The Pan-American Highway: Part 2, Laying the Foundation for New US Markets and the Darién Gap

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Heritage & Conservation, Inter-ethnic relations, Law and society,, Political geography, Regional History

Before there was talk in the United States about a highway to span the full length of the American hemispheres, there was talk (as far back as the 1880s and even earlier) of a Pan-American railroad to make a direct connexion with its continental neighbours. This ultimately came to nothing but the idea of a Pan-American highway caught on in the 1920s. With the US pushing the proposal, the 6th International Conference of American States gave its approval in 1928.

ყą۷ıʑą (℘ɧơɬơ: ɛҳ℘ɛཞɬ ۷ąɠąცơŋɖ) 

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Once work got started in the mid-Thirties on the first section of the highway—3,400 miles, connecting México to Panama1⃞—progress was slow due to multiple factors – disruption of war, the availability of money (the project increasingly depended on the injection of American funding), diplomatic issues, the problem of getting governments to cooperate. While México built and financed its own part of the section (opened 1950), the smaller Central American states required US aid to complete their’s (opened 1963)…and even then the Chepo to Yaviza (the Panama terminus point) stretch, a distance of 139 miles, took 20 years to build [Miller, Shawn W. “Minding the Gap: Pan-Americanism’s Highway, American Environmentalism, and Remembering the Failure to Close the Darién Gap.” Environmental History 19, no. 2 (2014): 189–216. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24690556.].

Road trippers on the PAH who make it as far as Yaviza find that the highway comes abruptly to an end where it meets to the Darién Gap, 66-mile strip of largely impenetrable jungle, rainforest, swamp and marsh land. If motorists want to continue on the PAH they must ship their vehicle by cargo ferry to Turbo (in northern Columbia) where the Highway resumes.

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Natural barriers of the Gap
American road builders faced a Herculean task in attempting to construct a road across the Gap. Geography and climate were a constant impediment…swamps and jungles and incessant seasonal rain produced unstable soils, making highway construction in Darién virtually an engineering “mission impossible”. Compounding the extreme topographical landform were the inherent dangers from jaguars, snakes and other poisonous creatures. Topping it off, Darién Gap’s “no man’s land” status, outside of any controlling authority, made it a haven for dangerous anti-government groups (Columbian drug cartels, leftist (FARC) guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries).

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Environmental focus
Later problems upped the degree of difficulty for the road builders. From the early Seventies they started to get a lot of heat from environmental groups. The California-based Sierra Club waged a successful campaign against the highway, raising environmental and health issues. Opponents of the road argued that it would cause irreparable harm to a sensitive area, eco-system damage, deforestation, pose biological threats and spread tropical diseases, and they were aided by the recent passage of US environmental impact laws.

Further thwarting the road builders’ plans was the realisation that the deeper threat of adverse change was not the building of a road through the Darién Gap per se. Establishing road infrastructure in the Gap would bring a raft of unwelcome by-products. Transportation access would facilitate the incursion of loggers, ranchers, farmers, cattle grazers, poachers of wild animals. Moreover, the highway would spawn the construction of many secondary roads throughout the Gap. The Sierra Club also voiced concerns for the culture of the area’s indigenous native communities—the Kuna, Emberá and Wounaan tribes—to safeguard their right to protection of their homeland (Miller).

Once the construction work on the Darién Gap actually commenced, the Atrato River Basin with its swampy wetlands proved a monumental stumbling block, the idea to build a very long bridge over it was eventually jettisoned after the failure to locate a solid earth foundation.

While the nature of the environment and taking into account the effect on local indigenous cultures were impediments to the Darién construction project’s progress, the crucial factor in the anti-highway legal case was the threat of foot-and-mouth disease being transmitted north from South America, sufficient for US federal judges to shut down highway construction for nearly two decades. The Sierra Club’s key argument was that “the Gap served as an essential prophylactic against dangerous microbes” (Miller).

Dariénistas
The absence of a road across the Darién Gap has never stopped adventurers (labelled Dariénistas) from trying to navigate vehicles over its forbidding terrain. A host of adventure junkies have attempted it with only a small number succeeding. The first automobile expedition to make it entirely overland used specialised vehicles and relied on winches, levers and help from indigenous peoples, a journey taking over two years to travel just 125 mi (Miller).

