Land remediation in Glasgow's East End

Abstract

Following an industrial boom from the mid-to-late 19th century, Glasgow’s East End underwent exceptional levels of industrial decline. By the 1960s, it suffered from wholesale abandonment and devaluation, visible through widespread swathes of vacant and derelict land and decrepit building structures. After several unsuccessful regeneration attempts over the decades, in 2007 Glasgow City Council (G.C.C.) won the bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games in the East End. In 2008, the same area was subject to the largest regeneration project in Scotland––Clyde Gateway––rooted in sustainability discourses and the provision of new green and blue infrastructure. Clyde Gateway has invested hundreds of millions of public funds across 840 hectares of land, 350 hectares of which was defined as surplus, vacant, derelict, polluted or in need of substantial infrastructural investment. This chapter explores whether substantial benefits from regeneration are in fact trickling down to the local community through the measures being implemented, or whether the “sustainability fix” merely operates to legitimize and accommodate the contradictory impulses of profit-making urbanism and environmentalism. In essence this chapter asks: for whom are the new businesses, jobs, homes and green-blue infrastructure, and at what cost? Keywords the urban development pattern of the city and neighborhood: recovering post-industrial; income inequality; enduring health inequality; vacant space; large-scale urban regeneration; creative class the urban greening of the neighborhood: land remediation; green infrastructure; green space the inequalities at stake: insufficient affordable housing; private capture of public investment; employment and economic development needs; (green) gentrification