
THERE are two Aberdeens. The first is that which breaks out into the wider British news with some frequency, the self-professed “oil capital of Europe,” the “silver city with the golden sands,” a strange international enclave of students and oil technicians, tucked away in a far corner of Scotland.
The other Aberdeen appears as any one of hundreds of similar towns and cities failed by the bourgeois state. It is an Aberdeen of crumbling tenements and neglected streets, of unemployment and unemployability, a city that has never felt like one with a future, even years before that of the oil industry was called into doubt.
Despite talk of Just Transitions and “no ban without a plan,” we must still work to build a better future both for Aberdeen, and for all Aberdonians.