"The aim was nothing less than to contribute to the reimagining of a city through the stories people tell about it."

Gerry Hassan, Head of Demos Scotland 2020, explains how the ambitious Glasgow 2020 project came about.

One of the most important ways that we make sense of and shape the world is through stories. This has now become increasingly recognised across the world from politics to business and arts and culture. We see it in the popularity of Robert McKee's Story, Howard Gardiner's notion that leaders tell the compelling stories of their age, and even, New Labour's (and now David Cameron's) obsession with the idea of 'narrative'.

Story touches something primordial and fundamental about what it means to be human. It reaches out to emotions, taps into the imagination and plays with our understanding of what 'the self' is. No wonder many business people are now fleeing the arid world of PowerPoint and spreadsheets and embracing the idea of story. McKee writes that "self-knowledge is the root of all great storytelling", and in ancient times, tribes would recognise the power and magic of the storyteller, and this is something we are now increasingly returning to.

Story can take many forms. It can be a written piece of fiction. It can be something told again and again passed down through the generations. It can be a film or play, or it can be the way we make sense of the modern world in a multiplicity of forms.

Scotland 2020 was set up under the auspices of Demos with the premise that the early days of Scotland's experience of devolution has been nearly entirely defined by negative stories. These had the cumulative effect of making Scots think they did not have the capacity to change things. There was as a corollary an absence of positive stories, which attempted to tell a broader narrative and picture about the kind of change and Scotland that people envisioned. The idea of story we thought took us somewhere that the conventional world of 'scenario planning' just could not reach.

This resulted in the publication of Scotland 2020: Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation in 2005, which contained essays and conversations, as well as a series of commissioned stories from writers such as Anne Donovan, Julie Bertagna and Ruaridh Nicoll looking at imagined Scotlands of the future.

From this came the idea of Glasgow 2020 - a much bigger, more ambitious project - based on the idea of exploring the idea of story and mass public imagination. The aim was nothing less than to contribute to the reimagining of a city through the stories people tell about it.

We started with the premise that a lot of the stories about Glasgow were powerful, potent, negative ones: the sick man of Europe, the crime capital of Britain, its reputation for knife attacks, and sectarianism. However, we also noted that 'the official story' of the city: of Glasgow's second coming post-Second City of Empire as a creative, cultural, shopping centre of activity and buzz did not convince everyone. There was also the issue of how did these two diametrically opposed tales of the city relate to each other when they barely seemed to be on speaking terms.

Glasgow has imagined itself by using story and narrative throughout its history. There has been the Empire City that made its wealth through trade, tobacco and slavery, the city of Red Clydeside, and the potency of its industrial working class to show their power, the Bourgeois Glasgow, of respectability and middle class aspiration, which was the counter-story to 'Red Clydeside', and the Divided City, of health, religion and the appeal of football.

Glasgow 2020 ran a programme of events and activities from the summer of 2005 to late 2006. We ran 38 events, most in Glasgow, but had a small international series of discussions in such cities as Helsinki and Gothenburg, to preclude having an insular Glasgow conversation. Over 4,200 people came to events, gave us stories, materials or contributed directly to the project.

We undertook a vast array of different activities. We took over Glasgow-Edinburgh trains for two days with a 'Creative Carriage' project and worked with an array of artists and creative types led by a 'thought collector', engaging with commuters. We sailed up and down the Clyde for a day in a boat we kitted out as an office. We had a Saturday in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum - just after it re-opened - where we put on poetry, comedy, music, children's activities - and at the same time engaged a cross-section of the Glasgow populace in thinking about the city's future.

Our events engaged different groups: young people in Castlemilk, arts and creative types, creative entrepreneurs, council senior officials, social tenants, hairdressers, taxi drivers, and many many more. The events developed an evolving methodology using philosophical inquiry to get people to think about the attitudes, values and beliefs they had about the city now and for its future. We got people to imagine and map out the stories of the city in the future, the expected, the preferred, the flights of fantasy. From these materials in our events, a host of short stories emerged which paint a vivid picture of the future.

What do these stories tell us? Firstly, it shows a very different view of the city and future than the one told by public agencies and even the science of 'futurology'. The stories we have gathered paint a rich, vibrant world of the future, filled with the importance of feeling, emotion and our senses. Secondly, across the diversity of our discussions and stories several common characteristics are apparent, and a set of different futures are evident.

We identified a total of seven different futures for the city from the above. All of these seven tales are present in some way in the city today; the future is already here in the present. These seven stories range from:

• The two speed city - where the affluent and less affluent occupy two entirely separate cities.
• The hard city - where Glasgow's macho culture takes over both its people and the 'tough love' approach of authorities.
• The soft city - where the city embraces femininity and the values of trust and empathy.
• Kaleidoscope City - where the mainstream culture is changed by immigration and diversity.

Some of the factors which ran across these stories included recognising the importance of gender, how men and women behaved and interacted, and understood each other. Simplifying a host of events, it was very pronounced that men and women tended to have very different views of the future. More women had an optimistic view of the future, informed by a community politics and activist, can-do approach to things. More men tended to have a fatalistic view, resigned to the current state of affairs, and believing authority would not let you do things. And of course, there is the issue of the environment and the challenge of the ecological crisis facing conventional ways of how we think about economic growth, development and success.

Glasgow 2020 has published a range of stories on its website at http://www.glasgow2020.co.uk/ and publishes a book in January 2007 which will contain a selection of the stories, a range of the materials collected, and the main findings of the project. One central area that the Glasgow 2020 book will touch on is the lessons for policy-makers and institutions which emerged from this process. The deep strand and spirit of public imagination about the future that we tapped into during Glasgow 2020 points to a very different way of thinking about the future and a very different kind of city and society.

It is heartening to note that people hugely identify with and believe in their city. An implicit sense of shared stories, purpose and ownership exists across social groups, ages and backgrounds. This is the language and values of a living, breathing democracy. However, people are significantly suspicious that the range of public agencies, organisations and corporates across the city do not reflect the same values as they do; these bodies may talk the talk of being people-friendly or customer-led, but in fact they are responding to wider financial or regulatory frameworks or the power of the market. And people note that the language of the city as a commonwealth - of a shared purpose and ownership - is completely lacking from these bodies.

The modern 21st century city needs a new kind of story and a new purpose. From our evidence and experience, the many people we encountered in Glasgow 2020 have the hope and imagination to begin telling a new story of their city.

The search and identification in Glasgow 2020 for a new set of stories points to the wider set of truths about the human race at this point in its development: post-Cold War, post-Enlightenment. We need to begin nurturing, nourishing and articulating a new set of stories about cities, human life and a future, that gives deeper meaning to life and goes beyond the idea of the market as everything.

December 2006

Gerry Hassan is Head of Demos Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020. He is the editor of Scotland 2020: Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation and co-author of Glasgow 2020.

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