A 2023 project to research and publish:
A city hand book for the discerning citizen, traveller and reader.
The Glasgow user Manual – A peoples guid to the city
The Project, will be a one year long survey for setting up process and ideas for collecting information for a peoples guide to the city. A publication and website that will manage information and data for a long term portal to allow access to a wide range of city data, infrastructure and aspects in the public interest. This year long project will be the first phase in organising and creating the content for a publication with a work title of: The Glasgow user manual A peoples guide to the city. Continue reading →
“Glasgow Life” Still closing down working class facilities and culture while spending millions on tourist attractions. Turning the city into a generic shopping centre like all others and ignoring the cities uniqueness.
The People’s Palace at GalGael – Govan’s Critical Connections.
Burrell’s vanity project he got us to pay for.
Forgotten Communities to Cultural Tourism
The Burrell Effect – Transferring pubic to private
What happened to citizenship, as in a responsible citizen of a place, city, a community? What happened to the civic imagination? in this regard What is it we need to ask ourselves? That is what we want to look at here.
I don’t think the moron nutcases attacking the capital are the main problem. They are kind of puppets for the main regime, the Cristian fundamentalist. The clean cut people in the wheelhouse charting the course. Remember when they were talking on US news outlets about UK cities being run by Muslims, which people here were perplexed at. Continue reading →
Glasgow Brachen
When I had time to do City Strolls, visiting the Glasgow bracken was a favourite. Unfortunately we do not have the same respect and love of the bracken as the Berliner. The 70s adventure playgrounds, environments and happenings, pop up theatres, had its time in the city. But big brother council and its ubiquitous red glaze soon covered up the bracken and sanitise the land long before it was needed for development parcels. I was never surprised that each time we did a talk on Scotland’s Common Good Fund, at the Electron Club or elsewhere, at least one Berliner would turn up for each occasion. And very impressed they were, that our Common Good Fund existed, along with its uniqueness. I guess it would take a Berliner, to appreciate, who still have the sense and scope of what the brachen and the commons represents and has to offer.
We also had our own Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord potential, but the Philistines-that-be down at the council, could not wait to be rid of ever last remanent of our innovative, industrial and engineering past in order to swathe the landscape in concrete boxes. Who knows to what mental damage the cleansing, both social and environmental of the city has done to its citizens. Soon there will be no place to be lost in, to find, to imagine. No nooks and crannies to offer respite from the bland. No city strolls because there will be no place to go or discover only generic landscape.
Every so often we are, if you even know about it, consulted by Glasgow City Council, about what we want in our public parks. At the last consultation I don’t remember the public agreeing that we should have much more in the way of lock-out festivals and expensive, ticketed, gigs, taking up great swathes of our park space over the summer period when we need the park most. The problem with these consultations is is that they just seem like exercises in get consensus to allow more commercialisation of the park.
The problem is as we see it is. The public do not just need consulted in these matters, we need to be involved in the discussion that leads to decisions. And to be involved in the discussion we need also to be aware of all of the facts relating to not only to the decisions made in our behalf, but also the longer term impact that these decisions will have on our green space.
The value of parks needs to be equated by more than the shallow monetary value put on them and the superficial business orientated consultations which add up to the same thing. The city administration and public need to start taking these thing seriously and understand the real value that is attached to our city parks.
When somebody tells you “Nobody uses it” “The parks have to pay for themselves”along with the sometimes pathetic excuses used to allow building on green space by developers and city administrators alike. We need to, (particularly our young who have most to lose,) be able to give them a cost benefit analysis on our green space and on how parks more than pay for themselves by:
