Recognising Emotions within Urban Development

Abstract

This chapter focuses on one aspect of urban planning – urban conservation – to examine the role of emotions within the system and specifically the mobilization of emotional attachments to prevent the loss of historic places. Urban conservation is primarily concerned with the protection and re-use of historic buildings and environments and has, historically, been a highly emotive subject. Glasgow has a reputation as a city that has traditionally shunned its historic architecture in favour of radical new building programmes. In the twentieth century, this was most evident with the ‘progressive’ modernist plans that envisioned the almost total destruction of the nineteenth-century core of the city, including its imposing civic buildings. The anxiety over losing the existing environment as well as the attendant emotions of sadness and anger can be read within the numerous novels and folk songs produced about Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s.