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“America’s greatest foreign development project”
Today, the PAH is somewhat of a sleeper among American history topics (with a negligible output of books on the subject cf. prolific number of narratives on that other great American enterprise overseas, the Panama Canal). A few historians recently have drawn attention to its largely-overlooked importance – at a time when America was still engaged in its official isolationist stance in foreign affairs, the PAH during the interwar period was the US’s largest global development project…more remarkedly FD Roosevelt allocated the money to kickstart the Central American highway project from New Deal funds during the Great Depression![Maureen Harmon, ‘The Story of the Pan-American Highway’, Pegasus, Summer 2019, www.ucf.edu]. US motives were mixed, PAH (together with the earlier Panama Canal project) is where “the ideals of Pan-Americanism intersected with an expansionist compulsion (by America) to reach new, foreign markets” Eric Rutkov, The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas, (2019)]. This duality runs through the history of the Highway…promoted as an example of good neighbourly cooperation and mutual advantage by successive American presidents, the blatant self-interest of the US was transparent. Making such a supra-state highway a reality was necessary to expand the lucrative market for American automobiles. The proposal by Washington to build the PAH came at a time (1920s) when the US was the dominant global force in motor vehicle production. The PAH from the American perspective was primarily about the selling of the country’s automobiles…and having the road infrastructure in place was the precondition for US automakers to reap the sales bonanza to come2⃞(Miller).

℘ɧơɬơ: ۷ıʂıɬƈɛŋɬཞơáɱɛཞıƈą.ƈơɱ 

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Endnote: “Tricky Dicky” Nixon, fan of the Pan-American Highway
Richard Nixon made the PAH something of a personal project, first as vice-president he talked Eisenhower into boosting American funding for the project. “Cold warrior” Nixon saw its construction as good for regional stability and a way of guarding against the spread of communism in the Americas. As president Nixon got behind efforts to bridge the Darién Gap, even (unrealistically) calling for its completion by 1976.

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1⃞ known locally as the Inter-American Highway
2⃞ in the Seventies the US government cloaked its over-the-top endorsements of the PAH project in the guise of highway safety education programs

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 3

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, National politics, Politics, Regional History, Society & Culture

At the conclusion of World War Two no one was seriously of the opinion that Glasgow didn’t need to urgent address the acute housing and quality of life dilemmas besetting the city’ inhabitants. For their part, the planners focusing on the city certainly had (or at least professed) good intentions in their efforts to ameliorate what was for tens of thousands of Glaswegians a polluted, congested and thoroughly unpleasant living environment. For all the planning and the vast sums of money poured into redevelopment however, the results were and continue to be more than disappointing. As discussed in the first two parts of this blog series, the uncoordinated approach of having two rival sets of planners trying to implement conflicting visions of a new Glasgow didn’t help matters at all.

