It started with a utopian vision of better places to live, but one Scottish housing estate illustrates the challenges ahead, says Mark Smith

I’m in one of the most remarkable housing estates in Scotland, wandering about, speaking to the folk who live here, and a lady walking her dog stops to chat. I tell her I’m here with an expert on architecture and design to look at the estate and talk about its legacy and the positives and the negatives and she’s keen to give her views. “The flats are terrific,” she says. “But it can get scary.”

It’s a word that comes up a few times: scary. Quite a few of the people who live here are single or retired and some of them tell me there’s a problem with security, and a lack of maintenance staff, and groups of men hanging about. I ask another resident who’s out and about if this is a good place to live and she responds with a perfect example of Glasgow laconicism: “aye and no”. She quite likes her flat, she says – she’s been here 29 years – but doesn’t feel she can go out at night, and if you live in a place where you don’t feel like you can move about freely, we have a problem.

The question is who or what’s at fault because there are some people who would blame the buildings themselves. The Dundasvale estate is in the centre of Glasgow and is made up of six five-storey blocks and two high-rises, all arranged above a ground-level car park and around traffic-free green spaces. It’s a classic example of the kind of 1960s brutalism that may have started with the best utopian intentions but went on to become the focus of concerns about social planning, cohesion and disorder. When Sir Basil Spence’s flats in the Gorbals were pulled down for example, some people said: good riddance.

But it’s significant that none of the residents I speak to in Dundasvale have much of an issue with the flats themselves: as I say, one woman thinks the flats are terrific. And the architectural expert I’m visiting with today, Professor Bruce Peter of Glasgow School of

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