Living with Rain: planning for everyday life in Glasgow
Published: 16 June 2025
Research insight
Dr Andrew Hoolachan’s Living with Rain report, now adopted into Glasgow’s planning policy, highlights the need to design for the city’s wet climate by focusing on everyday lived experiences and rain-friendly urban spaces.
Andrew Hoolachan - recipient of a Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Early Career Research Grant - reflects on his research process, findings and recommendations below.
I am delighted to share the report Living with rain: planning for everyday life in Glasgow. As one of Britain's wettest cities, Glasgow sits within a temperate rainforest climate zone, yet this fact is poorly understood in the city’s urban development. We hope our recommendations help improve planning policy and practice on rain in Glasgow and beyond. I am grateful to the RTPI for the early career grant which enabled this research.
Dr Andrew Hoolachan and Dr Victoria Lawson's recently published report, Living with Rain: Planning for Everyday Life in Glasgow, has been formally adopted as planning policy that will be part of the City Council's upcoming City Development Plan, due to be released in 2027.
Proposed by Councillor Baillie Paul McCabe (SNP), the motion directly applies the report's recommendations and
resolves to adopt a living with rain approach to planning, to ensure that we create a resilient urban environment that does not repeat the mistakes of the past and acknowledges Glasgow's distinct climate with the context of these islands; this includes investigating weather protection, shelter and other rain-friendly design features where appropriate in future public realm improvements, including the Glasgow City Council, City Chambers use of permeable materials where appropriate, working with urban rainfall is not limited to traditional policies on managing water but cuts across policy domains like public transport and active travel, and ensure living with rain is considered in the future Climate Plan update, new City Development Plan and other plans.”
The report's main takeaways are:
- Glasgow sits on the edge of a temperate rainforest climate zone, a fact that impacts the city in distinct ways, but this has long been misunderstood or ignored in planning an architectural history.
- We already know how to manage excess rainfall through sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) and ‘sponge cities’. This report goes beyond that to look at the everyday and ordinary life of people in wet cities, specifically looking at public spaces, active travel, public transport and threshold spaces (spaces between indoor and outdoor).
- The research used novel creative research methods and employed walking interviews with 20 participants in the rain, in combination with individual ‘rain diaries’ recorded on WhatsApp. This method was intended to get closer to lived urban experience.
- Deep-dive policy and practice analysis was conducted on the city's planning and development system and compared with the lived reality recorded by the participants. In addition to an international horizon scan of wet cities (Bergen, Singapore, Cairns, Vancouver), this policy and practice was combined with lived experience to inform the recommendations.
Read the full report on the Royal Town Planning Institute website.
First published: 16 June 2025