The sun is shining, the bins are smoking, the streets are starting to sink and burst water mains are sending jets of water skyward like a Yellowstone geyser. It’s finally starting to feel like summer in Glasgow.

En route to the office, my cognitive map is an assembly of classic landmarks: potholes, disorienting junctions between cycle lanes, ‘To Let’ triangles dangling over closed shutters, gaps left behind by fire-ravaged buildings, forests of buddleia sprouting from listed architecture.

I fumble around getting my workstation set up, and then I’m clicking away through my emails when a new infrastructure report from an engineering firm, Egis, catches my eye. Page after page, it describes how “networks built for a bygone era” across the UK and Ireland are buckling under the pressure of modernity. Infrastructure must evolve to meet society’s needs, which means treating our cities as systems, the Egis report argues.

We are gripped by a deepening infrastructure crisis – and the root cause is not that the country is skint, but a fundamental failure of approach. We can no longer afford to put up with the lack of joined-up thinking favoured by every level of government. And nowhere in Scotland is this more acute than in Glasgow.

Between ageing water and ground infrastructure, recurring fires, endemic dereliction, the housing crisis, the student accommodation mushrooming across the city, and the expensive, fragmented transport network, Glasgow is the poster child for what happens when you govern a city in silos.

The issues expand beyond the G postcodes. The report specifically highlights how flight from the city centre during the pandemic has affected the leafy suburbs surrounding the city – “small towns in and around Glasgow have ballooned in size, placing additional pressure on local buildings, schools, and health facilities that are not designed for such volume”.

Glasgow was already battered and bruised - this fire has torn the heart out........

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