At the end of last year we told you about our smart city vision for Glasgow, our role in the Glasgow City Centre District Regeneration Framework Master Planning Project - aka (Y)Our City Centre project - and the progress the international and interdisciplinary team has made.

We are now back with more updates as some of the master plans and designs are starting to take shape. To sum it up, the aim is to create a more walkable, greener, more liveable city centre and a truly 24-hour city.

Ideas are coming from many places: from the urban designers involved in the regeneration strategy, from other architects and from the communities themselves. Below are a few of the big ideas, some of which are already in the pipeline, and others of which are still just dreams yet to be fleshed out. Here is just a taste of the Glasgow to come, you can read more about some of the ideas on the Glasgow City Centre Regeneration Framework project page, the official (Y)Our City Centre project page and this comprehensive article by Herald Scotland.

_{source: MVRDV - https://www.mvrdv.nl/en/projects/your-city-centre}

A green linear park cutting through the city coming up.

As part of the effort to create a greener Glasgow one of our favourite (Y)Our City Centre project ideas currently is the one connecting Glasgow Green to the Riverside Museum and then up the Kelvin to Kelvingrove Park with a stretch of green along the River Clyde. This enables the river to become a natural gathering place rather than a place which divides - with bars, restaurants, trim trails and activities on both banks.

_{Image source: MVRDV - https://www.mvrdv.nl/en/projects/your-city-centre}

Transforming the city centre one lane at a time

Another project, that started before the (Y)Our City Centre project kicked off, is looking at and proposing solutions for the poorly utilised lanes connecting the arteries of the retail streets in Glasgow City Centre. The vision here is for the lanes to contribute to the economic prosperity of the city by enabling artists, designers and entrepreneurs to populate them.

_{Image source: MVRDV - https://www.mvrdv.nl/en/projects/your-city-centre}

We couldn’t agree more with Jeroen Zuidgeest, MVRDV partner and architect who says that “the (Y)our City Centre strategy is a hands-on, layered approach with a series of projects that range in scale, that will collectively contribute to the ‘upgrade’ of the city, to boost the liveliness, attractiveness and competitiveness of the city in a larger (inter)national context, allowing for a gradual development by many stakeholders’’.

There are a lot of opportunities within Glasgow city centre, such as empty spaces, empty homes, neighbourhoods on both sides of the river, the spaces under the M8, and we are excited to be part of a project that is looking at how to take advantage of and build a better, liveable city on the back of these opportunities.

Winy Maas, the visionary Rotterdam-based architect brought into the project by Glasgow City Council for an innovative, international-perspective is eager to test some ideas out. He calls this approach as a kind of “action planning”. Winy Maas says - “It would be great if on one Friday you could decide to close the quay to traffic and to simply organise a market or pop festival. Just do it and then see what the troubles are. Are they really that big, or not?” 

Stay tuned for more updates and news about the upcoming smart cities assessment to be supported by UrbanTide, for more engagement, more contribution opportunities and for more plans and ideas.