WIND SKIRTS the walls of Glasgow's Red Road flats, swirling litter into patterns that unfold on contact with abandoned shopping trolleys. On wet days, the ageing curtains and buckled window frames of the eight looming tower blocks make your soul retreat in horror. But in sunlight such concerns are hung out to dry under blue skies and chirpy birdsong: the graffiti on the windowless public phone box is less disturbing; the kids playing football in the rubble seem somehow friendlier; the multicoloured mothers with hand-me-down prams look more relaxed. On a day like this, it strikes home that the wire mesh stretched out across higher verandas could be for keeping birds out, and not just people in. That the buildings are due to come down soon seems almost sad.

When they were constructed in the 1960s, these flats were the tallest residential buildings in Europe, a modernist masterpiece, and as high as the hopes that went into them. They still serve as totem poles for visitors approaching Glasgow from the north and west, but their mystique has long since gone.

From the upper floors, however, the views are as stunning as ever. At the window of his 19th-floor flat, Thomas Walker points out a miniaturised Erskine Bridge, the Campsie Fells, the Craigend and Garthamlock water towers. His living-room is crowded with amateur sporting trophies, bowling balls, golf clubs and 13 years worth of furniture. "When I first arrived I wondered what I was moving into but I added my own things and the flat looked much better," he says. "I was born close to here, in Barmulloch, and remember the buildings going up when I was a kid." He pats his ripped leather sofa and shrugs. "There's potential in this flat, but there's no point decorating now because the blocks are coming down."

Walker lives alone here, in the block in which Andrea Arnold's award-winning 2006 movie Red Road was filmed. It will be the second of the towers to come down. Its empty counterpart, visible from Walker's living room, will go first. Glasgow Housing Association (GHA), which took ownership of the scheme from Glasgow City Council in 2003, has announced a £60 million rehousing initiative for tenants; more than 200 low-level houses are currently being built around Red Road, the first of which will be populated later this year. "I only have one neighbour in my landing now," says Walker. "I talk to him in the lift sometimes but I don't even know his name."

AS the flats empty out, the silence is becoming all-pervasive. It wasn't always this quiet, but music played by a noisy neighbour stopped for reasons unconnected with the evacuation. "He fell asleep on the couch with a cigarette in his mouth and died in the fire," recalls Walker. "I had to open all my windows to let the smoke out, but it still hung around for days." Walker will be moved to an apartment in a three-storey building within the year. "I'll miss it here," he says. "I'll miss the view, the contact with other residents in the lifts. I'll be completely alone. I won't even have the concierge."

Concierges have worked at the slabs since the early 1990s. From their station by the entrance, they survey live CCTV footage, take phone calls from residents, and answer queries from the general public. They ensure that the lifts are clean, that people feel safe.

"We were seen as the saviour of these flats," says Tommy McNeill. The only original concierge still working at Red Road, McNeill retires next month after 17 years in the job. "We had loads of empty flats when I first started because you couldn't get people to take them," he says. "There were drug and alcohol-related problems, broken lifts. That changed more or less overnight when we came along, and the difference was amazing."

McNeill seems genuinely sad about his impending retirement. He likes the unpredictability of his job. He recalls the time someone died on the bench next to his station in a pool of blood after a stabbing outside. On the same bench his colleague Jimmy McKenna delivered a Chinese woman's baby - which she later named Jimmy Ying in his honour - before the ambulance arrived.

"There have been umpteen stabbings and fights," says McNeill. "I couldn't tell you how many times I've been threatened but thankfully nothing's ever come of it."

He describes the blocks as roads going into the sky, with stages of life and death on every landing. He offers some explanation for the delinquency that has plagued the buildings from their earliest days. "The famous one was kids jamming the lifts," he says. "If you lived on the 24th floor, and had to walk up the stairs, that was just your luck. These buildings were never designed for children, but families were placed here all the same. Inevitably the kids used the blocks as their playgrounds."

On the 17th floor, Heidi McLean can't wait to move. She has lived in the slab for 15 years with her husband John and their children Andrew, 13, and Emily, 11. She longs for a two-door property with a garden, and is scheduled to occupy one through GHA later this year.

"My children still share a bedroom," she says. "Once you're in these flats you can't get out. It's only because this clearance is happening that we're finally moving on."

