Cost-benefit break down: unplannable spaces in 1970s Glasgow

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines a moment of uncertainty in early 1970s Glasgow motorway history: the planning of the East Flank of the Inner Ring Road and the potential removal of the Barrows Market. As sociological influences against wholesale urban clearance came into maturity in planning and community action, Glasgow planners carried out a feasibility study into the socio-economic costs of uprooting the commercial life of the Barrows. I suggest that reading this technocratic document for its cultural assumptions, ambiguities and tensions, rather than its engineering vision, opens up a different approach to the history of motorway planning.