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Gerry Hassan
© Gerry Hassan 2007
Most cities in the world are filled with stories, myths and folklore from people that contribute to how a city and others see it. Glasgow, Scotland's first city in terms of size, is a place which has gone from 'the Second City of Empire' to 'the second city of shopping' - undergoing in the process widespread change and transformation. It likes to see itself as a 'big city' - a city bigger and more important than it is merely in terms of population or status.
This is a city rich with stories and tales. We know that some of these stories about Glasgow are problematic - 'the sick man of Europe', the crime levels and sectarianism. We know others are positive - the culture and creativity, the buzz and character of the place.
Glasgow 2020 was a two year project facilitated by the think tank Demos which aimed to look at three things: Glasgow's future, cities generally and how we imagine the future. The aim was not to have an insular Glasgow conversation, but talk and swap ideas with others.
The project is a Glasgow good news story supported by twenty agencies in the city, from the City Council to the universities, fire service and police. It is a unique project and a world first: attempting to reimagine a city through the stories people tell about it.
We held 38 events which involved over 5000 people in the city: nearly one per cent of the population. We held events with different groups, from council officials to GHA (Glasgow Housing Association) tenants, entrepreneurs to hairdressers and taxi drivers, asylum seekers to commuters. We used a variety of public spaces: taking over Glasgow-Edinburgh trains, using Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum for a day.
The project findings are by necessity so rich and detailed that that they are filled with contradictions and paradoxes. At the same time they are also deeply philosophical, full of insight and deserve to be heard.
The story that emerges from our findings is one that is, not surprisingly, rich and complex and throws up all kinds of insights and questions. For a start, people talked all the time about the importance of Glasgow City Council. This did not mean they liked every aspect of it, but they recognised the role of the council as a custodian of the city's civic pride and the importance of the local.
They yearned for a politics different from the current centralism of much of political life whether at Holyrood or Westminster. And interestingly they barely mentioned the Scottish Parliament, while Westminster seems to have slipped off the radar of most people in Scotland.
People asked deep and penetrating questions about the future of the city and society. One area they expressed some unease with was the idea of 'the official future', a term which means the sum of how institutions, agencies and corporates see the world. Increasingly, this has become shaped by economic criterion and growth, which people feel trapped by and don't feel they have a say in or ownership of.
There is a direct relationship between this and the emerging values gap between people and institutions. More and more people say they suspect the values which inform public agencies are not the values that they would like them to be informed by; that institutions are too fixated on efficiency and targets rather than people. And they say this in a hesitant way - wishing it were different or that they could be proved wrong.
Balancing this, across all our events we found a desire for genuine engagement which moves beyond consultation. Discussions which ask serious questions and are open debates. Discussions which don't sit in the system and are not informed by pre-determined agendas and decisions. Discussions which are informed by a sense of play, imagination, fun and openness.
In every event 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 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 families and change their communities. This amounted to a very different and more immediate idea of change and politics than the more conventional ideas expressed typically by men. In short, this pointed to a very different view of the city.
Much of this is not unique to Glasgow. That should not be surprising. Many of the things Glasgow has experienced: mass unemployment, reinvention and renewal, the importance of culture, shopping and tourism, can be seen elsewhere. We went to other European cities - Helsinki, Stockholm, Amsterdam - and ran events which found similar issues and dilemmas. A common thread across cities was the feeling that the way institutions think of cities: of economic and cultural regeneration, of shopping and tourism, increasingly makes everywhere feel the same and removes uniqueness and a sense of soul.
What was unique to Glasgow was its history, sense of itself and its stories. Glasgow people told stories of their city and its different futures. Some were bleak, some were optimistic, but all were filled with a rich sense of imagination, play, fun and throwing up some of the serious questions we will face in the future.
Running through all of this is the question: what vessels and sense of agency can people create and bring into being which they themselves own? What networks and bodies can people invest their hopes, dreams and stories in which engage with the system creatively and constructively, but which are not part of the system?
Glasgow 2020 offered the beginnings of a road map on how to do this. It showed that people have the capacities and creativities to think deeply and profoundly about their city. The book of the project, The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, contains a collection of short stories about the future which emerged from our events (and one poem), project tools and methodologies, and lessons and thoughts from the project. A music album of the same name, The Dreaming City, will shortly be launched later this month; it contains the work of nine musicians and ensembles who have taken some of the stories and the one poem and used them as a starting point to create new artistic works.
Glasgow 2020 suggests as one possible answer to the question of agency the idea of 'assemblies of hope'. These are fluid, flowing networks bringing together an array of people, alchemists, campaigners, imagineers, and people with ideas, creative energies and who want to do something. The aim would be to bring people together to develop dialogues that don't normally happen, cross boundaries and divides, aid individual action into collective action, and communities of interest into communities of action.
These assemblies - of which there are already many embryonic and nascent ones in existence - would not define people as mere props of economic policy. They would say that human action, interaction, art, creativity and many other areas have worth in their own terms, and should not be seen as instrumental and subordinated to the needs of economic determinism.
The Glasgow 2020 project was a unique, wonderful and fascinating project which it was a pleasure and privilege to be involved with, lead and watch flourish and grow. It offers a rich tapestry of ideas, insights, processes and findings which have relevance for the city in question, but which go far beyond its boundaries. It shows that people increasingly question the current orthodoxies in policy, politics and society, but that the old-fashioned left answers and critiques are also more and more part of the same problem.
People do not like the narrow spectrum of politics on offer or the restricted menu of most public debate, and are searching for new languages, values that are both very human and immediate and at the same time both local and global, and looking at how people and their hopes can be nurtured, nourished and respected. This in many ways feels like the start of a journey, rather than a destination ….
Gerry Hassan is Head of Glasgow 2020, co-author of The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination published by Demos and co-producer of The Dreaming City album available on Sub-Urban Collective later this month.
The Dreaming City book can be downloaded at Demos or Glasgow 2020 or Sub-Urban Collective
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