Arcade Artists and Place-making is a compelling documentation by artists, academics, architects and writers of the work surrounding the regeneration of the Gorbals.

Glasgow’s rapid industrial development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left a legacy of unemployment and cramped housing. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Gorbals, just south of the river Clyde. Over the past 150 years, numerous efforts have been made to clean up the area; the Gorbals has been razed to the ground and rebuilt three times during this period, with the first two of these new ‘designed communities’ failing spectacularly.

The most recent initiative has involved the demolition of the infamous, monolithic 1960s tower blocks, designed by Basil Spence, and their replacement with modern, low-rise flats. Central to the success of this latest regeneration has been a unique artwork project that has created cultural continuity in an area undergoing massive change. More than 20 international artists have been commissioned by The Artworks Programme to work with architects, developers and the community in creating permanent and temporary artworks in the UK’s largest ‘Percent for Art’ scheme.

Now at the tail end of this redevelopment, Arcade surveys and assesses these projects, and also raises wider questions about the role and impact artists have in the regeneration of urban spaces.

Through a fascinating and diverse range of texts Arcade asks fundamental questions about the ways that artists influence the political, economic and social structures of urban change, presenting a new direction in Public Art practice as a process-led discipline that explores fundamental questions about the character, interpretation and expression of place and place-making. A thought provoking analysis of the creative currents in society that inform the redevelopment of so much contemporary urbanism.