A city of polymaths, a city of show-offs. A city once characterised by industry and commerce, where style and creativity have now become the currency of everyday existence. That’s Glasgow: the dear, green, extraordinary place that has found a new identity as a city where exciting things happen.

Let off a gun in any Denniston thoroughfare, so the local wits say, and you’ll most probably ground a dozen artists. Drop into a bar in the area around King Street, and you’ll very possibly have to squeeze between a platinum-selling music icon and a Turner prize winner to reach your pint.

It’s a strange place, Glasgow: a city of wondrous contradictions and rampant paranoia where beauty and the beast sit cheek by jowl, where cranes hover overhead as yet another tired slab of real estate is replaced with something tall and glossy and where a reality check [or put-down] is never more than a couthy one-liner away.

Two-up on a tenement stairway may be the premises of a gallery with a dazzling international reputation [if comparatively little local following]. On another landing, you may stumble across a fledgling fashion designer or customiser adding a personal bespoke twist to a familiar item. Across the street, a gaggle of hairdressers, website designers, DJs and shop-girls will be applying a veneer of eyeliner, lip-gloss and pomade in preparation for the evening ahead, and slipping into fashion looks pulled together from vintage stores and the studios of creative friends. There’s an extraordinary vibrancy about the place and its people. And a special energy too.

“Glasgow has an engaging sense of the chaotic,” suggests Stuart Macdonald, who until last year was Director of The Lighthouse, the city’s centre for architecture and design. “It seems edgy and random – yet it’s not really mad.”

“A lot of once-interesting towns are now very much the same,” says Ashley Page, who settled in the city five years ago when he became Artistic Director of Scottish Ballet. “So it’s refreshing to find Glasgow has maintained an individuality. With its tall buildings and broad streets arranged in a grid layout, the central area really does look and feel like a big city, yet the architecture is very different to that of Edinburgh and other British cities.”

“I do think Glasgow’s architecture is the unsung hero of the city,” suggests Professor Seona Reid, Director of Glasgow School of Art. “Architects love Glasgow; they wax lyrical about its stunning Victorian and Edwardian buildings. We tend to take Mackintosh for granted, but visitors find the Glasgow School of Art magical.”

The soaring imaginations of Charles Rennie Mackintosh or Alexander Thomson may be captured in Glasgow’s most iconic buildings, but, as Page suggests, the natural terrain contributes greatly to the drama and charm of the cityscape. “The hilliness of the place is unusual for a big city, and this creates extraordinary vistas. Then, in the west end and south side, there are those wonderful green strips snaking between the tenement buildings, and the fabulous parks such as Pollok and Ballahouston. It’s nice, too, that there are the two rivers: the Clyde, of course, but also the Kelvin with its leafy tow-path walks.”

“Thousands of people come to Glasgow from all over the world, and most of them want to stay,” Professor Reid suggests. She herself moved back to the city in 1990 after an absence of 20 years. “I was immediately aware of the incredible physical transformation. Back then, we were also just beginning to see the psychological transformation too, as people were becoming even prouder of their city. Now, of course, it’s very much a young person’s city – there’s a buzz about the clubs and the music scene, a general sense of energy that’s intangible yet clearly felt by everyone in that younger age group.”

“Compared with London, Glasgow seems the perfect size. People here are hospitable and friendly, genuinely so, and there’s very little snobbishness in the city’s arts community. I love its found spaces – venues such as Tramway, which I consider a fantastically exciting space. Glasgow is also an extraordinarily active city. There are gatherings, openings and other happenings every night of the year.”

“One thing that’s particular to Glasgow is that when people get famous they don’t necessarily leave. Take, for example, Douglas Gordon. He’s now one of the world’s most successful contemporary artists, yet he’s kept his flat in Partick and still goes to all the old firm matches. Simon Starling shuttles back and forth between Berlin and Glasgow, and although Turner-nominee Phil Collins may be peripatetic, he has chosen Glasgow as his base.”

“I think the city displays a wonderful generosity of spirit,” she continues. “With its extraordinary community of artists, Glasgow is seen as the visual arts centre of the UK, admittedly in terms of production rather than exhibition – although there is a burgeoning phenomenon of small artist-run galleries which have emerged from that strong idiosyncratically Glaswegian tradition of self-help.”

