Contested Visions of a Modern City: Planning and Poetry in Postwar Glasgow

Abstract

The author draws on the distinctions between representations of space and spaces of representation contained in Lefebvre's Production of Space, and examines the postwar modernisation of Glasgow. In the first part of the paper he considers the images of the city presented in the city's two postwar master plans; one drawn up by central government, the other by local government. These two very different representations of the space of Glasgow as a modern city sparked off a political struggle over the making of the built environment which has left its imprint on the city's contemporary urban landscape. In the second part of the paper he uses the work of several Glasgow poets to illuminate the consequences of the modernisation process for the lived spaces of the city—the spaces of representation. The poets' reading of the modern city vividly illustrates the effects of the colonisation of concrete space by the abstract spaces of the master plans. Weaving together these two different, but closely related, discourses about the city—planning and poetry—he provides a specific example of the significance of Lefebvre's conceptual framework for making sense of the urban landscape of the modern city.