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Designing Places

Edinburgh Park, Edinburgh

The qualities of successful places

The most successful places, the ones that flourish socially and economically, tend to have certain qualities in common. First, they have a distinct identity. Second, their spaces are safe and pleasant. Third, they are easy to move around, especially on foot. Fourth, visitors feel a sense of welcome.

Places that have been successful for a long time, or that are likely to continue to be successful, may well have another quality, which may not be immediately apparent - they adapt easily to changing circumstances. Finally, places that are successful in the long term, and which contribute to the wider quality of life, will prove to make good use of scarce resources. They are sustainable.

Sustainability - the measure of the likely impact of development on the social, economic and environmental conditions of people in the future and in other places - must run as a common thread through all our thinking about design. Thinking about sustainability focuses in particular on promoting greener lifestyles, energy efficiency, mixed uses, biodiversity, transport and water quality.

sustainability
The measure of the likely impact of development on the social, economic and environmental conditions of people in the future and in other places

Edinburgh Park, Edinburgh

Those six qualities - identity, safe and pleasant spaces, ease of movement, a sense of welcome, adaptability and good use of resources - are at the heart of good design for urban and rural development.

There is one other quality that many successful places have. Beauty, like the other six, should also be one of the objectives of urban design. It is less easy to plan for directly, but we may not need to. In a place that has the six qualities, beauty may well be the natural product of the patterns of human life and the skills of talented designers.

City Centre, Dundee

Throughout Scotland there are beautiful cities, towns and villages that were created with the help of civic leaders with vision, landowners with a stake in the long term future, and developers, architects and designers of talent and genius. Today their legacy is being eroded and too little of value is being put in their place.

Circumstances are more difficult than ever. Globalisation stamps its undifferentiated image on the world. Traditional town based industries have largely disappeared as technology increasingly frees us from ties of place. The individual freedoms of the private car have not been won without a cost to the quality of the places where we live.

What we build can be important to our sense of identity at all scales, from local to regional and national. In the words of the Scottish Executive's framework document on The Development of a Policy on Architecture for Scotland: 'The architecture and buildings of our towns, cities and rural settlements are a repository of our common culture and heritage, they provide continuity and a unique sense of history and tradition... The challenge for our architecture today is to fuse what is still vital in local tradition with the best in our increasingly global civilisation, to marry them in new ways that meet our modern needs and aspirations.'

Inveraray, Argyll and Bute	Irvine, North Ayrshire	Scottish Executive Architectural Policy Documents

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