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<\/a><\/p>\nToday I\u2019m shooting pickups at Water Row, which as its name suggests occupies a piece of prime real estate on the southern bank of the River Clyde. Lately it\u2019s been the focus of dissent due to redevelopment of the existing car park into a more expensive car park. Judging by the Water Row website<\/a>, it\u2019s a cause attracting many of the city\u2019s great and good: architects, charities, arts organisations, community ventures, archaeologists and academics \u2013 eager to contribute to Govan\u2019s social and cultural fabric but few, if any, live in the area.<\/p>\n Creating better public spaces is well-intentioned of course, but a proposal for a street market is at best idealistic when too many shops lie vacant and shuttered more than a decade after Asda opened a 24 hour store in Helen Street. Besides, how many Govanites have digested the Water Row website, written in the strange subsidese universally favoured by form-fillers \u2013<\/p>\n I stand my camera in the centre of a building site where plainly no expense has been spared when it comes to solid granite hard landscaping. On the banks of the Clyde, surveying the Riverside Museum, in a revelatory moment I vision<\/em> how Zaha Hadid\u2019s roofline profile offers a less than positive message to the folks of Govan \u2013 a graphic depiction of a heartbeat’s descent. All that’s missing is the solemn one-note death knell.<\/p>\n Later, walking round the graveyard of the Old Parish Church, all thoughts of community-centred regeneration<\/i> and facilitated and meaningful engagement<\/i> go out the window when confronted by the chronic dereliction. At best, the graveyard serves as an open-air pub and dog toilet, its ancient headstones and monuments collapsed and broken. The place is in a worse state of decline than I found it when I first shot here in 2008. Much the same can be said for the locals \u2013 never have I seen so many in wheelchairs or on crutches.<\/p>\n During my year in Govan I came to a depressing conclusion: poverty is commodity. Not wishing to criticise those who genuinely do good work \u2013 and there are many \u2013 such as GalGael<\/a> and those operating out of the Pearce Institute \u2013 I observed too many community ventures funded from an ever-dwindling pot of public and private money whose doors were closed to ordinary and deserving punters. Much of this funding serves to buoy up the middle-classes by keeping them in tenure in the types of jobs open only to the educated, the articulate and the professional shakedown artists.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n