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Designing Places

Scotland's urban and rural traditions

Scotland's enormously rich tradition of urban design goes back to the medieval period, for example at St Andrews. Many of Scotland's smaller towns and villages were built as new towns or extended in planned settlements. Landowners created many planned rural settlements in a drive for improvement. The New Town of Edinburgh is probably Europe's best example of neoclassical town planning. Scotland's tenement tradition is proving unexpectedly robust and today's designers are finding new ways of interpreting it. The best of these patterns of development are seen today as models of successful design for the 21st century.

In the development of 20th century town and regional planning, no one was more influential than Patrick Geddes. Scotland pioneered regional planning with the 1946 Clyde Valley plan, setting out a new strategy for tackling the appalling legacy of Victorian slums. The programme of new towns was one result.

Scotland's confidence in making its urban future has been shaken, as elsewhere, by instances where some of the hopes of 20th century planning and architecture turned out to have been misplaced. We have learned by bitter experience the financial and human cost of building against the grain of the natural landscape and the patterns of human life.

After three difficult decades, we are becoming more confident that we understand what makes successful places. The conservation of historic buildings was the starting point. It is now accepted that the best of what has been handed down to us should be protected. The rise of the conservation movement has involved a rediscovery of what makes places work.

Marchmont, Edinburgh	Sundrum, South Ayrshire

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