The culture of urban renewal: Glasgow, Britain, and the European Community (Scotland)

Annually since 1986, at least one city in the European Community has been elected to host the European City of Culture festival and in 1990 the celebration was held in Glasgow, Scotland. While festivals have become an increasingly important as urban-renewal strategies undertaken by many cities, Glasgow was the first city in Europe to use the festival in its larger urban-renewal program. Traditionally an industrial city, Glasgow, along with many British cities, was undergoing a significant social and economic transition in the 1970s and 1980s, as deindustrialization become the norm rather than the exception. While this study documents how the locus of the struggle over what kind of city Glasgow was going to become was local, it nevertheless seeks to incorporate an understanding of the larger political transition to Thatcherism in Britain and the development of a supranational form of governance within the European Community. Hence, while building upon some of the recent theoretical trends in urban studies, such as urban regime and growth theories, to describe urban politics and explain urban change, this study not only details the local role that the festival had in Glasgow's urban redevelopment but characterizes urban change as affected by many processes, mechanisms, and authorities that operate on varying geographical scales. Moreover, this study describes, in some detail, the specific configurations of actors in institutions not only to show how various individual projects compatible in some ways and conflicting in others, but also to present how institutional resources at these different scales were mobilized and invested in by individuals and networks in order to achieve the perceived ends of various factions. While it is important to examine these higher scales of authority in order to understand the material and social changes that took place in Glasgow, locally different interpretations of Glasgow's transition from being a city primarily industrial to something different, produced a host of conflicts over what resources would be valued or devalued. Important not only for Glaswegians but also for many Scots across the country, these struggles were often expressed, during the European City of Culture, through questions of culture and identity.