Map credit: Glasgow City Council
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The Clyde Valley Regional Park Plan with the umpf of the UK government behind it got more of its planned restructure of Glasgow off the drawing board than the discredited Bruce Plan. The core of CVRP’s plan was the “overspill policy”, relocating the surplus population away from the slums of inter Glasgow to new, modern, sanitary, green and spacious accommodation far from the inner-city. There were two planks to the planners’ intended re-housing fix – the creation of five purpose-built “New Towns” outside of Glasgow, at East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Irvine and Livingston, and the establishment of four new housing ‘schemes’ (ie, estates)«A̴» on the outskirts of Glasgow — Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok.
Irvine new town (Image: earlyooters.blogspot.com)
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Avoiding the city slums only to find a brand new set of problems
What looked good on paper (modern flats, heating, indoor toilets, more space, etc) transpired in reality for many of the relocated residents into a deeply dissatisfactory and frustrating experience. Flaws soon surfaced in many of the flats and houses, shoddy construction«B̴», poorly designed heating and ventilation, crumbling housing stock (eg, Castlemilk and Drumchapel).  For these residents, the initial hopes and optimism floundering on what Florian Urban calls “a sculpture park of failed modern utopias”. There were grounds for hopefulness at the beginning. After the poky, dirty, overcrowded tenements of Glasgow central, the former inner city residents you imagine would have welcomed living in the housing schemes, many of which were “the equivalent size of many towns in Scotland”, but their positivity were cut asunder by infrastructure realities – there was nothing like an equivalent level of facilities provided to cope with the large implants of population. In a catastrophic piece of non-planning the areas of the schemes had hardly any places for residents to shop or to meet new people and socialise (no pubs, no dance halls, no cinemas, etc) and the promised open spaces for leisure activities failed to materialise. Public transport to take estate residents to the city centre did not run frequently enough and was relatively expensive. The promised local employment opportunities for the new estates were not forthcoming, so unemployment became a major problem for the schemes’ residents (‘Overspill Policy and the Glasgow Slum Clearance Project in the Twentieth Century: From One Nightmare to Another?’, Lauren Paice, IATL Reinvention, Vol 1 Issue 1, May 2013, http://Warwick.ac.uk; ‘Billy Connolly classically described the new estates as “deserts wi’ windaes”’, The Herald, 07-Nov-1998, www.theheraldscotland.com).
Scheme in Easterhouse
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Scourge of Easterhouse
Easterhouse has the unwanted distinction of embodying the most dire consequences of the failings of Glasgow scheme planning. Physically isolated on the eastern edge of Glasgow, the severity of Easterhouse’s housing estate social problems and their persistence in the 21st century, has drawn a lot of concerned celebrity attention…. Princess Diana, PM Tony Blair and French President Chirac et al all made special visits to its notorious “sink-estates” (‘What’s Happened To Easterhouse: the Most Notorious Housing Scheme in Glasgow’, Francisco Garcia, Vice, 14-Nov-2016, www.vice.com). So depleted was its basic amenities, so lacking in a sense of community spirit, its infrastructure and housing problems magnified by a unemployment rate calamitously high (31.9% cf. a national average of 13.7% Hansard, 3 May 1985), the suburb’s schemes became a case study for social planners on what not to do to create a successful housing development (Paice). Easterhouse’s continuing woes have been compounded seemingly by a corresponding lack of political will to effect meaningful change (Hansard). Rather than leaving their problems and worries behind in the toxic slum tenements of the city, the dispersed Glaswegians found in the peripheral, facilities-deficient housing estates and towns a raft of new social problems…spikes in incidences of drunkenness and family violence, suicide, etc. Alienated and bored youth reacted to the lack of things to do by engaging in vandalism and petty crime (with young gangs perhaps no where active in the late Sixties than in Easterhouse and it’s so-called “Ned culture”).
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Family dislocation
Relocation to the edges from the city led to other unforeseen or unaddressed problems, including a major disruption to the extended family network…many residents in the new projects were now too far away from their past abodes and cut off from their extended families and friends, resulting in a heightening of a sense of isolation (Paice). This outcome was even more perturbing for those Glasgow citizens who had been forced into relocating to the schemes and New Towns.

Cumbernauld Town Centre: “the rabbit warren on stilts”
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Though the Glasgow schemes and the New Town project have been widely maligned as abject failures and disasters by both observers and residents, not everyone has come away with a negative perception: the people of Cumbernauld in a 1980s poll gave the program an 87% approval (of course some schemes and some New Towns did better than other). At the very least, the housing experiments did free thousands and thousands of Glaswegians from the abomination of slum life in the city and transported them into new and better if still far from perfect living conditions… certainly anywhere after the Glasgow slum tenements had to be a step up, although some would argue that after fifty or sixty years, the New Towns with their persisting ailments, no longer new, were showing the clear signs of the foundations  of new Glasgow slums«C̴» [‘Neighbourhoods New Towns’, (W Hamish Fraser), The Glasgow Story, www.theglasgowstory.com].
Craigshill 1960s (image: Livingston Devlt Corp)
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Divine right of technocrats
Nonetheless, a deep sense of dissatisfaction was and continues to be the general feeling about the two housing programs. Both plans for Glasgow’s regeneration, both the Scottish Office and Glasgow Corporation, were guilty (unsurprisingly) of taking a technocratic, “top-down’ approach to the re-housing solution. Both groups of planners failed to consult the residents themselves on what they wanted, the very people whose futures were riding on the experiments’ success and would be most affected by the results…a blind “focus on processes and numbers rather than people and their lives” (‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Arts, www.radar.gsa.ac.uk). In hindsight, had they done so, at least some of the chronic and systemic problems may have been averted.

