Dynamic Housing Transformations: Following the Money

Abstract

This chapter seeks to update the long-standing narratives that still shape contemporary understandings of Glasgow’s housing. Once the city’s housing was a simple binary, either public or private, either a tenement slum or council block, each sited within spatially and socially demarcated neighbourhoods. Now greater diversity and more complexity exists. In explaining this change the chapter sets itself two challenges. Firstly, to critique and re-appraise the traditional housing narratives, in order to lay out a city-wide housing template. Secondly, to outline how that inherited template has subsequently been reshaped by the financial, political and social contexts brought about by the consequences of the global financial crisis and financialisation, the process which changed housing finance from facilitating credit for home purchase to one increasingly concerned with facilitating returns for global investment. While financialisation offers a useful lens to better explain and understand the new narrative, the inheritances of the 19th and 20th centuries still exert a resonance on Glasgow’s contemporary housing situation.