Glasgow 1999: Homes for the Future, The Lighthouse, a new typeface. Tell that to the wumman with three weans at the Partick bus stop. They didn't. More interestingly, before Donald Dewar outlined the grand design for Glasgow as UK City of Architecture and Design at the Tramway yesterday afternoon, designers and architects of international renown hung around the bus stops in Partick and listened.

Carefully-buried beneath the razzmatazz around the coup of getting big-shot Spanish designer Javier Mariscal to turn the interior of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's old Herald building into ''Scotland's Centre for Architecture, Design and the City'' and the excitement of bringing people back to live in innovative housing round the ancient meeting place of Glasgow Green is the chastening but inescapable bottom line. Glasgow is broke. While Gorbals is preparing to be a tourist attraction, ready to welcome busloads of tourists to gawp at the new brick-built streets of friendly-scale houses and flats, imaginations reeling with images of rabbit-warren tenements teeming with razor gangs, the citizens pick their way about the holes in the streets and the gap sites colonised by buddleia and complain that their council tax is far higher than people in similar houses outside the city boundary.

There's no panacea for the fact that the city's ability to provide basic services for its people has never been more stretched - to the point where they are closing down the public toilets to save money. To the city which invented the idea of reinventing itself and in which image has become reality, the Rab C Nesbit possibilities in this metaphor for a once-wealthy industrial city on its uppers have to be avoided at all costs.

The pragmatic, elegant, Glas-wegian solution is bus shelters. Already the adverts in bus shelters pay for their cleaning and main-

tenance, usually on a 15-year contract. The revenue from all outdoor advertising in the UK - billboards, electronic signs, bus shelters is #450m a year. To Don Bennett, the city council's planning officer responsible for the central area, it's an opportunity.

One of his many problems is that there is no money for what's now called street furniture: bus shelters, litter bins, seats, bike racks, information signs, but the revenue generated by advertising - possibly as much as #5m - could pay for that.

That's why a posse of designers, planners and architects whose work ranges from London to New York to Singapore descended on Glasgow yesterday, asking questions in Partick, taking a bus back to the city centre and walking the central grid to get a feel for the city. Kenneth Grange of Pentagram Design, with a bird's eye view of the Victorian trophy cupolas and weather vanes which punctuate the skyline from the top floor of the new office block in George Square, chose to focus on a bus shelter, complete with advertisement end-panel, but he and his colleagues are equally keen to know about the street life and what the average punter knows about next year's architectural fandango.

In the new Glasgow, UK City of Architecture and Design, bog-standard bus shelters to keep off the rain and provide a canvas for the graffitists, won't do. Tell that to

the single mum with her buggy in Easterhouse and Castlemilk, where there are still bus stops without any sort of shelter at all. Bennett's vision is of a number of super bus shelters in the city centre and West End with a slightly more utilitatrian, but still effective, clean and probably also carrying advertising (and therefore lit at night,) version in other areas, but with enough of them to provide shelter from the storm in the windswept schemes as well as beneath the sandstone bulwarks of the city streets.

He's also come up with a money-making spin on the city's experiment with equipping some shelters with boxes which relay messages about bus frequency. Why not sell the space for personal messages, such as Happy Anniversary to Senga waiting for the 5.15 to Strathbungo?

It's a little daft, but has a sentimental gallusness which will be a winner with Glaswegians, who are the only people who can rescue 1999 from the charge of elitism which is certain to be levelled at it. The wumman at the Partick bus stop has heard fine words two days in a row

this week. The Scottish Childcare Strategy promises a nursery place to every four-year-old and a huge expansion in after-school clubs. Great in theory, but most mothers will still be stretching childcare hours to fit working ones until there's a social revolution which reaches employment practices.

The regeneration of Glasgow is of a similar order. There are many who believe it can only be done by redrawing the boundaries to ensure a more equitable share of the money and the problems, but few who would support another local-government upheaval, however minor. Donald Dewar's acknowledgment yesterday that tackling urban depivation in isolated pockets is not the answer could be applied to childcare, too. Lateral thinking can sometimes provide unexpected solutions. A bus shelter combined with a toilet is a practical possibility.