Détournement was a research project about motorway residual spaces, focusing on the M8, a section of motorway cutting through Glasgow
city centre.
150 000 people were to be displaced by the construction of this Glasgow inner ring road. Half of it has been built, the other half is now
under construction.
The same lack of thinking about the juxtaposition of this infrastructure with the city is taking place again, generating a series of deep incisions
and dead spaces all the way along the motorway.
Instead of considering their potential to help heal the cut, these spaces created by accident rather than by design still lay unused and
unexploited even in the middle of the city.
The only people really inhabiting these spaces are those who already use the city in an alternative way, closer to the vernacular use of a
landscape:
workmen, skaters, bmx riders, prostitutes, ...
The work was concluded by a series of temporary installations and computer montages illustrating the scale and potential of these
spaces through their power to arouse imagination.
Some of the research material was compiled in a book: M8