Community Public Meeting On Finance Crisis: Maryhill, 26th Nov, 7:30PM, Woodside Halls

Public Meeting for all Maryhill - the finance crisis and our community, what difference does it make?

Maryhill Burgh Meeting: The financial crisis – how’s it going to affect us in Maryhill.
A public meeting for Maryhill and beyond: Woodside Halls, 7:30PM, Wednesday the 26th of November
Tenants, Homeowners, Ratespayers, Claimants, Refugees, Migrants: ALL WELCOME
PUBLIC MEETING: for the whole community

MAP: Woodside Halls

• * Your Home
• * Your Rent
• * Your Council Services
• * Your Repairs
• * Your Refuse Collection
• * Your Childcare
• * Your Kids Play Facilities
• * Your Job
• * Your Benefits
• * Your Community Safety
• * Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour

YOUR RIGHT TO HAVE A SAY!

How a crisis in the world’s financial markets is going to hurt Maryhill, is going to hurt our services, raise our rents, hurt our pockets, and damage our community, and what we can do together in Maryhill to stop this happening.

A public meeting for Maryhill and beyond: Woodside Halls, 7:30PM, Wednesday the 26th of November

Come along, and hear what can be done. Have your say!

Meeting organised by:-

The Burgh Angel – community newspaper
The IWW – independent trade union

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Speakers include: IWW, Burgh Angel, London Coalition Against Poverty, and independent economists

 

Friends of Glasgow Parks

Friends of Glasgow Parks?  [Citystrolls Update]

“City parks to invite private companies to join in shake-up”

"625 car parking spaces on football grounds in Victoria Park"

"Nightclub in Botanical Gardens"

"Expensive adventure playground in Pollok Park & more car parks"

"Park toilets turned into chic cafe Kelvingrove"

"Building school in park"

"Save our schools"

"Community Bandstand ignored Kelvingrove"

"Park creeping"

"Consulted Remember?"

Read... http://commongoodwatch.wordpress.com/

"Mr Booth admitted that during the review, the possibility of the parks
being run by an external organisation was considered. However, the option
was dismissed amid fears that private contractors may charge for some of
the facilities which are currently free"...

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While we all watch television business gets organised.

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Pathways into sport inquiry: submit your evidence!

Sally Wainman Says [in comment]:

The Scottish Parliament is currently conducting a Pathways into Sport inquiry and anyone may submit evidence for the committee to consider.

The deadline for submissions is November 21st 2008

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/committees/hs/inquiries/pathwaysintosport/call.htm

See also: Govanhill Baths Community Trust and Govanhill Baths Variant Article

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Save Broomhill Pool! – www.savebroomhillpool.org

 

Apology demanded after housing group charges fees totalling up to £21m

[From the Sunday Herald]

HUNDREDS OF furious homeowners are demanding a full refund and “unqualified” apology from Glasgow Housing Association (GHA) this weekend after it emerged the landlord had been charging them undisclosed fees for home improvements.

The Glasgow Homeowners Campaign (GHC) made the discovery after the social landlord supplied homeowners with itemised bills for repairs for the first time last month. The campaigners claim GHA wilfully misled them over the cost of its city-wide home improvement programme by “hiding” a 6% management fee and a 3% contingency fee in the homeowners’ original estimates, which only listed roofing, rendering and VAT charges. Based on average bills ranging from £7000-£14,000 across 26,000 properties, these fees amount to a total cost to homeowners of between £11 million and £21m.

 

Why do we call the GHA a ’social landlord’?

GLASGOW RESIDENTS LIVING IN FUEL POVERTY RISING DRAMATICALLY

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.2464399.0.105_000_city_families_in_fuel_poverty.php

AROUND 105,000 Glasgow families face a miserable winter because they cannot afford to heat their homes, a report says.

Earlier this year city councillors were told around 72,000 families did not have enough money to pay heating bills.

Tomorrow the council’s executive committee will be told that number is believed to have soared by another 33,000 due to two recent substantial fuel bill increases.

GHA – THE COUNTRY’S BIGGEST ” SOCIAL ” LANDLORD – RAISING RENTS BY 6%

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.2464426.0.rent_rise_for_city_tenants.php

THOUSANDS of Glasgow Housing Association tenants are facing a 6% rent hike.

Bosses say the proposed increase would kick in in January, a year after rents rose by more than 5%.

The board of Scotland’s biggest social housing landlord will meet tomorrow to set its annual rent strategy for 2009.

An agreement which transferred Glasgow council houses to the GHA sets rent at no more than the Retail Price Index – the main measure of inflation in the UK – plus 1%. The 6% rise would be based on the current RPI of 5%. It means a family paying £300 a month rent would pay £318.

 

NORTH KELVIN MEADOW CLEAN-UP

15 November 2008 at 11am

Assembly point: The Clouston Street entrance to the former Clouston Street playing fields

Please join us on 15 November to clean up the disused land between Clouston Street and Kelbourne Street in Maryhill. Bin bags will be supplied and the rubbish we collect will be uplifted by the Council.

The clean-up is the first step in a campaign to turn this land, formerly the Clouston Street playing fields, into a community-run green space for the people of Maryhill. The campaign, called the North Kevlin Meadow Campaign, was started on 13 October after Glasgow City Council rejected out-of-hand the results of a survey of local residents which showed that they overwhelmingly support the creation of a green space on the land.

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Visit www.northkelvinmeadow.com to find out more – and please join us at Clouston St, G20 on 15 November at 11am.

