The Clyde and its tributaries run through the eight local authorities of the Glasgow City Region that together have a population of just under 2 million (1.87m) making up nearly 40% (37%) of Scotland’s population. As a holistic ecosystem, the Clyde and its tributaries is today a widely unappreciated waterway network throughout the entire city-region.

In the vocabulary of the Resilient City Network (Rockefeller Foundation), the River Clyde has the potential to create both ‘stress’ and ‘shock’ in the metropolitan city-region of Glasgow, primarily as a result of flood risk which manifests in two ways: the first from downstream flow following serious precipitation events, and the second from upstream flow associated with increased sea levels as a consequence of climate change. There is a clear and present need to address both flows and ‘space’ for the river.

There have been a number of initiatives for the river, but there has never been a single piece of visioning work that seeks to consider the future of the river as a rural and urban ecosystem from its source to the sea, that relates to the settlement pattern through which it passes, in concert with the strategic challenges of the transportation networks, and the networks of vacant and derelict land and stranded assets lying within the post-industrial metropolitan area of the Glasgow city region.

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