On the 1st of April 2007, the management of Glasgow's common good assets was transferred to a private charitable company...

This sitehas a videomemorial to what the people of Glasgow have lost: http://www.glasgowlost.org/

I can't think of a way to sensibly introduce this story and its bizarre connection with recent themes posted here: multiculturalism, regeneration, the Olympics -> Thames Gateway,  vicissitudes of global finance, the reorganisation of city/slum life along cultic/folkish/corporate-religious lines. The Sunday Telegraph's favourite nightmare of the moment. No further comment :

Still heaving with disgust at the vaporous propositions mapped out in the London Developments Agency's plan for the legacy of the London Olympics, exhibited at a recent 'consultation' i.e. thinly veiled PR excercise, in Hackney, London, I was only more thoroughly sickened by the reminder that the calendar for primitive accumulation stretches even further into the future than 2012.

Report on the Divided Cities conference by Keith Perkins, reposted from :
http://www0.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/10/352437.html

At the request of the European Social Forum and to coincide with World Habitat Day, a meeting to discuss housing and land rights issues entitled the Divided City was held by London Social Forum at Limehouse Town Hall in East London on Sunday 1 October 2006. Speakers and delegates came from across Europe and from further afield.

Amsterdam is undergoing a historic process of regeneration. Much of the city’s reserve of social housing is being transformed into luxury accommodation for the growing numbers of ‘creative economy’ employees. Meanwhile, waiting lists for the remaining social housing are flooded by former occupants forced out of their homes and neighbourhoods by renovation programmes. Merijn Oudenampsen describes a process of urban ‘rebirth’ through place branding and social cleansing

Waves, a recent exhibition and conference in Riga curated by RIXC and Armin Medosch, tuned in to artistic engagements with the electro-magnetic spectrum. By exploring the material, if imperceptible, base of the information sphere, this event attempted to escape the conventional fetishisation of message over medium. But here, Rob van Kranenburg argues for a less esoteric, more abrasive confrontation with the 'matrix'

The spectre of poverty has always been used by the powerful as a stick to goad those wishing to live without working. Here Demetra Kotouza explores the intimate relationship between the management of the pauper and the (re)production of the labourer, overseen by state and philanthropic institutions. Whether stigmatised by the workhouse, cushioned by welfare or patronised by the neoliberal rhetoric of self-help, she argues, the poor are a necessary constant of capitalism