Every big birthday encourages us to look both back at a life well lived, and forward, optimistically to the future. Glasgow’s 850th birthdayprovides us with a unique opportunity to imagine the city’s future, and for us to enter that future with a clear vision of what it means to create a ‘Good City’.
October 2025 marks 850 years since Glasgow was founded. This milestone is an opportunity to question what kind of place we want Glasgow to become over the next century. From a medieval ecclesiastical hub to industrial powerhouse, from postindustrial decline to cultural renaissance, Glasgow’s identity has rarely been static. Urban reinvention is not unique, but it has left Glaswegian’s with a unique city.
We must recognise that this process of reinvention must continue if Glasgow is to meet the challenges of our age: climate transition, the economies of a post-covid and technology focused society, and the pursuit of equity in an increasingly fractured world. It is time to reflect on our ‘dear green place’ with the understanding that thriving and healthy cities are essential to both societal health and the health of the planet.
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‘People Make Glasgow’ is a genius marketing slogan, only because it is true. Glasgow is a city that blends its strong personal identity with a welcoming attitude. If the most important role for any city is to become a place with community, a place where people from different backgrounds can live in supportive environments, then Glasgow is off to a good start. You only have to remember the actions of protesters in Pollockshields as evidence, as they surrounded a UK Border Agency van shouting ‘These are our neighbours, let them go.”
As we try to increase city centre populations the city must provide space for the individual, for the family, and spaces for community. Development of its residential precincts should empower, not displace, it must avoid the siloed communities that leads to ghettoisation. New developments should encourage multigenerational, mixed and resilient communities. Development should happen with Glasgow’s communities, not to Glasgow’s communities.
Humans are social animals. A city that brings its people together is one that embraces places and spaces for culture and the arts. This is something Glasgow already does brilliantly with world class venues such as the SSE Hydro and its (free) museums including the Riverside Museum and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and recent investment in the Citizen’s Theatre. Venues like SWG3 and St Lukes show us that culture can colonise found spaces too, connecting past and future.
Edward Dymock(Image: BDP)
Access and movement is crucial to the ‘Good City’. We have all seen the diagrams that poke fun at the simplicity of Glasgow’s ‘clockwork orange’ subway. But the Glasgow subway is a beautifully simple backbone to its public transport infrastructure, connecting deprived areas with the city’s commercial core and its west end, and providing a simple solution for the travellers’ ‘final mile’.
SPT is currently endeavouring to improve accessibility to the subway. Projects such as the Clyde Metro, misunderstood by some as being focussed on an airport link, are driven by the desire to further connect communities, tackle social exclusion and improve access to amenities in underserved areas. When we do invest in new low carbon public transport infrastructure, we need to celebrate the passengers’ transport choice with architecture that celebrates both movement and place: a key quality of the design of Glasgow’s Queen Street Station.
A visit to Europe’s best cities, such as Copenhagen and Paris, will tell you that Glasgow is lagging behind in the transition to active travel. Despite investment in the Avenues programme, cycling remains niche in the city and many urban and suburban streets remain the territory of the bus and car. More needs to be done to aid a cultural shift to walking and cycling as they are the cheapest and most equitable transport modes. As well as investing in infrastructure, the answer is to focus on creating beautiful streets and places that make walking the natural choice.
Glasgow’s birthday year saw the release of the city’s tall building guidance. A key attribute of The Good City is Transit Oriented Development (TOD), and I hope that we see taller buildings clustering around existing transport hubs, such as those promised at Charing Cross station, delivered in a way that promotes the integration of their new communities with the city’s existing populations and infrastructure.
The Covid- pandemic reminded us, somewhat brutally, that the buildings that form our urban infrastructure need to be able to respond to the changing needs of society. But changes to Glasgow’s buildings is nothing new. The building that is home to GOMA today for example, started life as a Tobacco Lord’s house before becoming the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Royal Exchange, and then home to the Stirling’s Library collection, before becoming the Gallery of Modern Art. I’m certain it will have other uses in the future.
Those that commission and design Glasgow’s new buildings must recognise that future programmatic change is inevitable and use circular construction principles to facilitate it. Buildings like the Learning and Teaching Building, the University of Strathclyde’s much loved student hub, shows that even underutilised 1960’s buildings can imaginatively have new life and new beginnings breathed into them.
Glasgow is famously a city of tenements, and many look at this as a challenge to decarbonisation. Uninsulated Victorian four-storey flatted buildings, with every flat having a separate owner, does not make decarbonisation easy. But is it ever? With one building type being so prevalent across the whole city, we should see the city’s tenements as an opportunity. A relatively small suite of technical solutions (and supporting funding models) could decarbonise massive swathes of Glasgow. Even recent developments will need decarbonisation. Energy networks, of various scales, will be part of the solution. The new energy centre for the transformational Barclays Campus, shows that the solutions can be fully integrated into their urban environments.
If Glasgow’s recent history was about growth, power, and reinvention, then its future must be about balance, generosity and belonging. Glasgow’s shipbuilding spirit must now be used to forge a place that is resilient to climate, equitable in its economy, proud of its cultures and remain confident in its identity.
Edward Dymock is an Architect Associate Director in BDP Glasgow Studio. As part of the Glasgow 850 celebrations BDP has been leading tours of several of its key buildings in the city including Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum’s New Century Project, Glasgow Queen Street Station and the University of Strathclyde’s Learning and Teaching Building.