Falling soon after the sudden closure of the CCA, threats to Glasgow arts hub Trongate 103 in the form of unsustainable rent rises advertise the precarity of Glasgow’s arts ecology – and a persistent failure to understand the essentual role played by its physical and social infrastructures.
Opened in 2009 with public funding from Glasgow City Council alongside support from the Scottish Arts Council, Scottish Enterprise and Merchant City Heritage Trust, Trongate 103 is home to a range of grass-roots (and widely-celebrated) organisations including Transmission Gallery, Street Level Photography and Glasgow Print Studio.
The building’s landlords, City Property – Glasgow City Council’s “arm’s-length” management company – have maintained that no organisation will be evicted and that the new rents are still substantially cheaper than commercial rates. Cheaper or not, the new proposals for rent and service charges reportedly amount to a more than four-fold increase in overall costs to the building’s charitable tenants. And as GMAC (Glasgow Media Access Centre) have argued, ‘a four-week deadline to accept significantly increased costs or vacate is, in practical terms, an eviction notice for a charity’.
A major dimension of the ongoing dispute is whether the city’s authorities – or its appointed surrogates – see Trongate 103 as a revenue-generating commercial asset or as a vital element of publicly-funded cultural infrastructure equivalent to the performance venues, galleries and other public buildings managed by Glasgow Life. And, in turn, whether the logics of commercial viability should apply at all given the number of empty office spaces and buildings in the city.
Faced with risks to its equipment and film archive, GMAC has already made the move to the Pyramid community centre in Anderston. As a report for the BBC observes, leaving the building is far more challenging for other tenants – not only risking livelihoods and accessible working space but scattering an established community at a moment when there are few affordable, high-quality spaces for artists across the city.
Infrastructures are frequently invisible – or, rather, visible only when they stop working: a power line falls, a pipe bursts or a road closes. And so they are often seen as less important that the work which they enable – a view which fails to recognise their essential role in creating literal and figurative spaces for diverse communities of practice to gather, offering continuity and some measure of stability in fiercely uncertain times. Glasgow’s art scene and the creative city at large doesn’t need such spaces to scrape by and survive – it needs them to thrive if that ecology is to have a future.