According to Julie Tait, whose Glasgow Grows Audiences office aims to drive attendance at the city’s innumerable performance venues, “It’s important how people perceive the city as a whole. A healthy, contemporary city attracts artisans, artists and creatives who, in turn, establish an interesting underground scene. The volume and variety of creative work currently undertaken in Glasgow is amazing, from Toby Webster’s roster of extraordinary artists at the globally renowned Modern Institute to Janice Kirkpatrick of Graven Images, who has kept a healthy cynicism about creative industries yet never sold out to the commercial world.” So, Glasgow’s spiritual reawakening and economic growth is all down to a critical mass of creatives?

“Absolutely!” Professor Reid confirms. “The OECD review sees Glasgow’s regeneration as culturally-led. Creative people are attracted to a certain place by the existence there of other creative people. In his thesis on the rise of the creative class, Richard Florida argues that vibrant economies are now driven by people using their imagination: namely, the creative class. The cities that will flourish in the future are those such as Glasgow that are especially successful in mustering clusters of creatives. Glasgow already has the UK’s largest concentration of creative industries outside London, and the city displays an extraordinary style-consciousness.”

The marvel, of course, is the synergies that exist in Glasgow between different creative disciplines – witness, for example, fashion designer Niki Taylor’s fascinating collaborations with musicians and filmmakers. Another marvel, according to Francis McKee of the CCA, is the number of artists in Glasgow who double as musicians or DJs, and the number of musicians in Glasgow who double as digital designers or, for that matter, juice bar owners.

It’s not necessarily that such people lack focus; they simply embrace the opportunities that exist in a city like Glasgow for the widest possible range of creative expression.

“Polymathing is certainly something that happens in Glasgow,” Professor Reid. agrees. “It’s especially noticeable in the art and music scenes – something, I think, to do with the nature of art school education here. Whereas a facility such as the RSAMD (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama) focuses on a technical training, the emphasis at Glasgow School of Art is not on skill so much as generating ideas and thinking laterally.”

“It’s all about giving form to your imagination,” she continues “We nurture a creative atmosphere, and people here are creative in lots of different ways. Think about that great little cafe, ‘Where the Monkey Sleeps’. That’s an example of art school graduates taking creative ideas and applying them to create a cool place. Other graduates have become successful writers or film-makers.”

The city council has supported [some might say engineered] the zoning of the Merchant City as a cultural quarter, and Professor Reid cites Brazen Studios as an example of a creative enterprise that has benefited from Glasgow’s policy of encouraging such businesses to locate in the area. Through this strategy, the city council is surely whispering an acknowledgement of the importance of creative endeavour to the regeneration of Glasgow.

According to Professor Reid, “The fundamentals for successful start-ups are low rent and critical mass. The Merchant City has the potential to provide both. As Richard Florida says, you can’t plan for a city to become a creative place, but you can certainly remove the barriers. And there are certain enabling conditions that a city can put in place, most especially low-rental accommodation for niche craft-based enterprises.”

Is encouraging creatives to colonise one particular area of the city a good thing? “If you create opportunities for lively, imaginative, creative people to meet,” Professor Reid responds, “exciting things happen.”

The present concentration of artists’ studios and show-spaces in the streets between the Merchant City and the river-front is almost making Francis McKee wonder whether his CCA gallery spaces are located in the wrong part of town.

“Artists are a bolshie bunch,” he half-jokes. “They have no respect for authority and aren’t very good at taking orders from above. But many have gone along with the city’s zoning strategy so far, despite their healthy scepticism, because of the availability of empty space at low rents – space that doesn’t generally exist in the central areas of other cities.”

Professor Reid agrees; “Artists will settle in areas where property prices – both for domestic and studio spaces – are low. Hence the concentration of artists, at present, in the Merchant City, in Dennistoun, and in Govan.” And, the evidence from Glasgow suggests that wherever artists settle en masse, characterful cafes, delis and bakeries soon follow.

A city of creative communities that make incredible things happen. A city that once again has good reason to believe in itself. A city happier than ever to acknowledge that creative ideas make the world go around.