While the media event and the reportage it generated spread the official claims about the failure of Red Road, it also served to embroil greater numbers of people in that fate. This inevitably heightened the risk to the GHA’s plans to demolish by exposing them to counter-claims. One such dissenting voice was the Red Road Save our Homes Campaign which was active for some months after the redevelopment announcement. We are not going to offer an account of its emergence or political efficacy here. Rather, we wish to deploy the theoretical lens we are working to show something of how those drawn together in the name of the Campaign comported themselves in relation to the ‘fact’ of Red Road as a housing failure.  In particular, we account for the ways in which they sought to contest that fact and to translate Red Road back into a viable housing solution. The Campaign staged a public meeting held just one month after the redevelopment and demolition announcement in an old school hall on the Red Road estate, and attended by around 80 people [image_3]. The task that faced those gathered that night was a difficult one: how do they contest the fact of failure attached to the ‘Red Road multis’? How can they reshape the socio-technical assemblage that the redevelopment announcement had generated and avert the fate of demolition? And would the building technology of Red Road, along with the various translations of it, afford or forbid further claims for Red Road as viable housing?

The Red Road Save our Homes Campaign meeting brings together a new arrangement of people: residents who might not have met before, neighbours form nearby highrise estates, local politicians and housing activists. That the instigator of this meeting could call the group gathered there the ‘Red Road Save our Homes Campaign’ gave stability to a collective where none existed. The work had yet to be done of ordering the people gathered there into active allies who would work towards another destiny for Red Road. In the first instance this labour fell to the instigator of the meeting (a Red Road resident and housing activist) and his invited speakers (other non-local housing activists and a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP)), all of who were seated, separately from the audience, at a table at the front of the hall. The right of those gathered at the table to speak on behalf of Red Road was by no means clear and much of the early part of the meeting was dedicated to establishing this. The designated speakers variously spoke about their credentials: as a concerned local resident (the meeting instigator), as housing activists who understood the political background, or as an elected representative with experience dealing with the GHA. They sought to galvanize their authority to articulate (translate) on behalf of tenants an alternate set of facts about Red Road. At one point a tenant stood up and challenged the speakers, accusing them of political interests and specifically of being there simply to support the political aspirations of the instigator of the meeting. The challenge required a response:

‘Concerning the political aspect I disagree entirely. The gentleman, who stood over there [pointing to the meeting instigator], lives in Red Road and has lived there all his life. He has actually stood as a candidate for the election…[but] he has never announced that [here]. So he is not here political. He is here because he cares about the people. And so is everybody else at this top table.’ [3]

Additional work by the speakers gathered at the table was directed at establishing what exactly residents were up against – to make clear the ‘real’ reasons why Red Road was being demolished. For a first video clip, showing edited footage that we have recorded in the campaign meeting, we have selected three statements of how these facts were established [video_1].

The first housing activist names the GHA and an agenda of privitisation.

The second attaches the academically defined term 'gentrification' to the process.

The third speaker animates the enemy by linking the proposed demolition to a familiar ghost.

We have seen how the press conference and associated inscriptions operated to short-circuit any complications stemming from the designation of Red Road as a housing failure, so facilitating the demolition of the highrises. In contrast, spokespeople at the Campaign meeting sought to linger precisely on those complications, to coax them into being, to enlarge them and to explore their potential to engender alternate points of view, and other facts, pertaining to the fate of Red Road. The more effective the Campaign was at elaborating such other facts, the more effectively they could destabilise the fact of Red Road as a housing failure, and the more compelling their alternate visions for the viability of Red Road could become. [4]