Sighthill Transformational Regeneration Area, Glasgow

Since 2005, Glasgow City Council has been working with the Glasgow Housing Association and the Scottish Government to establish a new approach to the regeneration of eight key areas in the city. In 2009, Scottish Ministers gave the green light for an early action programme to be initiated. Sighthill is the largest and most challenging of the Transformation Regeneration Areas and was given the status of priority regeneration site.

The scheme includes the regeneration of a mixture of occupied, vacant and derelict contaminated land including the site clearance of former residential tower blocks, followed by extensive remediation, land regeneration and the construction of new serviced development platforms (including installing new sustainable urban drainage, roads, utilities, landscaped grounds and public realm). The scheme will result in approximately 600 new residential dwellings, a new school and sports facilities, a religious centre and student accommodation, as well as new allotments and urban parkland with extensive water features and amenity attractions. 

This project will significantly enhance north Glasgow’s regeneration by removing derelict communities and social blight, whilst providing new opportunities for employment and higher quality housing.

Successful, dynamic and resilient cities are increasingly seen as essential drivers of regional and national prosperity. But cities are highly complex systems and in order to create such vitality, diversity and economic prosperity require Urban innovation and creativity.

In this regard, Glasgow has embarked upon a major Transformational Regeneration Areas project, identifying eight key districts requiring inward investment to support significant regeneration.

Sweco´s history has been proudly connected with various regeneration schemes in Glasgow over the last two decades when Sweco designed and delivered the enabling works for the 2014 Commonwealth Games Athletes’ Village in the city's east end.

Glasgow has a proud industrial heritage, from coal mining through to building ocean going ships, which along with a steady population growth, made it one of the most successful cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since this time, and with increasing international competition, Glasgow struggled through the mid twentieth century experiencing closure of many of its heavy industries and a steady decrease in its population. The consequent downward spiral of urban blight and declining communities has played a key part of Glasgow’s story in the mid to later part of the twentieth century.

Since this time, the UK and Scottish governments have supported a variety of initiatives to stem this decline and reverse the fortunes of Glasgow’s derelict areas. In the last two decades, Sweco has been involved in a variety of regeneration schemes in Glasgow, ranging from remediation of heavily contaminated sites through to construction of new infrastructure (roads, utilities etc.).

A key catalyst to this was the award of the 2014 Commonwealth Games to Glasgow, which triggered the automatic financing from government budgets and subsequent significant inward investment into brownfield sites, mostly in the east of Glasgow. Glasgow has since been keen to maintain a positive legacy from this initial investment, securing further funding and political consent to regenerate areas in Glasgow not impacted by the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

The Sighthill TRA is one of the key sites in the north of Glasgow scheduled for regeneration in the coming years. Sweco’s appointment requires them to work with the project manager and client organisations to deliver multi-disciplinary engineering solutions. This has presented many challenges to the Sweco design team, including developing an integrated engineering solution that delivers an optimum cost-benefit solution to the client whilst complying with stakeholders, statutory and non-statutory requirements. To achieve this, Sweco have acted as Lead Consultant, leading design workstreams in the disciplines of Environment, Landscape, Drainage (including Sustainable Urban Drainage), Roads, Utilities, Earthworks and Platforms and their integration in a single coherent design tendered across phased work packages to align with minimum construction and development costs.

Glasgow is now well established as one of the leading cities in the UK to best illustrate how to deal with the significant impacts associated with large scale industrial decline. Through public-private engagements, Glasgow is on course to make significant improvements to its communities and ultimately towards a sustainable positive social, environmental and economic well-being.