She says the points system used in the past to allocate housing gave priority to those with greater social problems, and that her family ended bottom of the pile no matter how the cards were shuffled. She will miss the views from their living-room ("especially on Guy Fawkes' Night"), but little else. "I could never let the kids out when they were younger because I couldn't see the park from my window to check on them," she says. "Even now, Emily hardly ever goes out unless I'm with her."

McLean's flat sways when the wind blows and she feels as though she is living on a boat. "The lampshades shake and you can hear the walls creaking," she says. "You try to block it out with the telly but you can still feel yourself moving. The first time it happened, when we moved in, John and I were clinging to each other. It's a feeling you don't forget."

The building's increasing emptiness is eerie, she says. The only other occupied flat on her landing is home to a family who fled the Ivory Coast in 2003. Asylum-seekers and refugees inhabit several of the furnished properties still let by Glasgow City Council. Likewise, a number of flats are used as temporary accommodation for homeless people and recently released prisoners. It's a heady mix. McLean's African neighbour Adelaide Williams smiles as she opens her door. Her three children cling to her, peel away, fall over bicycles and plastic chairs. The family speaks French and only a little broken English. "When I first came here, one old woman would give me a headache every day," says Williams. "She would knock on my door and say You can't stay here. Go back to your own country'. I called the police, but every day she came back."

LIKE McLean, Williams has felt her flat swaying in the wind ("I prayed to God to protect us"), and, like McLean, she is raising her family in damp conditions. Kitchen roll and sodden towels line the steel-framed windows, thick with condensation. In the bedroom, where her two oldest children sleep, she pulls back a wardrobe to reveal a wall black with mould. "Every day she has a cough," she says, pointing to her three-year-old, Olivia. "The girls have to sleep in here and I sleep in the other room with my boy." The bathroom tiles are held together with fetid water and fungus. I ask the eldest daughter, Marie-Magdalene, what she thinks of the flat. She rolls her eyes before managing: "It's good."

According to the GHA, asbestos in the walls and ceilings means the single-pane windows cannot be changed, nor the flats cost-effectively upgraded. For the same reason, explosives can't be used to demolish the buildings. Instead, they are likely to be brought down floor by floor in an exact reversal of the construction process.

These towers grew from the seeds of the Bruce Report (1945), which advocated replacing Glasgow's existing Victorian buildings with modern architecture in order to loosen the city's slum belt. Red Road's chief architect Sam Bunton warned, before the scheme's completion, that residents "mustn't expect airs and graces, and things like different-sized windows and ornamental features". Of course not. It would be well into the 1990s and noughties before designer high-rises would spring up in areas such as the Glasgow Harbour development, sold privately and expensively as waterfront apartments with stunning views. Meanwhile, GHA-owned tower blocks are being felled across the city at a rate of one a month. Dissent, where it exists, hinges on the idea of revamping those condemned multi-storeys, as has been done successfully with several ex-council blocks in London, and as happens as a matter of course across Europe.

Red Road, because of its fame, gained the worst reputation of the multi-storeys thrown up in the heat of the 1960s. Support for any similar schemes ended almost on completion of the final Red Road block, the last roof nail setting off a hangover that persists in public planning today. In time, council leaders came to realise that social problems, when relocated, start anew, only in a higher-density setting. Decades of under-investment, of heads stuck in the municipal sand, resulted in irreversible decline.

Most people seem to agree that things are getting steadily worse on the scheme. When the tightrope artist Didier Pasquette attempted to cross between the roofs of two Red Road tower blocks last year, top floors were evacuated, allegedly for fear that someone would take a shot at him with an air rifle.

Jimmy Docherty came to live on the scheme right at the start. He worked for years in the slab and still does the occasional shift as a concierge. "They were very good flats with very nice people in them," he remembers. "When we went to the corporation housing office, a girl came out with a shoebox full of keys and shook it. You had to put your hand in and whichever key you pulled out was your house."

Because Docherty's mother had breathing problems, she managed to swap keys for their 29th-floor flat with someone on the third. Nobody seemed to mind. "Having a home with a toilet inside was a real luxury," he says. "You had people coming to Red Road from areas like Gallowgate, Duke Street and Parkhead. It was like a big village in the sky. It's different now, but it was self-contained with shops and other services."

