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A new ‘rapid repairs’ pilot has been launched by Glasgow City Council in a bid to help improve the look and feel of the city centre.
The £400,000 project will look to carry out rapid repairs to streetscape issues, with it primarily targeting the public realm in commercial areas of the city centre. Priority areas will include zones around transport hubs and stations, and principal routes in and around office areas and key retail destinations.
The scheme is predominantly intended to provide a fast response to smaller, compact areas – an average street would be at the very upper limit of size in terms of eligibility – that appear neglected or which show poor-quality public realm features that are undermining investment opportunities in target areas.
Seen as a new approach to public realm management, the pilot will operate as an addition to any planned maintenance works being undertaken by the council. The work itself includes repairs or replacement of pavement slabs, street furniture, lighting and bollards, removal of lighting stickers/flyposting and offensive graffiti, street washing, and/or other measures that improve key routes and spaces.
The pilot is being equally funded from city centre developer contributions and city centre strategy funding. This is described as a new and more proactive way of using developer contributions to tackle a specific issue.
Recent public surveys show that issues on look and feel range from vacant units to stickers on bins, poor quality pavements, antisocial behaviour, and greenery on buildings. Glasgow’s city centre strategy 2024-30 has introduced a range of new measures to react directly to this, and the pilot will fill some of the gaps that already funded programmes do not cover in the city centre.
The City Centre Rapid Repairs pilot will begin in January 2025 and last as a trial for one year.
Councillor Angus Millar, convener for city centre recovery at Glasgow City Council, said, “We know that relatively small defects in the public realm such as issues with pavements and street furniture can have an outsized impact on the look and feel of the city centre. This new approach will allow us to respond more quickly to such issues where they arise to create a more attractive city centre for everyone and further support investment into Glasgow.”
