Gentrifuckation

Maryhill is a very large district in the North West of Glasgow, home to a large community that still suffers from the fall-out of the collapse of heavy industry in this city. Developers have eyed-it up, almost in its entirety, as ripe for social-cleansing, blessed (or condemned) as it is with proximity to the City Centre, easy access to the M8 motorway and its links to the rest of Scotland, the River Kelvin on its southern flank and the Forth and Clyde Canal and the exciting ‘opportunities’ that it represents. It follows a trend being echoed in cities across Britain. Oh dear.

Being four hundred miles from London puts you well outside the radar of government. Up here we are far beyond the rim of the Westminster magnifying glass. Sometimes it is almost as if a different, more pliable, set of rules exists up here. Scottish politicians have an uncanny ability to be an unlikeable and muddy bunch, even by the judiciously high-standards of unlikeability set by their profession. I am often reminded of the cunning quote used in a book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland which describes the honour involved in assuming power, however small – “trumped up to the level of village Napoleons” – when thinking about politics in this tiny country.

There seems to be a level of intransigence and lack of transparency here that can only be compared with the deep-seated aloofness of some American city governments of old. Unfortunately the by-product of that situation does not seem to have transplanted across the pond. The "Take It To City Hall" mentality does not appear to exist within the apathetic confines of Glasgow, and the movement to resist the irrepressible forces of developers rises barely to a whimper above the deafening sounds of the bulldozer.

This city also appears to suffer from an unfortunate propensity to become star-struck - "All fur coat and nae knickers" - as some would put it. If Ken Livingstone is alleged by some to be a ‘Zone 1’ Mayor for an apparent lack of concern for problems that do not afflict Central London, then their counterparts Glasgow similarly appear to some, whether in truth or not, to lack much concern outside of the cosmetic clean-ups of the West End and the City Centre and the glamour of things like Architecture awards, City of Culture status and the Commonwealth Games. Except, of course, when it comes to social-cleansing, a tradition that has been forged to perfection after decades of practice and one that is not at all unique to this city.

Social Cleansing (Soh-shill Klen-Ziiing)(n.):1. The art of displacing people of a perceived lower social-order from an area in order to gentrify said area and construct garaged suburban-style housing, Singapore-style condominiums, contorted cul-de-sacs and Tapas Bars. 2. The alternative to regenerating an area to help eliminate the social problems faced by the local population. Often motivated by the fact that is makes far more money, results in a more apparent aesthetic change in the character of the area, relegates the previous ‘troublesome’ inhabitants elsewhere, often beyond the scope of the city* and puts smiles on the faces of developers which is heart-warming in a slimy, wrist-cutting kind of way.

* - Which, incidentally, is the en masse equivalent of the American sheriffs of yore ‘running criminals over the state line’ so that they will be outwith the jurisdiction of said sheriff and thus be no more of a headache to him. Flattening parts of Nitshill on the south-western edge of the city and precipitating an accidental transplant of its inhabitants into neighbouring Barrhead, under the jurisdiction of East Renfrewshire not Glasgow, merely seemed to have the effect of moving the social problems there. Far from an attempt to cure social problems then. Of course, the rush to confuse causality with correlation should be guarded against. It cannot be proven that displaced social problems were caused by these events, only hypothesised.

For Sale: One Maryhill

One carefree owner. Any offer invited provided it will inject millions into the city and result in wholescale transfusion of human population of the type that worked so wonderfully in the Le Corbusier-inspired Clearances of decades gone. See how they smile in those Soviet-style blocks. Must be able to take advice from architects who have identical ideas on residential ‘buildings of the future’, consisting as they do of wood-slatted balconies, steel framing and vast use of concrete judiciously covered over with colourful, panelled cladding to hide the resemblance and cheapness of their building technique from that of the hated council infrastructure** of the fifties and sixties.

