The Consuming City: Economic Stratification and the Glasgow Effect

This presentation will focus on the city of Glasgow (located within the central belt of Scotland) and explore the way its economic development is influenced by ideological, socio-cultural and historical forces. Images, discourse and media representations associated with Glasgow offer opposing views regarding the success, prosperity and identity of the city. On the one hand, Glasgow is proclaimed to be a city of retail and following London is the UK’s second largest shopping destination. On the other hand, Glasgow has high levels of deprivation. With this in mind, we will consider the following research questions: Is the focus on consumption making the citizens of Glasgow vulnerable? Are regeneration strategies that centre on consumption effective both for economic development and individual consumers? Or are they counter-productive and instead harming the social assets of citizens already vulnerable due to decades of deindustrialisation? The development of consumer culture in Glasgow has been a central strategy in response to the identity crisis caused by de-industrialisation and the decline of traditional employment opportunities, particularly that offered by the ship-building industry. Similar to Miles (2010), the consuming city has become central to urban life to the extent that policy-makers and urban planners focus on consumption at the expense of anything else. Since the early 1980s, place marketing campaigns have drawn on sophisticated lifestyle concepts to position Glasgow as a high class destination. One of the most prominent, the ‘Glasgow: Scotland with Style’ marketing slogan was launched in 2005 in an effort to enhance the city’s reputation, increase visitor numbers and increase the economic value of tourism. Proclaimed as the ‘Style Mile,’ Glasgow’s city centre is presented as a destination filled with what Ritzer (2010, p.7) would term ‘cathedrals of consumption:’