Scotland’s Place-based Deficit
Rory Hamilton
This article is a reproduction from Common Weal’s weekly newsletter with The National, subscribe here: https://www.thenational.scot/newsletters/
Last week, a Dani Garavelli article for the new Glasgow Bell publication stirred up some online discourse about the state of Scotland’s largest city.
Among various debates saw praise for areas like Strathbungo, Queen’s Park and Shawlands feeling more liveable crossed with criticism of the gentrification of these areas by many residents past and present coping with rising rents, poverty, and crime, set against a backdrop of £4 flat whites, beanie hats too small to cover your ears and turn-up jeans.
Of course, that’s not to say that memories of dirty children running up and down Gorbals side streets or racial attacks on the large Muslim population south of the Clyde, are any sorts of nostalgia to get glossy eyed about. Rather that regeneration does not have to come with gentrification. The working-class people of Govanhill, Pollokshields, and further afield in Maryhill, have a right to participate in the production of a new Glasgow, not to be victims of another regeneration project geared towards rent-seeking and land speculation.
One need only travel down the M8 to see the results of such a process, where the Edinburgh Evening News confirmed recently that 15 registered landlords owned around 5300 private rented properties across the city. GMB general secretary Gary Smith highlighted the continuous social cleansing of working people from Edinburgh’s collective memory in a piece he penned for The Times protesting the closure of the People’s Story Museum on the Canongate.
“Profound social change is not unique to the capital but the chaotic demolition of swathes of the city centre in the 50s and 60s destroyed communities and literally marginalised those living there, driving them out to the schemes and estates.”
Situated on the Royal Mile, what a tragedy that one of the few remaining sites which can share the story of Edinburgh, told not through the eyes of kings and queens but through the people that built it, now has to turn people away to the neighbouring tourist tat shops which reinforce the outdated and kitschy representations of Scots as tartan-wearing, whisky-drinking, Highland-cow-loving bagpipers.
What we are seeing in this hollowing out of Scotland’s two main cities is the destruction of cultural fabrics, and the creation of a place-based deficit, in which people fail to identify with the place they find themselves.
Pollokshields Road and Mount Florida may be forging a new identity built off the economically comfortable graduates of the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, but for those for whom rent, energy and food prices are outstripping their daily means, this is just another nail in the coffin in a city where derelict buildings of historical significance such as the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice on Carlton Place are of more value to their (private) owners as charred rubble than fulfilling a purpose, since underneath the rubble is land prime for speculation based on a notional value of what could be done with it.
This hollowing out process is the result of a decades-long ideological emphasis on urban space as private property, as a commodity, rather than as somewhere to inhabit. Property rights interpreted this way, just as capital alienates the proletariat from its labour and from the means of production, alienates urban space from inhabitants.
This sense of alienation pervades more than the low-income communities illustrated here. This recent discourse over gentrification and the closure of working-class spaces has been undercut by Scottish university students finding themselves subject to speculation over tuition fees, and classist discrimination by their non-Scottish peers.
In particular, comments from the student online newspaper Edinburgh Tab that a lack of Scottish students around the University of Edinburgh was "as it should be", was met with outrage as Scottish students shared their experiences at some of Scotland’s Russell Group universities, highlighting the high numbers of private school students, often from the south of England – 35% of students at Edinburgh were privately educated, 20% at Glasgow, compared to 1.8% at Glasgow Caledonian – living up to the EdinbRAH identity the university has cultivated for itself through a reliance on non-Scottish/international fees.
Being told your Scottish accent was “embarrassing”, you can understand why Scottish students, if not deterred from applying to some of Scotland’s top universities, those who make it past the cap on home student numbers, might feel alienated from their surroundings.
But with universities now seen as "global businesses", it is no wonder that any sense of place fails to cut through the profit-seeking model any more so than it does in towns and city centres which are seen as economic opportunities that people just happen to live in. It is time for a politics of inhabitance, for a right to the city, built on the re-appropriation of urban and academic spaces for those who play a part in their production and reproduction.