Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… It’s Monday, the tail end of spring, with temperatures hitting 24 degrees Celsius in Glasgow, Scotland. The sky is blue. It’s a bank holiday, and Kelvingrove Park is teeming with activities. Kids are on their bikes. Couples are basking in the sun like lizards. Some are roasting skewers, kebabs, sausages, and meat on tiny grills. The air is so thick with joy you could cut it with a blunt blade. I had arrived at the Queen Street train station earlier, one of the hubs that feeds the railway arteries into the belly of Scotland. Paved, safe, walkable paths and wide, clean roads made my walk to Kelvingrove an easy breeze. Even though I’ve lived in this country for some time, the demands of life as an expatriate living away from home can get in the way of smelling the flowers. But today I left my laptop bag at home, wore my sports shoes and shorts, and with a sling bag across my chest, decided to make time for myself. I’m on a mission to visit the University of Glasgow, an iconic school that has been producing some of the world’s notable thinkers since 1451. Kelvingrove is a well-designed free park with a state-of-the-art tennis court, a children’s playground, an outdoor gym, and tarmacked walking and cycling lanes. The River Kelvin runs through it, and there is a museum here too. It’s safe. There are no heaps of garbage, no flies, no cops with guns, and no council askaris . People are sitting on the grass unbothered. An elderly man is on a bench, reading. A little further away, a wheelchair user and a three-legged dog are moving through the park with the same ease and entitlement as everyone else. Nobody is staring. Nobody is making way out of pity. The city was simply built to include them, and so they are included. Children are running freely. Kelvingrove has been here since 1852, built as a public recreation ground, not for royalty or the well-connected but for the people of Glasgow. It is 85 acres of a public good, and it is not even the biggest in this central Scotland city. Glasgow, a city of 650,000 people, has over 90 such parks and gardens. I am not naive about how empires accumulate wealth. I know what Glasgow’s merchant past looks like. But somewhere along the way, someone in this city decided that part of the wealth, however it arrived, would be spent on the people who lived here. On parks. On benches. On cycling lanes. On museums that anyone can walk into for free. Looking at how they are savouring this moment in this public amenity, I feel a tinge of jealousy. I want to stay in this moment. But something keeps pulling me back. As I walk in this city, I notice the statues, the names on the buildings, and the stories carved in stone. I notice that Glasgow decided long ago, and baked it into its laws and its architecture, that the people who shaped how the city thinks are worth remembering. I stopped at one statue, and then another. I saw a pattern; this city memorializes its thinkers. A city is not just its roads and buildings, but the philosophy that decided what the physical infrastructure was for. But the contradiction, which I didn’t know was so obvious, did not delay its arrival. There’s a statue of Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, a British colonial commander who spent his life extending an empire that believed some people were meant to rule and others were meant to be ruled. Yet a few steps away is the intellectual legacy of Adam Smith, he of The Wealth of Nations, and David Hume, men who asked the hardest questions about human nature and how societies organize themselves. Some might argue there is no contradiction here. That the gun and the idea of capitalism were always two arms of the same empire, one conquered through violence and the other through markets. And they would not be wrong. The city chose to remember both. The humanist and the imperialist. The rebel and the administrator. In the same park. On the same tarmacked path. Remembered equally in stone. I k