Glasgow’s George Square
As the administrative and geographic core of the city, with high footfall, George Square is one of the most palpable spaces for Glasgow’s citizens and visitors to connect to the consequences of action and inaction on climate. In a climate ready scenario, the look and feel of the ultra-low emission square is dramatically transformed to the eyes and ears.
A climate ready scenario depicts a fully pedestrianised space offering a rolling vista of adaptation: the vertical gardens of the restaurants and hotels are immediately eye-catching; rivalled by the solar-panelled façade of Queen St Station. The Square is now host to many more small businesses and enterprising projects associated with the transition, bike hubs and ‘remake and repair’ services, as well as a portfolio of cultural events and leisure activities that take place in between its newly afforested areas and the City Allotment site.
A climate unready scene is wholly different: protesters often converge on the City chambers on a range of issues from housing to energy costs to job losses. A battery of air conditioning units ceaselessly thrum around the square. Traffic throngs the site, which itself is subject to flash flooding. Businesses vacate, citing the economic costs and building denigration, as footfall has dramatically decreased in a space where the urban heat island effect is most intense and air quality is highly degraded.
Glasgow’s Clydeside
Clydeside presents a focal symbol of the historical transformations and redevelopment of Glasgow through time. Its iconic qualities resonate nationwide; a readily identifiable site able to generate the kinds of inspiration publics in Scotland and around the world require to make their own transitions. Its surrounding landscape is frequently reproduced in aerial or landscape images, producing effective means to seamlessly envision its dramatic renovation into a climate ready space.
The river itself will literally contribute to the divergent outcomes of action and inaction on climate change. It can be used as a heat source, a water transport hub, a site for new district energy plants and other green industrial and agricultural developments.6 The adjacent brownfield sites and open spaces between various buildings are adaptable into sustainable habitats and climate ready architecture.
In this positive vision, recognisable buildings literally become green with emplanted facades. The rapid urban afforestation programme intersects with the development of the new wheeler highways as people cycle for health, leisure and commuting. It is a shining example of a city that determined to transition the right way.
The river, however, is equally significant as an imagined source and site of negative impacts, most specifically from sea level rise and extensive flood damaging events8. This vision utterly changes the look and feel of water-lapped buildings around it, emptying Clydeside of people and activity, with immediate transport and communications infrastructure destroyed, businesses defunct.
Waterlogged Clydeside in this view is a symbol of abandonment, inaction and failure, of a city overcome by ecosystem degradation and its attendant social harms.
