Glasgow 2020: Dreaming the City

The following visions of a future Glasgow were created using the collected thoughts, wishes and dreams of the Glasgow people. Which Glasgow would you like to live in?

1: Do you want to live in the soft city
A city once known the world over for its masculine attitudes and behaviour now runs to a different heartbeat. Public spaces are filled with softness, conversations and a sense of verve. Women now represent the public face of this new age, setting the scene for a city where people work and live in a very different way from now. Many men are as enthusiastic seeing themselves as liberated from machismo. Even football is no longer so important and instead is one sport amongst many.
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2: Do you want to live in the dear green city
The second city of the empire has now embraced the green life. As the price of energy has spiralled, Glasgow`s fierce cultural independence and sense of itself has translated into the will to go `off-grid` and generate its own power. While windmills and solar panels top most of the buildings, `Glasgondalas` now sail up and down the Clyde. The city promotes clean energy and sustainable living to the rest of Scotland, and even manages to make a nice tidy profit piping water to England.
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3: Do you want to live in the slow city
By the early years of the 21st century, Glasgow voices were beginning to question the addiction to shopping and many people were coming down with consumption fatigue, after literally shopping `til they dropped. Many have abandoned the fixation and pursuit of wealth, consumption and money, and instead focus on finding deeper meaning in life, investing time and love bringing up children, family, friends and relationships. This has become a city that values slowness, deliberation and a sense of pride in taking time to do things.
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4: Do you want to live in the lonely city
This is an individualised, hi-tech world where people are free to create their own lives on their own terms. They work, play and socialise through their computers. You can have any experience you want, but speaking to your neighbour might be a bit unusual! Everything people used to get from others - humour, ideas, pleasure - can now be accessed via technology. The city is full of opportunities, but for someone looking for a real face-to-face friend the city can feel like a lonely place.
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5: Do you want to live in the hard city
The city authorities ran out of patience with the people a long time ago. Government intervention now extends into every citizen`s life as never before, enforcing curfews on entire families, banning smoking in the home, and outlawing petrol-driven cars. This is a city which practices `tough love` - although it has forgotten the second sentiment in the phrase - and is `tough on failure and tough on the causes of failure.` Crime has fallen dramatically and the city is neater, cleaner and quieter. Prisons, law enforcement and surveillance systems are having more business than they have ever had.
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6: Do you want to live in the kaleidoscope city
Once a city with a narrow range of voices, accents and cultures, Glasgow is now a kaleidoscope of diversity. The city is famed for its open doors policy to newcomers and tolerance. Waves of newcomers have arrived and been absorbed: the Poles, the Iraqis, the Lebanese . even the English. The new Glaswegians have not only been welcomed, they have changed the culture and identity of the city which is now celebrated for its cuisine, pink pound and the emergence of Partick Thistle as the leading football club in the city representing the withering of old divisions and tensions.
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7: Do you want to live in the two speed city
A place where one half of the city are seen as winners and half as losers . The two cities know little of each other, with different languages, views of the world, employment, lifestyle and wealth. If you are born in one part of the city, you grow up in it, live there and die there. The `winners`, being influential, shape the city`s identity, politics and how it thinks of itself. Both Glasgows may sit side-by-side but they might as well be on different planets .
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To read more stories and wishes from the Glasgow2020 project, visit www.glasgow2020.org.uk