** Anyone doubting the Utopian pretensions of the last wave of city planners to swing their wounding scythe should head for the Second Floor of the Mitchell Library and its wonderfully helpful staff, where there is a depth of material with artist's impressions of how tower blocks would transform the Gorbals, Anderston, Sighthill, and so on into heavenly dream-worlds of face-achingly happy citizens. The artist's impressions bear an eerily resemblance to those of contemporary images, albeit without the Photoshopping and computer-trickery available today. Why do these 'community walkways' not show desertion and newspapers blowing about in the corridored wind, I wonder? And why is the sun always shining?

Err, A Sermon, Delivered From The Steps Of the City Chambers, George Square

The problem is that this logic of displacement treats the district itself as the organism, and the people within it as parasitic, for good or bad. It is akin to flushing out perceived cancerous cells and allowing perceived healthy ones to breed. The definition of ‘healthy’ and ‘cancerous’ of course being fabrications in the minds of councillors and developers. The organism, being the district, at the end of this process, is of course much healthier-looking. It would be easy, with an injection of money, to level swathes of Maryhill and build luxury apartments. I dare say, there are enough of the professional classes living in the fringes outside the city boundaries to snap up such properties, look at the transformation near Ruchill, for example. That, to most people, would appear to be ‘The Saving of Maryhill’. The old cells are flushed out and the new ones substituted. But the district is not the organism. The people are the organism. A bloody obvious point, but it escapes many who drive around these new neighbourhoods and wonder at the awesome transformation. If you simply substitute the people of Maryhill with newly-found white-collar workers, you displace the original inhabitants, and you displace the social problems that were rife in those communities. The new neighbourhoods you see are not populated by the previous inhabitants, for they have been driven elsewhere. God knows where. A website proclaims that the high population density of the area presents a ‘barrier’ to would-be developers’ dream of wholesale demolition. I wonder whether this is the actual mentality of developers. I suppose rapid depopulation of a problem-afflicted area would represent a ‘win’ for the client.

It is quite easy to allow an area to become abandoned in a generally low-density and slowly-depopulating city such as this one, and it is a practice that has possibly been purposefully taking place in Glasgow for many years. I hypothesise the process to be as follows (I am not saying that the Council or the Housing Association indulges or has ever actively indulged in this kind of activity, merely that it is a possible theory to explain the mysteriously rapid decline of such districts - again I have eight-year-old photos of every stage described below, predominantly from Drumchapel, Cranhill and Possilpark which I will post when my Luddite brain figures out how):

1 – You rehouse a couple of tenants, and do not fill up their properties again. Immediately, the presence of metal shutters on the windows of the vacant flats signals the area as an investment blackspot.
2 – Abandoned properties attract vandals and crime. More people move out, and their flats are left vacant. The lower densities of people increases the danger of the area, the limited self-policing-effect of the community becomes far more patchy. People set fire to some of the abandoned properties for shits and giggles and mainly because they can get away with it.
3 – Streets are intermittently bulldozed once all the properties on the street are empty. This can be expedited by offering small sums of cash to ‘will’ tenants into relocating. The tenants who remain in the area feel marginalised, the gentle hand of government flat against their backs, pushing.
4 – The effect of streets-without-buildings is a blight like no other. I have photos of this from 2000 which I hope to post in due course. They present opportunities for burning out stolen cars and organising 'gang' fights. The neighbourhood looks dilapidated, its days numbered.

What happens next is a fork in the road. One path, the venerable one, is the replacement of housing stock and an attempt to cure the ills of the district from the core. In many cases, Glasgow City Council has made sterling efforts to rehouse the displaced in a nearby (or even the same) area in far better-quality housing. Since the stock transfer to the Glasgow Housing Association, this has also been much in evidence, in places like Drumchapel for instance, and can only be applauded. Improvements including central-heating, double-glazing, lockable tenement closes with password protection and the like are seemingly small improvements that vastly improve quality of life. A step in the right direction at least. It is the noble and right way to continue improving the city and the lot of its inhabitants.