Social engineering, the “Glasgow Effect”
Glasgow’s 20th century standing as the British Empire’s “Second City” and an economic and industrial powerhouse in the region came at a cost. Studies have long revealed that Glaswegians have a proportionately higher early death-rate—and not accountable by poverty alone—than other comparable great cities«D̴». A 2016 report by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (‘History, politics and vulnerability: explaining excess mortality’) concluded that the combined historic effects of overcrowding, poor city planning (1960s-’80s) and “a democratic deficit–a lack of an ability to control decisions that affect their lives”—were the causes of the city’s susceptibility to premature death (“Revealed: ‘Glasgow effect’ mortality rate blamed on Westminster social engineering”, Karin Goodwin, The Herald, 16-May-2016, www.heraldscotland.com). The SO took this tact, the GCPH asserted, knowing full-well that the policy would be damaging to the long-term health of Glaswegians (Goodwin).

Castlemilk ca.1965 (Source: Gordon Waddell (Pinterest))

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“Skimming the cream”
The evidence points to a deliberate government policy of social engineering experiments in Glasgow…Scottish Office documents released under the 30-year rule reveal a calculated policy in determining which inner city residents were relocated where. ”Skimming the cream” (rehousing the best preferred preferred citizens in the choices parts of the new settlements) was practiced. Skilled workforce and young families were chosen to reside in East Kilbride and the other New Towns while the centre was left with “the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable”. This tactic and the steering of economic investment away from Glasgow resulted in a “serious population imbalance” (Goodwin) and putting the vulnerable ’stayers’ in a jeopardy.

Murray Drive (Photo: Stonehouse Heritage Group)

Postscript: Belatedly aborted Stonehouse – New Towns become surplus to needs
There was meant to be a sixth New Town built to absorb overspill population from Glasgow…the small village of Stonehouse was slated to accommodate 22,000 new homes and 35,000 people, in fact local farmers had their land compulsorily purchased and the first 96 homes in Murray Drive were not only constructed«E̴» but in 1976 the first residents were already two days in occupancy before the Scottish Office suddenly got “cold feat” and pulled the plug on the development! Why was Stonehouse New Town axed and why did it occur so late in the process? Originally proposed in the early Sixties when planners had identified a continuing need for new houses on the periphery, by 1973 two developments had prompted a policy change — Glasgow city had depopulated dramatically as a result of the dispersals (1970-73: 58,000 Glaswegians left) and the authorities were concerned that too many young people were leaving the centre. The emphasis for the inner city refocused on renovating rather than demolishing and rebuilding and the SO began redeploying resources towards regenerating and rehabilitating the East End of Glasgow. Roger Smith’s answer to the obvious question of why the authorities still kept going with Stonehouse after it was apparent by 1973 that the project was a “no-goer” is that the government machine at both the centralised and local level was simply incapable of “respond(ing) quickly to changing events and new understandings of existing situations”…which seems to sum up many of the urban planning missteps made in postwar Glasgow (Roger Smith (1978) Stonehouse—an obituary for a new town, Local Government Studies, 4:2, 57-64, DOI: 10.1080/03003937808432733; ‘The Scottish town that never was’, Alison Campsie, The Scotsman, Upd. 04-Jun-2020, www.scotsman.com.au).

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«A̴» which initially were unfortunately called “townships” until someone pointed out Apartheid South Africa’s use of the same term to delineate non-white homelands
«B̴» the haste of the estate building program contributed to this
«C̴» as a result of multiple factors including lack of investment, cost-cutting on building materials and techniques, poorly maintained estates, apathy and neglect, pollution, loss of community pride, etc.
«D̴» 30% greater risk of dying before 65 than comparable deindustrialised cities like Liverpool and Manchester (Goodwin)
«E̴» everything else planned remained unbuilt, schools, swimming pools, sports centre, factories, etc.

