Merchant City Research Articles

Urban Regeneration and Sustainable Markets

The paper assesses the criteria for the success of British urban policy initiatives and concludes that they are too short term. In the search for a long-term measure of success, the paper examines the process of development of new property markets. The concept of sustainable markets is proposed as the ultimate goal of urban policy. To explore the creation of sustainable markets, the paper charts the development of a city-centre housing market in Glasgow created by the Merchant City policy initiative instigated at the beginning of the 1980s. The establishment of new local markets is shown to be a long-term process requiring a period of sustained resale/reletting market activity. The conclusion drawn is that the government has underestimated both the funds required for and the time-dimension to sustainable urban regeneration.

Barriers to the enterprise culture: new firm formation in the merchant city area of glasgow

Abstract The paper reports the study of a group of twenty‐two new firm founders in the retail sector, in the Merchant City, an historic part of inner Glasgow that has recently undergone a miraculous revitalisation in a vein similar to that of the Docklands areas of London and Liverpool. The principal aim is to indicate how far the long term unemployed will be involved in this particular part of the enterprise culture, whether directly, or indirectly as a result of expanded employment opportunities. The results provide an upper limit of what we could expect this type of economic development to achieve in less attractive areas. The study provides a useful comparison to previous work concentrated on the manufacturing sector and suggests that the results from such work apply across sectors.

Merchant Bankers and City Aristocracy

Merchant Bankers and City Aristocracy