Glasgow is a city that is partying this week to celebrate the start of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. It's a city that has struggled to reinvent itself after post-industrial collapse. But has it succeeded?

Infamous for being home to some of the widest social inequalities and poor health outcomes in Europe, the city has been hard at work for decades to give itself a new identity following the demise of the shipbuilding and dockland/port industries upon which it once built its fortunes.

The attempt at renaissance can be traced back to when it branded itself as the European City of Culture in 1990, since when it has had an annual festival that has been widely praised by residents and tourists. The experience gained helped it to win the competition to host the Games this year.

The spirit of the city is undeniable. Most of the inhabitants are enthusiastic about the Games. There is no doubt that building the facilities has brought huge benefits to the city.

Yet there is still a huge stretch of the Clyde Gateway whose banks are lined with rusting derelict hulls, relics of a former high employment. This is where the velodrome has been located, the Commonwealth Games athletes village, and the Emirates Arena. Dalmarnock is blighted by depopulation and underinvestment.

Tenements were demolished and hundreds of families moved elsewhere. With the departure of major retailers all that was left is a small shop set up by the workers in the community centre to service the remaining locals. Even that has gone now. Five schools have closed.

Glasgow council itself boasts about its regeneration programme, talking of the eight transformation regeneration areas it has, and the number of targets for housing, investment and jobs. It has produced a glossy video, below:

But a review of the regeneration process by Audit Scotland found it wanting. It found "no tangible evidence that bending mainstream budgets to address poverty and deprivation is actually taking place".

It wasn't that partnership never happened, for it said that there was a commitment "yet, as the evidence reveals, despite such commitment and a concerted policy effort to this mode of working, major problems persist with partnership working, especially in terms of shared strategic thinking and critically with progressing joint budgeting." (Christie Commission, 2011; Audit Scotland, 2013).

The review finds that despite name checking the involvement of the local community, for example in the Glasgow housing stock transfer, the community was not itself actually involved. It goes to far as to accuse the authorities of hijacking the language of community "so that the entire strategic planning system is now the responsibility of Community Plan Partners, bodies that have been continually criticised for failing to engage with, let alone embrace local communities in their work" (ODS, 2006; Fyfe, 2009; Audit Scotland, 2013).

The most deprived 2012 datazone was Ferguslie Park, Paisley. It had been the most deprived in 2006, and was ranked 2nd in 2009. Also ranking at the bottom of the pile are Possil Park, Glasgow City, Keppochhill, Ferguslie, Paisley, Renfrewshire, (another within Ferguslie Park), and Parkhead West and Barrowfield (in Glasgow's East End).

All were originally clearance estates, seeing new council housing built in the 1930s to solve the slum conditions and associated health problems, and each has since been subject to a variety of renewal initiatives since the 1970s including another wave in the 1990s and 2000s.

But Glasgow still finds itself with 42% of its area being in the 15% most deprived regions of Scotland in 2012, although this is reduced from 52% in 2004. These areas house hunters and 42,200 people, most of the unemployment, including very long-term unemployed and the long-term sick.

The geographic locus of poverty and deprivation has not migrated from this area in 80 years, despite all the regeneration. Social movement is poor.

An analysis of the problem has situating the cause of the problem in not just lack of consultation but lack of defined budgets with particular outcomes brought about by poor coordination between different levels of government.

Other neighbouring areas have been gentrified rather than regenerated as a result of the development necessary for the Commonwealth Games to happen. The land where the shiny facilities have been constructed was simply the cheapest.

The leader of the City Council, Councillor Gordon Matheson, knows that it's a problem. He has said: "I recognise that we won't solve the economic problems that our citizens face simply by holding a Commonwealth Games."

Still,it might take their minds off it for a while.