However, in the case of Maryhill in the next few years, I doubt many of the previous inhabitants will be welcome back to the area, as can be testified by even a cursory glance at the plans. This is the other path, private development. I mentioned before that our distance from central government’s watchful eye allows us to limbo under well-placed barriers. There is very little enforcement of principles that address the need for social or affordable housing. Even the parsimonious nod given to the concept in the London Boroughs seems luxurious when compared with here. The canalside apartments of steel and glass with their sun lounges will, I predict, not be aimed at the unfortunate souls who fell through the gap between the loss of heavy industry and its very partial and piecemeal replacement with services.

Glasgow Harbour, a development on the Clyde waterfront not two miles to the south is a case in point. There was a unique opportunity to wipe out the derelict industrial infrastructure (though this unfortunately included the enormous, beautiful and monolithic Granary, a building of incredible size which could surely have undergone a transformation similar if not larger in scale to the present Tate Modern in London) and give something back to the citizens of the area. It is now being filled with multi-storey blocks that will offer condominium-style luxury living on the banks of the Clyde, building what might possibly become a new wall of severance for the more traditional communities of the area to replace the old one. Even the BBC ran an article asking whether we had lost a golden opportunity to create something beautiful, and public, allowing existing residents access to the river.

Don’t get me wrong. Turning Maryhill into the Venice of Glasgow is a wonderful idea. Doing it at the expense of those who belong there is the issue. It would be wrong to let the championing of such causes remain purely in the hands of the Scottish Socialist Party (however genuinely selfless its aims may be) and a few self-interested hard-left fringe groups that breed personalities who hitch lifts with the nearest cause galloping by in order to hoist themselves into a position where they have a stab at leadership and glory. It is a fundamental concern that affects us all. For when the higher powers start selling swathes of our precious city into the hands of private developers, those acres will remain fenced off from the rest of us forever. Wrenching apart communities to inject the monied, and in so doing setting into motion enforced exoduses of population is what got this city into this mess in the first place.

I can’t actually lay the blame with the City Council, the Housing Association, politicians or developers. For the most part, the plans offered up are the result of a genuine attempt at well-meaning resolutions for the problems of districts, not of people. Only the reckless would point the finger entirely at organisations like the Housing Association that do not exist for profit, and that have been ensured by politicial process to have nothing to gain. The market economy will always dictate that money flows where it can be invested. Governments and organisations like the Council and the Housing Association can and should however use their powers to influence, tugging at the strings of the puppeteers (developers, and so forth) to legislate in favour of existing residents and thus safeguarding the character and, more importantly, the justice that city residents deserve. Adopting Ken Livingstone's strategy of a concrete (excuse the pun) commitment to affordable and social housing would be a good first, if small, step. Glasgow is an amazing city, and to now relegate the communities that have contibuted so much to the city's past to the sidelines, all to turn this place into the kind of faceless 'Clone City' satellite-town of the kind that are ten-a-penny throughout the developed world would be a terrible loss.

It is the lack of willingness to learn from mistakes, of our own city's and of others, and also a result of a general apathy and tendency to remain disunited, that means that Glaswegians will always be condemned to be pushed around like cold mashed potato around a child's plate. It is no puzzle where the phrase, “Glasgow cares more for the dead than it does for the living” comes from. Take a walk around the Necropolis at the stunning stone monuments for the departed, and then look down the slopes at the filing-cabinets in the sky filled with the living. Take a read of the plans past and present that have been stapled onto the city maps in the Mitchells Library and wonder at the carelessness of the treatment of the city and its inhabitants. Successions of short-sighted plans glued together haphazardly to masquerade as a unified solution for a long-term problem. In some cases it has worked marvellously, and has helped to lift poverty from long-afflicted districts, and for this we can only be thankful. But much of the time, it appears to be treated as if it were simply a cynical attempt to save a long-drowned man one finger at a time. It is not that the city deserves better, it is that its people do.