Urban Renewal and the Origins of GEAR

Abstract

Urban renewal managed by public enterprise is not new in the United Kingdom. The first civic improvement commissions and trusts were set up considerably more than a century ago. The Glasgow Eastern Area Renewal (GEAR) project came more than a century after Glasgow's City Improvement Trust was established in 1866, empowered to acquire and clear unfit and overcrowded housing and to make new streets. The way out of Glasgow's descending spiral of social and economic decline seen from the Scottish Office in Edinburgh was by co-ordinated action. Into the 1970s, however, the climate for urban renewal changed, and GEAR emerged not directly from the foresight of Brennan and Hart, but from the convergence of various motives. The way out of Glasgow's descending spiral of social and economic decline seen from the Scottish Office in Edinburgh was by co-ordinated action. The GEAR project coincided less with the rising tide of experiments in urban renewal and area management taking place in England.