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 2

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, National politics, New Technology,, Regional politics, Town planning
Glasgow ca.1945 (Source: Glasgow Heritage)

In Part 1 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ we saw how decades of neglect and torpor had resulted in a concentration of Victorian slums and a chronic housing crisis that Glasgow authorities coming out of World War 2 were forced to confront. This prompted the 1945 Bruce Report, proposing that what Glasgow needed to regenerate its overpopulated metropolis was a new approach which was in the words of its author Robert Bruce, ‘surgical’ and ‘bold’. While Bruce’s scheme emphasised slum clearance and a mega-sized re-building project within the city limits, other planners from outside Glasgow put forward a competing plan, one with a very different vision of Glasgow and its solution for the city’s problems.

Patrick Abercrombie (Source: alchetron.com)

The alternative model: ”New Towns”
 In 1949 the Scottish Office (in Edinburgh) presented the city of Glasgow with an alternate blueprint for improving living standards and renewing the city, the “Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946” (CVRP), Advocacy of the CVRP model was spearheaded by English town planner Patrick Abercrombie〚𝔸〛, whose town planning CV included the City of London, Hong Kong and Addis Ababa. The Abercrombie Plan recommended rehousing much of the population outside the city largely in “New Towns” which would function as overspill areas for overcrowded central Glasgow…it proposed not Bruce’s skyscrapers but low-rise living, expanding out to spread the density beyond the city limits [‘Scotland from the Sky’, BBC One, Series 1, Episode 2, (TV documentary, 2018)]. Integral to the plan was the presence of green belts in unbuilt areas, establishing buffer zones between the city and the New Towns – an idea the CVRP got from the earlier Garden Cities Movement〚𝔹〛. The outcome of the authorities’ attempts to transform Glasgow’s urban landscape into New Towns and “Peripheral Housing Estates” will be outlined in detail in ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars, Part 3’.

Scottish New Town (Source: Pinterest)

New Towns phenomena
 New Towns were not novel to Glasgow and Scotland, the new towns movement was an international one (from the 1950s on, spreading to developing and de-colonising countries in Africa, Middle East and Asia) [’New towns on the Cold War frontier’, (Michelle Provoost), Eurozone, 28-Jun-2006, www.eurozine.com]). Pioneered in Britain, the movement followed the passage of the 1946 New Towns Act—handing the UK government power to designate areas of land for new town development—kick-starting an ambitious program of new peripheral and outlying settlements across the Home Countries [‘New towns’, UK Parliament, www.parliament.uk].

Schism Over Glasgow: two distinct planning strategies
Academic Florian Urban sees the contest to shape postwar Glasgow as one of national ’planners’ versus local ’housers’. The Scottish Office’s CVRP was national policy, Westminster’s optimal regional fix for the poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary nature of Glasgow’s urban inner core. Bruce’s plan was to be the intended local fix, the solution to Glasgow Corporation’s objective of eradicating the city’s slums and ghettos. The first group was advocating dispersal away from the centre and the other containment in newly configured but in some cases even denser concentrations within the metropolis. The schism between the planning philosophies of the planners and the housers tapped into other existing tensions at the time – Tory national government (1951-55) versus Labour Glasgow City Council〚ℂ〛; ’refined’ Edinburgh versus “gritty industrial” Glasgow [‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, (Florian Urban), Glasgow School of Arts, www.radar.gsa.ac.uk]. The Corporation’s opposition to the Scottish Office’s interference (as it saw it) was couched in existential terms…loss of population was equated with the Glasgow authority’s loss of political prestige [‘Building and Cityscape Council Housing’, (Ranald McInnes), The Glasgow Story, www.theglasgowstory.com].

Photo: the sun.co.uk

Regionalisation v Containment: the first as advocated by the Scottish Office and Abercrombie entailed first and foremost the creation of new towns (low-rise housing consisting of “detached, semi-detached or terraced houses surrounded by ample green space”)…contrasting with the containment approach of Bruce and the Glasgow City Council which sought to create “an architecture based on the principles of the existing city (3 to 4-storey modern tenements and corridor streets)” (Urban).

