Row Breaks Out Over Think Tank’s 2020 Vision Of Glasgow

Civic leaders in Glasgow were last night accused of running out of ideas by a report they helped to fund. Demos, a London-based think-tank, said the city’s council and other authorities had left whole communities and neighbourhoods behind as they chased a “formulaic” vision of regeneration.

The findings came after an 18-month programme during which Demos surveyed the views of 5000 Glaswegians, nearly 1% of the city population. However, they were bitterly rejected by Glasgow City Council which described a final report from Demos as “an insult”.

Melissa Mean, of Demos, said: “City leaders are running on empty in terms of ideas to sustain the urban renaissance. When every city has commissioned a celebrity architect and pedestrianised a cultural quarter, distinctiveness is reduced to a formula. To find some new ideas and energy, instead of dry consultations which have pre-set boxes to be ticked, cities need to open up to the mass imagination of their citizens.”

A final report, called The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, contained some difficult language. It recommended “assemblies of hope”, networks of individuals who could get together to help shape the city’s future and find space for everyone from “alchemists to imagineers”.

A city spokesman said: “This report is nothing less than an insult to the many Glaswegians who gave up their time to take part. Bizarre would be a charitable way to describe some of the report’s conclusions. What on earth is this meaningless nonsense such as assemblies of hope’, alchemists’ or mass imaginings’?”