These days, amenities in the area are scarce. The Brig Bar and the bingo hall have been closed for an age. The Presto supermarket burned down years ago and was never rebuilt. The Filling Station burger van does brisk business in the main square, as does a Costcutter, but the post office inside the pharmacy closed earlier this year. One shop advertising "fancy goods, hardware, clothes, lamps, clocks, toiletries, paint, toys, bedding, almost everything" has steel shutters pulled irrevocably down. Nearby, a solicitor's office and a bookies' stay open like last-ditch invitations for those with little left to lose.

BARMULLOCH Primary School is closed today, and children play on the Red Road swings. People of different ethnicities and languages muddle together in a way that wealthier people rarely do. Late-afternoon sunlight softens edges, mixing the cottons of the old with the nylons and bangles of the young. One girl does a cartwheel; a man with jet black hair sings in Arabic.

Red Road Women's Centre, on the slab's basement floor, provides support for women who have been sexually abused, besides offering childcare facilities and English-language classes. In tandem with the Springburn Alive And Kicking Project - a nearby service for elderly residents - it is seen by many as the glue holding what's left of the scheme together. Its manager, Linda Fraser, is preparing to move premises, but only by a stone's throw along Red Road.

"This estate's gone right downhill," she says. "We did a survey at the start of the 1990s and were shocked that so many people actually liked living here, but there were better services back then. Even the bus service is poor these days." Around 30% of the women using Fraser's services come from the Red Road flats - a high proportion, she says, given that the blocks are emptying out.

When people leave, their doors are removed and replaced with steel covers, which in turn get scrawled on with graffiti and subsumed into the building's fabric. Inside, the rooms are empty spaces where washing machines once spun and electric fires blazed. It would be nice to think something remained of the people who lived there, but there is little in the way of atmosphere. In one cleared home, a Celtic poster ripped from a newspaper in 2002 is stuck with Blu-Tack to the wall; clumps of green carpet cling to nails on the floor like tufts of hair on a tortured head. A bucket on one veranda contains an old shoe, but no sense of the foot that once wore it.

Alan Garth was moved from the slab some months ago after 17 years as a resident. "We get obsessed with the bricks and mortar, but an area is made up of its people," he says. From Yorkshire originally, he arrived in Glasgow in the late 1980s with no money, no job and no home. The precise details would be burdensome, he insists, but he was in "the direst straits you could imagine". While staying at the now defunct Glasgow Resettlement Unit, he got wind of the Red Road blocks and immediately applied for a flat.

"I was interviewed by a small committee of people to decide whether they thought I'd fit in," he says. "I've been constantly grateful that they did." He would never have moved from the flats had they not been coming down; at 72, he was settled for life and could have done without the disruption. "Somehow or another there's still a community there," he says. "I haven't lost touch with Red Road."

WHEN the blocks come down there will be a hole in the ground, but Garth worries more about the hole in Glasgow's skyline. "I will miss the architecture," he says. "Looked at from a distance, it's quite dramatic. There were great hopes for the flats in the early years, there must have been, but a lot of tricks were missed."

Any opposition to the flats coming down has faded in the face of inevitability; the asbestos argument, like the material, is flameproof, or as good as.

John Wood, the last of Petershill Court's original residents, is packed up and ready to move out of his 10th-floor flat tomorrow. He stands by the building's main entrance, his tartan shopping trolley in one hand, a matching tammy hat on his head, and eyes the outside world. The windows of his new flat, in a much smaller building in Springburn, are double-glazed, and the property was the best of those available. But he doesn't want to leave.

"I've stayed here for 34 years, always on the same landing," he says. "I've seen all sorts come and go, the good and the bad. But we've had some great times here, like anywhere else." The trick is to not take things too personally, despite the personal nature of events, to chalk it down to the general demise of the high-rise. "They're just not desirable any more," he says. "They cost a packet to maintain. It doesn't matter who takes them over - the flats have no chance."

And Wood has no choice. It would be nice to see inside his flat, to pry into his privacy as an era draws to a close, but he is going shopping. He grips the rubber handle of his trolley and doffs his cap to the concierge. "That's me," he says, already across the landing, turning left into sunlight and shadow.

IS YOUR TOWN READY TO BE REBORN?

Spearheaded by Alan Simpson, Head of Urbanism at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, the Renaissance Towns programme - to be launched at the Lighthouse next week - will emphasise "regeneration driven by the community, for the community". If your area is selected, you and your fellow citizens will have the chance to work alongside professional and civic bodies, in devising and realising a vision for where the town wants to be in 25 years time.