Image: Google Earth

Even after Glasgow Corporation withdrew its approval of Bruce’s proposals (too radical, too expensive), it never formally adopted the Clyde Valley Plan in its place…it did however accept many of the CVRP’s principles. In 1954 the Corporation made key concessions to the planners, agreeing to the creation of green belts around the city and accepting the inevitability of decentralisation (the need for 100,000 new flats outside the metropolis to alleviate the centralised overcrowding). The planners’ objectives were aided by the appointment of Archibald Jury as city architect〚𝔻〛 who was fully on board with the goals of (British) national planning (Urban).

Photo: Architectsjournal.co.uk

A mishmash of “divergent visions”
 In the end the Corporation sat on the fence and opted for “two bob each way”…cherry-picking from both rival schemes — so that both modernist tower blocks and low-rise buildings got erected concurrently and haphazardly, oodles of high-rise and low-rise housing all mingled in together. This confused juggling of opposing plans by the Glasgow authorities led to construction delays and made for erratic even schizophrenic urban planning in the three decades after the late 1940s, contributing to high levels of dissatisfaction felt by many Glaswegians with their reassigned housing arrangements〚𝔼〛.

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〚𝔸〛 together with co-author Robert Matthew
〚𝔹〛 the New Towns movement can trace its British lineage to the “Garden cities movement” of the turn-of-the-Twentieth-century – to the pioneering experiments with Welwyn (later the first of the British New Towns), Letchworth and Cadbury’s Bournville
〚ℂ〛 Glasgow Corporation, still trading on its earlier status as an economic powerhouse within the British Empire, was staunchly committed to resist any attempt by Westminster to curtail its municipal powers (Urban)
〚𝔻〛 replacing Robert Bruce as Glasgow chief planner after he resigned in pique in 1951 following the rejection of his plan
〚𝔼〛 many of the residents removed (some forcibly) from inner Glasgow and relocated in the New Towns and the peripheral estates were sufficiently disenchanted with their new lot that they requested to be transferred to alternate accommodation

Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars: Utopian Visions of Dystopia, Slum Clearances, New Towns and Social Engineering – Part 1

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, National politics, New Technology,, Regional politics, Town planning
⏏️ Corporation engineer Robert Bruce (Source: Scottish field) ⨳

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As WWII drew to a close Glasgow Corporation (City Council) had big plans for changing the face of Scotland’s biggest city and the (British) “Empire’s Second City” in the postwar period. Determined to rid Glasgow of its unhealthy “ghettos of decay and decline”, its plague of overcrowded slums and entrenched poverty and to fix the city’s critical housing shortage, the Corporation was gearing up for a mission to transform the city-scape. In 1947 a plan for total urban renewal put forward by the city engineer and master of works, Robert Bruce, found favour with the authorities〚𝔸〛 [‘Streets in the Sky: a social history of Glasgow’s brutalist tower blocks to be documented’, Judith Duffy, The Herald, 29-Mar-2015, www.heraldscotland.com].

