There is a twist, however. Whenever Kate awakens from her dream, the real world alters, harshens. One morning, she finally arrives in the worst of all worlds: where George Bush is president, fossil fuels rule and 9/11 is under way. Newman’s technique, contrasting utopian with actual reality, is horror fiction at its most visceral. You cannot un-feel the darkness of our own times after reading The Heavens.
Repairing, upgrading, maintaining, adding new stuff carefully, stitching and weaving, keeping it local and co-designing – this was a Glasgow idea. Today this approach is evangelised as progressive development, vital to the climate change challenge. It is Glasgow’s gift to the world of urban design. And it shines a light on a possible new future for the city.
Yet positive change – investment, jobs, better health outcomes – must come if Scotland is to have a significant future. No other urban landscape matters to Scotland like Glasgow matters to Scotland. It brings to this small nation a worldly dimension, with the potential to take on roles on a global stage. While Edinburgh is where Scotland celebrates its past, Glasgow is where Scotland dreams about its future. The goal is to awaken in a world like President Chen’s, in terrifying, hopeful The Heavens.
A 15-point plan for salvaging Shipwrecked Glasgow
- A heavyweight mayor with far-reaching powers
- Establish a new metropolitan region – and tax base – for Glasgow
- Scottish Government-funded Glasgow museums and galleries, to benefit all of Scotland
- Undo the M8 – and make it a world-leading, UK-funded project
- Reinstate old street patterns across former motorway land
- And perhaps some specific buildings, too (we’re doing it with the art school – so why the hell not?)
- Completing the rethink of the Glasgow School of Art rebuild, learning from Hill House’s game-changing approach
- International competition for contemporary, super-flexible, zero-carbon Glasgow tenements
- Establish national building trade skills academy in tandem with a tenement upgrade strategy
- Repurpose the Clyde shipbuilding zone as the UK’s foremost clean energy research, design and build campus, another world-leading, UK-funded project
- Appoint a citizens’ panel to the planning department to inform and shape city-wide planning decisions – based in a revived Lighthouse
- World’s first co-designed masterplan for the city
- A co-designed George Square
- A presumption against demolition in the city centre and other Glasgow townscapes of note
- Establish a national museum of slavery in the Egyptian Halls and rename streets linked to slavery.
It asked: ‘Do we live in a shipwrecked timeline in which our Glasgow is neither one thing or another? Not the Victorian capital of planet Earth, a living story carved in stone, and not the Bruce-planned Modernist boot camp, a kind of Caledonian Logan’s Run. Do we live in their collision?’
The Heavens was on my mind when I penned my speech, Welcome to the Shipwreck, for the RIAS’s annual convention last month. Newman’s novel captured the feeling I’ve had for years about another great Atlantean city that achieved global fame in the 19th Century: Glasgow. And how, given the mess the city is in now, it is hard not to feel that our reality is the ‘wrong’ one and that there’s a better Glasgow to be had just a few dreams away.
Rory Olcayto is writer and critic at Pollard Thomas Edwards and a former AJ editor. To read his RIAS speech in full, click on the file attached
My argument centred on how the hybrid landscape that emerged from this clash cancels the possibility of a bright future for the city – and will do so forever – unless it is undone. It proposes three major moves to establish a new era for Glasgow: get rid of the M8; cherish the tenements; and supercharge the city’s world-leading, co-design heritage that emerged out of the resident-led housing associations in the 1970s.
Right now, however, shipwrecked Glasgow has run aground. There are no more neoliberal ‘City of’ baubles to collect. No more games to bid for and the slogans these days – such as People make Glasgow – are nauseous. You know the kind of thing: ‘Don’t worry about the buildings falling apart around you, or going on fire, or the ones being boarded up. Don’t worry, because, here in the shipwreck, People make Glasgow.’
Glasgow is on its knees: a report in the summer recorded 132 deaths in the city’s homeless hostels since 2020. It has the highest rate of drug misuse deaths in Scotland. And in the east end, 45 per cent of children live in poverty. Despite the AJ’s upbeat account of Glasgow’s regeneration prospects, the built environment is sick, too. From the twice-enflamed Glasgow School of Art – still in charred limbo – to the drive-thru Burger King and Starbucks given planning weeks before Cop 26 rolled into town and the 46,000 tenement flats that will cost north of £3 billion to bring up to energy standards, there’s little to cheer in the former City of Architecture and Design and once Capital of Culture. Put simply, Glasgow has lost its way and desperately needs cash, new ideas, political restructuring and inspirational leadership.
In Sandra Newman’s The Heavens, protagonist Kate, plagued by a recurring dream, lives in New York in ‘the year 2000 in the affluent West’. But it’s not our New York. This version is subtly different: it’s a bi-lingual city (a party on page one is ‘mostly francophone’) and President Chen – a woman and an environmentalist – is in the White House. As the story unfolds, we learn more about this parallel reality, where, it seems, the 20th Century has played out less intemperately. Carbon emissions have ‘radically declined’ and ‘the Jerusalem peace accords had been signed’.
Welcome to the Shipwreck sought to address these issues by tracing a line from Glasgow’s slave-powered expansion in the 18th century, its rise to become a vibrant world city in the Victorian era, to its present, denuded, demolition-happy state.
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