the alternative to knocking everything down and rebuilding it for different people

Despite a long, hard campaign by a group of residents, the demolition of the Wyndford towers is a guide to an awful lot of things wrong in Scotland – and how to fix them.

First, embedded carbon in a building is very significant and only in rare occasions can a genuinely environmental case be made for demolition and rebuilt over retrofitting. A financial case perhaps but not an environmental one, and the financial case is only statable if the developer does not have to pay to compensate the loss of the embedded carbon.

That is the solution; retrofit is often fundamentally more expensive than knock-down and rebuild, but only because of a tax system that works against retrofit. That system must be reformed. New build is VAT-exempt while retrofitting is charged at full VAT. This is nonsensical and must be equalised.

Wasting good material which must be replaced with heavily carbon-intensive replacements is entirely counterproductive to the environment. There should be a demolition tax which equalises the prices of demolition-and-rebuild and retrofitting.

But the failures are not only environmental, they're democratic. The whole process has been just another instance of disempowered citizens being ignored by distant, top-down managers who do not seem to be restrained by what appears to be the rules (on issues like the duty to produce a proper environmental impact assessment).

Residents were not properly involved in planning decisions and it does not seem that much consideration was given to redeveloping the existing buildings in partnership with residents. A developer mindset seems to have been set on gentrifying the area and reducing the number of housing units available.

We need to move to properly democratic participation in bodies like housing associations and there must be much stronger limitations on how fast and far council planners and developers can go before they really involve residents (which should begin from the very start of the process).

Common Weal favours the mutualisation of bodies like housing associations so they become owned by their residents. And there should be powerful residents associations which must be involved in planning processes from the very beginning.

Finally, it is hard to get away from the feeling that this is just part of Glasgow City Council's obsession with gentrification. The price of rent of the homes replacing the existing homes will be higher and the planning considerations will be different. It does not feel like the new infrastructure will be designed primarily for the needs of those reliant on the current infrastructure.

It is hard not to feel at times that Scotland has a serious class problem and that the political classes are broadly embarrassed by if not ashamed of the working classes. Few decisions appear to be driven by their needs.

A strong solution to this is to have genuinely local councils which are elected from citizens and not between political parties. We need new structures of democracy to address the fact our current structures have a strong class bias.

You can read more about our vision for housing, retrofit, greater scrutiny and accountability for administrators, responsive democracy and community development in our book Sorted.