Building Inclusive City Centres: What Happened When Five Brilliant Minds Walked Into Il Salotto

A few months ago, a quiet lunch at Il Salotto planted a seed. A small group of us — architects, developers, regeneration experts — sat around the table and started asking the uncomfortable questions about Glasgow. Not the polite, panel-ready questions. The real ones.

So we did it properly. We brought the conversation back, opened it up, and hosted Building Inclusive City Centres — a #DesignPopUp panel with five of the sharpest people working in Scotland's built environment right now: Gina Colley (Threesixty Architecture), Angela Higgins (Avalon Partners), Bruce Patrick (Math Real Estate), Peter Kerr (Cameron Kerr / BCO Scotland), and Lisa Blyth from 7N Architects.

What followed was one of the most honest, energising, occasionally bruising conversations I've chaired. Here's what I took from it.

The monoculture problem

Glasgow built its identity on retail and offices. For decades, that was enough. Then COVID happened, working from home happened, and the structural cracks became craters.

Bruce Patrick put it plainly: we've been running on a dual culture of offices and retail, and both have been "completely found out." His argument — and I find it compelling — is that mixed use isn't just a nice-to-have. It's the only model that builds resilience. Education, living, leisure, culture, workspace: stacked, connected, alive at different hours of the day. The University of Glasgow gets this. The city centre, largely, does not.

Gina Coley brought the same energy from a different angle. She's been working on town centre regeneration across Scotland — East Kilbride, Inverness, Glasgow's Golden Z strategy — and the pattern is the same everywhere: too much retail, half-empty assets, and a massive opportunity hiding in plain sight. The question isn't whether to change. It's whether we have the political will to do it.

People need to live here

Angela Higgins has spent years in commercial asset management and made a pivot that I respect enormously — into Build to Rent, specifically trying to get good BTR into Glasgow. Not the pile-it-high version. The version where someone actually wants to live there in five years.

Her stat that stopped the room: Glasgow has roughly a third of the BTR residential density of comparable UK cities. We are genuinely miles behind. And the cycle is vicious — no residents means no footfall after 6pm, which means hospitality struggles, which means the city feels unsafe, which means fewer people want to live there.

The antidote isn't complicated. It's what the great European cities do naturally: people living, eating, working and socialising in the same district. Milan. Amsterdam. The German cities. Not everyone commuting in and escaping out.

Safety isn't just lighting. It's design.

Gina's work on the feminist cities agenda deserves its own article — and I'll be honest, when she explained what it actually means in practice, I wanted to stand up and applaud.

Glasgow is the first city in the UK to formally adopt the feminist city model. That's not about making things pink. It's about designing for people who have historically been designed around — women, Black and brown residents, disabled people, trans people, people from the care system. It's about understanding that a woman in Glasgow city centre at night is currently choosing between a brightly lit street where she might face harassment, or a dark lane where the risks are different but equally real. That's a design failure. And it's fixable.

The motion passed unanimously in 2022. A full-time officer has been appointed. Pilot projects are underway. It's moving.

Food is the glue

This is the part of the conversation that felt most like us — the thing that started as a casual observation over lunch and turned into something with real weight.

Every vibrant city centre in Europe has food at its heart. Not fine dining behind closed doors — affordable, accessible, communal food culture. The aperitivo. The market hall. The place you go after work with no particular plan.

Glasgow's hospitality sector is on its knees. Restaurants that were open six days a week are now open three. Utility costs are crippling. VAT policy actively discriminates against food and drink businesses compared to European neighbours. And yet — and Bruce made this point with data — spend on food, beverage and leisure in Glasgow city centre is up, relative to retail. The demand is there. We're failing the supply side.

Angela said it clearly: cut business rates for food-led hospitality. Cap energy costs the way France does. Stop treating restaurants as an afterthought and start treating them as infrastructure. Because they are.

What needs to change

At the end of the evening, I asked each panellist for one thing. One thing that would genuinely shift the dial in the next ten years.

Peter Kerr wants a Mayor. Someone entrepreneurial, visionary, and brave enough to make decisions — instead of the endless procrastination and blocker-up culture that characterises too much of how Glasgow is currently governed. Manchester got 300 million pounds in housing investment between 2014 and 2019. Glasgow got nothing comparable. That's not bad luck. That's leadership.

Gina wants community embedded at the centre of every decision. Not two afternoons in a shopping unit. Real, sustained, resourced engagement — the kind that East Kilbride has been doing since 2020, where datasets come back in the thousands, not the tens.

Lisa wants joined-up national vision. Every town and city should be able to see themselves in a clear picture of what Scotland is trying to become. Right now, that picture doesn't exist.

Angela wants the good developers — the ones who care about legacy, not extraction — to be welcomed, not treated with suspicion.

Bruce reminded us that this is a blip. 850 years of city history. We're living through a muscle spasm. It will pass. But only if we're thinking about the hundred-year view while we're in the middle of it.

I started the evening saying I'm an adopted Glaswegian — twelve years in, completely besotted, and perpetually frustrated that this city doesn't fully believe in itself.

I ended the evening more hopeful than I expected to be.

The ideas are there. The people are there. What's missing is a leadership with vision.

Watch the recording here