 

Resisting Regenicide: Struggles in the City

Saturday 1 Nov : 1 – 5pm : FREE “Our relationship to the built environment is perhaps the most crucial element to the quality of community life.”

Free discussions bringing together representatives of community & activist groups – including local groups from Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and Manchester – to share their experiences of community-based engagement in the planning processes of urban regeneration and the built environment.

A strong dimension connecting the diverse groups is their shared concerns for community video as a basis for connecting people.

Mark Saunders The Spectacle, Martin Slavin Games Monitor, Nick Durie Glasgow Residents Network, Carl Taylor Hackney Independent, Libby Porter Planners Network UK, Neil Gray Variant, Jonathon Atkinson Open Manchester, Anthony Iles Mute.

www.metamute.org
www.spectacle.co.uk
www.openmanchester.org.uk
www.gamesmonitor.org.uk
www.pnuk.org.uk
glasgowresidents.wordpress.com
www.hackneyindependent.org
www.variant.org.uk

Organised by Variant affinity group

 

The Clyde Gateway: A New Urban Frontier

[Originally Published here in Variant Magazine]

By Neil Gray

“Not only does ‘urban regeneration’ represent the next wave of gentrification, planned and financed on an unprecedented scale, but the victory of this language in anesthetizing our critical understanding of gentrification in Europe represents a considerable ideological victory for neo-liberal visions of the city.” Neil Smith¹

“The Clyde is now one of the largest and most visionary renewal projects being undertaken in Europe. I believe that this is only the beginning of this tartan tiger’s awakening.” Stephen Purcell, Glasgow City Council leader²

Glasgow’s urban regeneration converges most symbolically around the £5.6 billion Clyde Waterfront project to transform 13 miles of the Clyde river corridor into an “…internationally competitive ‘central belt’ for business, employment, living and tourism.”³ The Clyde Gateway project, an ancillary development situated in the east of the city, is deemed a vital part of this broader long term project to re-brand and transform Glasgow’s image from that of recalcitrant ‘Red Clydeside’ into that of consumerist ‘Glasgow: Scotland with Style’. The scale of the Clyde Gateway project – which includes the site for the 2014 Commonwealth Games – is enormous: Stewart Maxwell, the minister for Communities and Sport, recently described the development as: “The biggest regeneration programme in Scotland.”⁴

City boosters have been quick to point to poverty, deprivation and dereliction in the east of Glasgow to legitimise large-scale regeneration. They argue that the Clyde Gateway initiative will ensure the provision of jobs and housing, the remediation and reclamation of contaminated land, and bring wider benefits to the local and national economy. Above all, they argue that the project is essential to ensure Glasgow’s ‘edge’ in the competitive global economy. Yet, the over-arching reality is that urban regeneration has for some time been writ large as a global urban strategy of gentrification and capitalist accumulation. The disjuncture between the triumphal neo-liberal ideology of the city – of successful self-regulating markets achieving optimally balanced economic growth – and the everyday reality of uneven development, intensifying inequality, and generalized social insecurity is ever increasing.

 

Save Pollok Park Public Meeting

[Syndicated from Indymedia Scotland]

PUBLIC MEETING – POLLOKSHAWS BURGH HALL

28 OCTOBER – 7.30PM

Back to Pollokshaws Burgh Hall for the next in our series of lively public meetings. We’re still finalising the agenda and we welcome any suggestions.

• Full Details of meeting
• “Trained Monkeys Vote for Go Ape”
• “1000 ‘Go Ape’ Over Pollok Park Invasion”
• Save Pollok Park

MEETING POSTER: 28th-poster_004

 

Govanhill Baths: “Historic pool on show for first time in seven years”

From ET:-

VISITORS are to be given a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Govanhill Baths – for the first time in seven years.

The Govanhill Baths Community Trust is opening the B-listed building to give people the chance to explore the former steamie.

The trust is still hoping to see the Calder Street baths transformed into a £7.5million healthy living centre at the heart of the community.

And now they are getting locals involved in a bid to generate a fresh surge of support.

Andrew Johnson, chairman of the trust, said: “A lot of people were very upset at the baths closing seven years ago and they have not been able to see inside since.

“It is a historic Victorian building and people deserve the chance to look inside and see what the facilities were like 100 years ago.”

Since the pool was closed amid violent scenes in 2001, campaigners have been battling to raise funds to restore the building and reopen it as a swimming pool. But they have so far failed to secure enough cash.

Although relations between the council and the trust were initially strained, city bosses have now created a board, including MSP Frank McAveety, to give the group professional support.

Glasgow City Council offered a 99-year lease to the trust on the condition the group produced a business plan showing how they would generate enough cash to revamp the building.

The trust were given a further boost in August 2007 when the council offered £5000 to help hire a development officer – and extended the fundraising deadline to July 2009.

Now campaigners have until the end of October to come up with a second business plan, showing how they will regenerate the baths.

Mr Johnson added: “We are working hand in glove with Glasgow City Council, who have been extremely supportive of our efforts to renovate Govanhill Pool.

“Hopefully by inviting people along on Sunday we can show the community how important the building is and what benefits it will bring to the area.”

Visitors to this Sunday’s open day will get the chance to see a model of the proposed Govanhill Sports and Wellbeing Centre.

Nord Architects, who are designing a series of eco-friendly plans for the centre, will be on hand to hear suggestions of what local people want from the development.

The day will also feature a photography exhibition of people involved in the campaign to save the baths, taken by Glasgow artists Reuben Parris and Steven Hanson.

Guides will be on hand to give tours round all three pools and answer questions on the history of the building.

For more information log on to www.govanhillbaths.com