politics and society. The old-fashioned wisdoms of the right – of the market as the solution and government and the state as the problem – and of the left – of the state and government as the solution and the market as the problem – are increasingly out of touch with the challenges of modern society and the planet. The conventional left and right are united in a narrow economistic view of the world; they have similar ideas of human nature, and similarly restricted notions of progress, founded on materialist values; both are oblivious to the coming environmental crisis. This is an age where mainstream politics across the Western world operate in an increasingly narrow bandwidth. The language, values and priorities of the official future have become an intolerant, inflexible orthodoxy, with little room for manoeuvre or dissent. The power and hold of this worldview is directly linked to the demise of the Soviet bloc, Soviet Union and socialism in 1989-91: from this set of events a belief in the possibilities of another kind of social order has been discredited. In this vacuum a newly confident and triumphalist ideological perspective has arisen about the attractiveness and appeal of a certain kind of capitalist economy and order: one which is increasingly divided into winners and losers; which celebrates wealth, status and power; and which is shaped by massive structural inequalities, with poverty sitting side-by-side with wealth undreamt of in human history.
One of the great tragedies of the last decade and a half is that so many, many people have gone along with this warped, flawed and horrid view of the world. Figures from the centre-left across the Western world have become the leading cheerleaders of this perspective: from Clinton, both Bill and Hillary, to Blair and Brown. People in leading positions in public institutions in the UK, US and Europe have embraced the language and mindset of this world. They have given sustenance to the notion that we live in an age where ‘There Is No Alternative’ , where words such as ‘knowledge economy’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘step change’ are bandied about without any critical understanding.
The Glasgow 2020 project shows that people don’t want this state of affairs, and nor do they believe in their hearts and souls in the official future. They recognise that the world on offer is a pretty unattractive, soulless and pessimistic one, where every person is a potential economic threat and competitor, rather than a friend and neighbour. They recognise that relationships have to be about more than economic logic, and that we cannot go about the world viewing everything else – other cities, countries and institutions – as threats that we need to trash and undermine.
There is a very definite message of optimism and hope within the Glasgow 2020 project. Firstly, there is this deep-seated lack of faith in the values, aims and aspirations of the official future. Secondly, there is a profound sense of creativity, imagination and play, something which is not touched upon or recognised in mainstream debates. If we are to live in future societies that we can identify with, connect with, and feel some sense of ownership of, we need to fundamentally change direction as a society. This has to be centred on a concept of progress, and a version of the future, that we wish to nourish. Once upon a long time ago the left had a sense of certainty, even arrogance, on such positions. Now it has a sense of doubt, silence and unease.
Throughout human history cities have been places where different versions of humanity have contested a multitude of versions of the social order and the future. The city has been a place of social change, upheaval and dislocation, the place of capitalism’s greatest triumphs and potential demise. For the left, historically, it has been a place where it feels more at home, and has more to say. But we now need a very different model of a city: one that renews an idealistic, optimistic and forwardlooking idea of humanity and the future. One that is imbued with a green sensitivity and an ecological concept of the planet. We cannot leave the utopian imagination to the free market modernists, unchallenged.
We have reached a nadir in the official conceptions through which public agencies, corporates and developers think of cities. Our cities are the product of an age that is filled with talk of change, innovation and diversity, but is defined by conformity and fixed mindsets. We have to dare to dream of cities and communities in which people live, work, love and interact in ways which nurture and nourish the best in all of us, rather than play to our worst and most base instincts.
Notes
1. Edwin Morgan, ‘A City’, in H. Whyte (ed.), Mungo’s Tongues Glasgow
Poems 1630-1990, Mainstream 1993, p262.
2. Maggie Bell, No Mean City (Theme to Taggart), www.taggartfanclub.
co.uk/nomean.htm.
3. On RAND and the American military-industrial complex see
Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are
Seduced By War, Oxford University Press 2005.
4. Gerry Hassan, Eddie Gibb and Lydia Howland (eds), Scotland 2020:
Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation, Demos 2005; Gerry Hassan,
Melissa Mean and Charlie Tims, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, Demos 2007.
5. From The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass
Imagination. Hereafter all quotations without citations are taken from
this collection.
6. For a critical overview of Arup, Dongtan and the British
political classes see the analysis of the Ethical Corporation at:
www.ethicalcorp.com/resources/downloads/20076411627_
Paul%20French%20Cast%204.mp3
7. On the idea of ‘the official future’ see: Richard Eckersley, Well and
Good: How We Feel and Why It Matters, Melbourne: Text Publishing
2004.
8. Gerry Hassan, Introduction, in Gerry Hassan (ed), After Blair:
Politics After the New Labour Decade, Lawrence and Wishart 2007.
9. The Dreaming City, Glasgow: Sub-Urban Collective 2007. Available
from:www.sub-urbancollective.co.uk.