When Stuart Gulliver arrived in Glasgow in 1978 to work as an economic development strategist, the city was desperately in need of a plan. Its population had crashed by almost 25% in the previous 20 years. Its swagger as the empire’s second city, with a Manhattan-style grid and a wealth of grandiloquent but by then decaying architecture, had evaporated. Its factories, shipyards and steelworks were closing.

The people of Glasgow were getting steadily poorer and sicker. And as one wit suggested at the time, its only tourists were people who had got lost trying to go somewhere else.

Gulliver, who has died aged 84, became one of a small but diverse group – including politicians and planners, activists and artists, architects and officials – who showed, over the next two decades, not just that positive planning was possible, but that a badly wounded city like Glasgow could be coaxed back to life. Well before the world went to look at the renewal of Barcelona and Bilbao, Glasgow demonstrated that it was more effective to work with existing cities rather than abandoning them to concentrate on new towns and suburbs.

Gulliver’s employer, the Scottish Development Agency – set up in 1975 by Harold Wilson’s government to boost Scotland’s economy – confronted him with the seemingly hopeless task of finding a new future for Glengarnock, outside Glasgow, where the British Steel Corporation had closed down its 150-year-old steelworks, taking thousands of jobs with it. The experience of dealing with the desolation of abandoned blast furnaces and decades of environmental degradation convinced Gulliver that physical regeneration had to come before economic development.

There was never going to be a new steelworks or a car factory in Glengarnock, but the moonscape of industrial spoil and pollution was remade into a handsome park that showed a new start for the area was possible.

Gulliver went on to lead a taskforce working on a similar transformation of Clydebank, and then to push through the beginning of the regeneration of Glasgow itself, and its previously intractable East End. The plan included a mix of new homes, and the rehabilitation of old tenements, investing in new factories and infrastructure, an operation on the scale of the development of a new town.

He was executive director of the Scottish Development Agency from 1987 to 1990. When the Thatcher government replaced the Scottish Development Agency with Scottish Enterprise, and handed its activities in Glasgow to the Glasgow Development Agency (GDA), in 1990, Gulliver was appointed as its chief executive, and led the organisation for a decade.

He had the political guile and the toughness needed to wrangle the various factions and organisations in a city where, as he once assured me, “they stab you in the front rather than the back”. He ensured that organisations worked together, rather than against each other, a process that was officially described as “coordinating management”.

It was an early step in the growing realisation through the developed world that, as Gulliver once put it, “the city is the engine of society, and the city region is its best form of governance”. He had the charisma to make a convincing political case for the lost art of city building.

Born in Sheffield, he was the only child of Sarah (nee Hall), who was in domestic service, and Thomas Gulliver, a steelworker. Stuart went to Firth Park grammar school and then studied economics at the London School of Economics. After teaching in Leeds, he joined the Warrington New Town Development Corporation in 1970.

As chief executive of the GDA, he was instrumental in rebuilding the Gorbals. The first attempt to replace its 19th-century tenements with high-rise concrete in the early 1960s was a manifest failure. The GDA’s plan drawn up by the iconoclastic architects Campbell Zogolovitch Wilkinson Gough was based on the model of mansion blocks and private communal gardens.

Gulliver was a pioneer of culture-led urban renewal, putting the GDA’s resources into a series of innovative cultural programmes and projects that helped to create jobs and attract visitors, and changed the way that the city saw itself. In 1983 the city opened the Burrell Collection, an art museum that for a time had an impact greater than that of the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Glasgow staged a Garden festival in 1988, became European capital of culture in 1990 – an event that helped attract three million visitors – and built the Glasgow Science Centre on Pacific Quay. The inner city, renamed the Merchant City, turned into a centre for nightlife.

Alongside the lord provost, Pat Lally, Gulliver was a leader of Glasgow’s successful bid to stage the UK City of Architecture and Design year in 1999, of which I was appointed director. Among other things, it involved the restoration of the former Glasgow Herald building designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a demonstration housing project on Glasgow Green, and the creation of six new public spaces in peripheral parts of the city.

Gulliver personally co-founded the Glasgow international jazz festival in 1989. He left the GDA in 2000 to become professor of city development at Glasgow University and subsequently worked on a range of urban renewal projects, including schemes for Salford and Sheffield.

Glasgow made Gulliver rethink his priorities as an economist. “Eighty per cent of Scotland’s future performance is not amenable to change, it’s outside of our control,” he once said. “We pull small levers. We should focus on the five or six things that we can influence: airports and connectivity, higher education and making Edinburgh and Glasgow really beautiful cities.”

Gulliver married Jayne Kerley in 1963; she died in 1975. His second marriage, to Barbara McEwan, ended in divorce. He is survived by his partner, Margaret Williamson, and three children: Patrick and Helen from his first marriage, and Roland from the second.