ABSTRACT
This essay will explore a range of literary and architectural narratives that represent and reshape the city of Glasgow through its historic and contemporary associations with Italian culture. It will focus, in particular, on the diverse and conflicting representations of the Italian Centre, a mixed-use development of flats, shops, cafes and restaurants that was an early and important example of Glasgow City Council’s regeneration of the ‘Merchant City’ district. By examining a range of little-studied narratives about the Italian Centre – architectural reviews, advertising and sales material by property and other commercial agents, interviews with the architect, as well as novels published in the early twenty-first century – I will consider how these narratives promote, analyse or critique the social implications of the ‘culture-led regeneration’ that the Centre apparently embodied. I will also briefly compare these representations with several semi-autobiographical narratives about historic Italian-Glaswegian identities and cultures, and particularly the functional and symbolic role of the café. By thus examining texts written outside the geographic and cultural ‘Centre’ of Glasgow, I will locate counter-narratives about urban regeneration and the formation of civic and national identities.
