One of europe�s Biggest urban renewal project faces the challenge of reviving the fortunes of Glasgow�s poorest areas. Can it succeed?
By Colin Donald, Business Editor

GLASGOW'S east end as a business powerhouse once again? For the first time in more than a generation, a transformation of the area - long seen as a drag on Scottish economic progress - looks do-able.

With candidates in the Glasgow East by-election competing over the airwaves to endorse the ambitions of the Clyde Gateway urban regeneration company (URC), a vision of an economically productive east end is lodging in Scottish and UK-wide consciousness.

Economic development specialists talk about the project with the same excitement with which researchers talk about an imminent medical breakthrough. In this case, the "patient" is the Scottish nation.

"If you can fix Glasgow's problems you will go along way towards fixing the problems for all of Scotland, says Richard Cairns, the new chief executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and a forceful cheerleader of private sector involvement in Clyde Gateway.

"The east end is key, because it has the largest concentrations of derelict and underutilised land, as well as of unemployment and low skills. If you can regenerate that, then you make a huge difference to the economic performance of that part of Scotland's largest city and, therefore, the whole country."

Amid the rumblings of a property price collapse and the threat of sustained recession, Clyde Gateway's guaranteed funding makes it a counter-cyclical source of jobs and momentum. But even with the vast sums of money involved, the scale of the economic and social ambition means that a leap of faith is still required.

The resources that are going in to reinfuse the business base are impressive, even when you exclude the cost of the project's infrastructural backbone, the £700 million M74 extension, and its little brother, the £70m East End Regeneration Route.

London Olympics-related work apart, this is the biggest urban renewal project in Europe .

In Clyde Gateway's office in Bridgeton Cross, Ian Manson, the URC's chief executive pores enthusiastically over maps and Google Earth-type satellite photos that show vast tracts of startlingly empty or nature-reclaimed city-centre space amid the meandering loops of the Clyde.

"There are a lot of pockets of green in the east end, because there was nothing else to do with the land that was left when tenement housing was developed. It's not unattractive, but in economic terms, it is meaningless" he says.

"For us, Clyde Gateway is a back-to-the-future project. The east end was an economic powerhouse of Britain, and even if people don't get teary-eyed about it as they do with the shipyards, its decline had every bit of an impact that the decline of that industry had. The Parkhead Forge steelworks used to employ 30,000 people, making it the largest in the world in 1975, but there were other big businesses like Templeton's Carpets on Glasgow Green and Arrol's steel plant in Dalmarnock. These companies supported industries, local shops, local pubs. It was a very self-contained community.

"More than most cities in the UK, the business landscape was dominated by big business rather than small business, which meant that the removal of those businesses took away a lot of the latent potential that other cities enjoyed. Awareness of the industrial history of the east end is central to this project, and we expect about 100,000 people will benefit from it. It's about taking wasted assets, and bringing them back into the market.

"Business is central to us. We want to attract developers and businesses to think about setting up here, though the market, not us, will decide what is appropriate. Our job is to change perceptions, and to turn them on our head, and that starts with solving the practical problems of ground contamination and water and sewerage infrastructure."

For Manson, the public sector's role is to "use its assets creatively", for example, turning flooding problems into an excuse for a system of watercourses with parallel walks or cycleways.

While so much of the Clyde corridor has already been transformed, the east end has, until now, remained at the back of the queue. Why?

The non-political answer is that the area is a victim of previous success as a workshop of the British empire. The cost of "decontaminating" former heavy-duty industrial land, in a heavily depopulated area with a generally low-skilled populace has never seemed worth paying by would-be investors.

Clyde Gateway, which is chaired by former Scottish Enterprise chief executive Robert Crawford, is largely about removing barriers that potential employers had no great motive to try to overcome. They could always go somewhere else. At the project's core is the creation of modern business space for existing and new companies, giving them a competitive advantage in transport and logistics and energy efficiency that they wouldn't get elsewhere. The main targets are jobs in construction, offices, leisure and recreation activities, hotels and tourism, retail, financial services and "the new and emerging industries of the 21st century".

The Scottish government has already pledged £62m, to be spent before 2011, to Clyde Gateway, whose 2000-acre area straddles Glasgow's southeast city boundary with South Lanarkshire, to include Bridgeton, Dalmarnock, Partick, Shawfield and Rutherglen. The project's partners have committed land holdings and staff resources amounting to more than £100m of public money, in the short-term, to "pave the way" for a further £1.5 billion in private development over the next two decades.

The Commonwealth Games village (£245m) and the National Indoor Sports arena and Velodrome (£120m) are the most publicised parts of the package but neither they, nor the 10,000 new houses projected across the area, are central to the project. According to Cairns, the most enduring benefit will be the provision of space for a substantial amount of "the missing 5000" - the number of extra businesses that a city with the population of Glasgow should have, but doesn't, according to the city's economic strategy.

More than in any Scottish regeneration project previously, business is at the heart, and the project symbolises the closer working between civic and business leadership, championed by Glasgow City Council leader Steven Purcell and his predecessor, Charlie Gordon.

Cairns, who was head of economic planning at the council before taking charge of the English-speaking world's oldest Chamber (founded 1783), says the east end should not be treated as the kind of poster child for social injustice that the candidates are parading around the doorsteps and the media. Instead, he argues, the practical fact needs to be addressed that there are too few "class B" spaces for business outside the city-centre glass palaces, and too few work-ready personnel to allow them to expand without leaving the city, if they manage to survive business infancy.

Such constraints appear to have made Glasgow a net exporter of businesses and people, although the figures are hard to calculate precisely.

"Glasgow and the west have had a declining population and there has never been a case of a growing economy where that is happening at the same time," says Cairns.

The vision is of a "virtuous circle" in the east of the city where successful companies breed more of the same.

"We have got to find ways of getting more people into the labour force and if we are spending money it should be on getting people back to work. There is no way we can prosper where you have this number of people sitting around."

There have been significant successes in reducing the amount of worklessness in Glasgow from around 100,000 people four years ago to 80,000 now, and more are likely thanks to such schemes as the welfare-to-work Glasgow Works project supported by the Clyde Blowers tycoon Jim McColl. Clyde Gateway is intended to bring another 20,000 jobs to the city, and a similar amount of population growth.

With these changes, Cairns hopes, will come a more psychologically important shift that will be needed before the decades-long economic restoration of Scotland's biggest city can be considered complete.

"Glasgow is in better shape than it has been in a generation, but business in Glasgow is still undervalued," he says. "As far as I am concerned, business is Santa Claus, but there is still a passive attitude that sees it as a necessary evil rather than something that is fundamentally good. We need to celebrate the success of businesses here. A lot of that message just disappears in the ebb and flow, and people don't see it."

Enthusiasm for the possibilities of Clyde Gateway is partly based on a determination to feed the momentum that will be needed to carry a project of unprecedented complexity through to its conclusion, but it also reflects the determination to succeed where preceding generations of planners have failed - to provide a lasting, holistic answer to the devastation of Glasgow's heavy-industrial eclipse.

There has always been extreme poverty in the east end, but it was a world-class economic hub for far longer than it has been a marginalised area it is now.

Clyde Gateway sees no logical reason why the latter state is more natural than the former.