Glasgow’s reputation for hosting large-scale events stretches back to the International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry of 1888, which showcased the city’s global prestige as the “Second City of the Empire.” The exhibition funded the construction of the palatial Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, and sparked a series of successor international exhibitions in the ensuing decades.
Later, the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988 and the celebrations that accompanied Glasgow winning the European City of Culture title in 1990 were both viewed as landmark moments, at a time when the city was trying to recover from the decimation of its traditional industrial base. The 2014 Commonwealth Games used a global occasion to invest in the city’s deprived east end. As well as providing a boost to Glasgow’s GDP, such events were also matched by tangible legacies in the form of concert halls, docklands renewal and sports facilities.
The legacy of the latest Glasgow-sited jamboree, however—the largest diplomatic event on British soil since the Second World War—may prove harder to pin down.
COP26 landed in a city in dire need of investment. After over a decade of austerity, the city’s infrastructure and the fabric of its built environment are eroding fast. On top of this, Glasgow’s cleaning workers have been on strike over low pay and poor conditions. To the embarrassment of the city council leadership, these workers have captured the imagination of the many young environmental activists in the city—including Greta Thunberg, who endorsed their campaign.
Still reeling from the impact of the pandemic, Glasgow City Council has yet to make clear what the longer-term legacy of the summit will be. A spokeswoman for the council said that the event offered an opportunity “to showcase the UK’s world-leading capabilities in offshore wind, green finance and electric vehicles,” while vaguely noting that the conference “has brought an economic boost to Glasgow.”
For Boris Johnson, the choice of venue may have seemed like an easy win for unionism. But the full practical implications of hosting such an enormous event—closed to the general public and in the middle of a large working city—seem to have been overlooked. By contrast, the Paris and Madrid COP summits of 2015 and 2019 met in the suburbs.
With only 15,000 hotel rooms for the 25,000 delegates attending the official elements of COP26, prices soared and many visitors struggled to secure accommodation. One response from organisers was to billet event staff on two Estonian cruise ships: a symbol of the temporary and improvised nature of solutions to problems that organisers failed to take into account.
The experience of hosting COP26 has also struggled to kickstart the sort of structural changes that cities will have to undertake in order to transition away from carbon dependency. Active travel, one of the key strategic priorities for Glasgow City Council and the Scottish government, has been significantly curtailed by the closure of cycle lanes and major roads near the conference centre. At the same time, a new smartcard travel system was introduced for the exclusive use of delegates, granting them free public transport across central Scotland. A similar integrated smartcard scheme was promised by the SNP in its 2017 local election manifesto for Glasgow, but has yet to be delivered.
“These huge events often serve to shut cities down for residents while opening them up for the wealthier visitors. COP26 has been no different. Delegates get free public transport, while ordinary people in Glasgow have received nothing,” said Gavin Thomson, transport campaigner with Friends of the Earth Scotland. “In a city where many working-class areas are chronically excluded from affordable public transport, and where only 50 per cent of people have access to a car, it would be outrageous for measures put in place for conference delegates to simply be withdrawn” instead of shared for the wider benefit of the city, he added.
As a base for building a social movement in the face of the climate crisis, however, Glasgow has excelled. Countless fringe events have taken place in the city’s plentiful venues and urban spaces, while over 100,000 people took part in a march to mark the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice on 6th November. The demonstration was organised by the COP26 Coalition, a civil society group bringing together environmental campaigners, trade unionists, NGOs and grassroots organisations.
Quan Nguyen, Scottish co-ordinator of the coalition, suggested that local government had been “overwhelmed” by the scale and complexity of hosting the summit; it has simply lacked the capacity to consider a long-term legacy. He proposes an alternative way to assess the impact of the conference, namely that “the people of Glasgow have come together to open their homes, and civic society their spaces, to host the movement. They’ve done more than expected to host and welcome people and there was a lot of inspiriting co-operation,” he told me. “We’re a radical city, we’re a global city and that’s a really powerful legacy. What we need to keep is the bridges that have been built here.”