⏏️ Central Train station, Glasgow (Photo: Network Rail) ⨳
⏏️ The Planning Committee’s eight-minute film ‘Glasgow Today and Tomorrow’ (1949) was its sales pitch for Bruce’s vision of “New Glasgow”. The functionality and conformity of the estate in this model illustrates why the Bruce Plan was likened to a communist Eastern Bloc city (Screenshot, ‘Scotland on Screen’)
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“New Glasgow”
Bruce’s radical scheme was to wipe the slate clean in Glasgow…tear down a whole slab of the city including the run-down tenements in a wholesale slum clearance. Included in the plan for demolition were much of Glasgow’s iconic buildings, including architectural gems built by famous 19th century architects of the city, “Greek” Thomson and CR Mackintosh (Glasgow Central Railway Station, School of Arts, etc and many other historic Victorian, Georgian and Art Deco buildings). Bruce, an avid admirer of Le Corbusier modernism, wanted to fill the void at least partially with skyscrapers (“Streets in the sky”), the plan being for the city to “reinvent itself by building high and building modern”, alongside a program of urban and industrial decentralisation〚𝔹〛 [‘Canned designs: Two sides of Glasgow’, Christopher Beanland, TheLong+Short, 07-Apr-2016, www.thelongandshort.org]. Bruce also wanted to jettison the city’s familiar grid pattern in favour of straight streets and rectilinear blocks.⏏️ Slums in the Gorbels (Photo: thesun.co.uk)⨳ ⨳ ⨳
Fixing “the worse slums in Britain”
Apparently unfazed by the horror expressed by many Glaswegians at Bruce’s brazen assault on the city’s grand architectural heritage, the Glasgow City Council had definite self-interest in mind when it endorsed the plan: Bruce’s scheme was essentially about slum clearance and re-housing people in the less densely populated parts of the city, not about re-location away from the city’s boundaries. Politically, this suited the Labour-dominated Corporation which was concerned that large scale depopulation of central Glasgow〚ℂ〛 would diminish the city’s standing in the UK. In the late 1940s Glasgow Corporation walked back its initial endorsement of the Bruce Report…shied away by the projected astronomical cost of the project while Britain was in the vice of postwar austerity. Ultimately some of its initiatives were implemented but many were never put into practice〚𝔻〛. One ‘modernisation’ initiative that did come to realisation was the M8 motorway, constructed right through the middle of Glasgow (“Glasgow Inner Ring Road” encircling the city centre). Around 230 tower blocks in the city did get built (some of the tower blocks were subsequently torn down much later), eliciting mixed opinions from the community. Most of these high-rise constructions were cheaply and quickly finished to meet the pressing exigences of public housing. While some residents were initially attracted to the features of modern convenience included—central heating, indoor toilets and hot running water—the downside for the longer term was poor quality housing stock (Duffy). ⏏️ Moss Heights (Source: UK Housing Wiki – Fandom) ⨳ ⨳ ⨳
 Moss Heights
Moss Heights in Cardonald was the Corporation’s debut experiment with high-rise family housing (accommodating 263 families, built 1950-1954), and one of the best known. Intended to be “superior high-density housing for the working class”, the reality was that Moss Heights was more expensive to rent or buy than the usual Glasgow Corp units, thus many of those same working class families couldn’t afford to live there [‘Moss Heights’, University of Glasgow Case Study, www.gla.ac.uk]. The radical nature of the Bruce Plan polarised the community and dismayed many Glaswegians, eventually provoking a reaction to its extreme position and an ensuing tussle between two competing bodies of technocrats, one national and one local, to determine the future shape of Glasgow. The rival plan, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946 (CVRP), was backed by the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. Part 2 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ will look at the CVRP and its impact on Glasgow. Red Road Flats (Photo: glasgowtimes.co.uk) ⨳ ⨳ ⨳

Footnote: Red Road Flats
 While Moss Heights was a “one-off”, Robert Bruce’s vision of clusters of high-rise buildings filling the Glasgow skyline didn’t really arrive until the 1960s, their belatedness made up for by being scattered all over the city. One of the most notoriously Brutalist of the high-rise Sixties complexes was the massive complex of eight tower blocks known as the Red Road Flats in the northeast of Glasgow〚𝔼〛 . The ageing and condemned buildings, vandalised and afflicted with asbestos and rising damp, were demolished between 2012 and 2015 [‘End of the Red Road’, Disappearing Glasgow, www.disappearing-glasgow.com]. Red Road, along with “the equally controversial and derided Hutchesontown C estate in the Gorbals”, became a symbol of “the errors of Glasgow’s ambitious post-war housing renewal policy” [‘Red River Flats’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

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〚𝔸〛 officially, the “First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow”

〚𝔹〛Bruce’s vision was long-term, envisaging a transformation over a 50 year-span into “a healthy and beautiful city”

〚ℂ〛 the city an agglomeration of one million people at the time

 〚𝔻〛 an embittered Bruce resigned his post with the Corporation in 1951

 〚𝔼〛 furnished with the same set of “mod cons” as Moss Heights