It’s happening again. Sir John Maxwell School in Glasgow has been declared “structurally unsafe” and is to be pulled down. Some of the building’s key architectural features, we are told, will be preserved “where possible” but it’s small comfort really. Start up the diggers. Cue the wrecking ball. Stand well clear.

What makes the imminent demolition of the old school in Pollokshaws so depressing, so soul-sucking, is that it follows a very familiar pattern we’ve seen over and over again in Glasgow. Building closes. Building is left to rot. Roof collapses. Vandals get in. Council expresses concern about public safety. Council orders demolition. It’s a sort of wilful neglect and a process that almost always ends up in a pile of rubble.

I’m not saying the school is a particularly beautiful building or worthy of architectural oohs and aahs. It isn’t. It wasn’t even listed. It’s just an old Victorian school like hundreds of others that were built all across Scotland. I went to one of them. Walker Road Primary in Aberdeen. I particularly remember the door marked “boys” and the door marked “girls” and the high ceilings and long corridors designed in much the same way as prisons were and for similar reasons: do as you’re told or you’ll be punished.

However, in deciding whether a building should be saved or not, it’s important to consider not just its architectural merit – and the experts are usually pretty divided over the question – but its place in the wider community as well, and what its destruction can signify to the people who live there. What does it say to them if the buildings around them are turned into piles of stone?

That test is particularly significant in the Pollokshaws area of Glasgow which – like a lot of other parts of my city – has suffered two waves of destruction. The first was in the 1960s when the old rundown houses were replaced by high flats. The intentions were good no doubt, but we know the result. The community was decimated and sentenced to decline.

Then came the second wave, which, again, was probably well intentioned but is having similar results: the high flats that replaced the houses that were pulled down were then themselves pulled down. We’ve also seeing it over at Maryhill where some of the residents of the Wyndford high-rises are fighting the plan to demolish them and we saw it in Pollokshaws too: another wave of destruction with a devastating impact on the locals.

I spoke to one of the campaigners trying to do something about the situation in Pollokshaws and save Sir John Maxwell School, Douglas McCreath, and he was in doubt about what had been happening in the area. Bricks and mortar are part of the cultural heritage, in rich areas and poor, he said, and bit by bit, brick by brick, the people of Pollokshaws were losing theirs. The swimming baths where Mr McCreath used to take his children, for example. Gone.

Mr McCreath and his fellow campaigners had a number of ideas to save the school, including a community centre, a business hub and exhibition space, some of which were more realistic than others. He and other members of the Pollokshaws diaspora had also done a lot of work to clean the building up and demonstrate that someone still cared about it. And he was pretty convincing on the deeper reasons for saving buildings like Sir John Maxwell. They provide a way of looking back, he said; they’re an insight into our heritage and history and if we don't know where we've come from, there's little prospect that we'll make a good job of going forward.

Obviously, some realism is always required: saving and preserving old buildings costs a bucketload of money. But equally, leaving old buildings to rot in the way that Glasgow City Council has with Sir John Maxwell is very much against the current trends in architecture. There was a time when old buildings were seen as an expensive nuisance and an obstacle to progress – and some developers no doubt still see it that way. But increasingly, inventive architects and designers are realising the ways in which old structures can be incorporated into modern ones, or sit next to them. Old and new. Together.

If you don’t believe me, check out the great recent examples of the genre across the city. Look at the Gorbals for example where the old red sandstone building on Gorbals Street – one of the few listed buildings that was left in the area and which had been on the at-risk register since the 90s – has now been incorporated into a new residential development by the Southside Housing Association. I pass the building regularly and it’s a constant joy and a fine example of the possibilities of development that’s sensitive to history.

The same applies at the other end of the city at Maryhill Burgh Halls which I visited only the other day with the man who led its renovation, Hunter Reid. Again, the old parts of the site weren’t demolished, they were incorporated imaginatively into the new and the result is stunning. The building could have disappeared but instead it’s still part of the community and the people who visited it in their childhood haven’t been left to summon it up only in their memories because it’s still there.

Admittedly, the model used in Maryhill and the Gorbals might not have worked lock stock and barrel in Pollokshaws with Sir John Maxwell School, but the point is it should have been tried. Anyone who’s attempted to buy a flat on the south side of Glasgow recently will know how expensive it’s become and how hard it is to find something affordable. The campaigners’ plan to turn the school into a community centre may not have been viable – buildings have to earn money – but why wasn’t the option of housing, incorporating the old and the new, investigated?

The answer, I fear, is that the council didn’t care and that raises the question of why, over and over again, it is the poorer parts of Glasgow that suffer most and then suffer again. You may know already that the school is named after Sir John Maxwell, whose family owned much of the land that the southside of the city was built on. It was Sir John who paid for the school in 1909 in an act of philanthropy that has rather gone out of fashion. But the point of it remains. Sir John Maxwell School was built because someone cared about the people of the area. Saving it from demolition would prove that somebody still does.