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Review of Scotland's Cities - The Analysis

9 BEYOND CITY LIMITS

9.1 CHANGING LIMITS OF UNDERSTANDING

For much of the last twenty years the changing conditions and roles of Scotland's cities have not always been at the forefront of policy reflection and development. Whilst many individual area or sectoral actions have been pursued, some of them effective and successful and others less so, there has been no integrated understanding of how the cities contribute to national progress and wellbeing. This Review set out to develop three important sets of insights.

• First, it aimed to achieve an assessment of how cities matter in achieving Scotland's core objectives.
• Secondly, having established that where things occur influences what happens and for whom, the intention was to develop both a way of thinking about city issues and policies for the future.
• Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the Review aimed to bring together what was known about key processes, problems and potentials in the Scottish cities.

This document essentially sets out the challenges, whether in solving problems or releasing city potentials, which the Review Team identified from the analysis of data, and through discussions with the research community and literally hundreds of officials, experts and others who attended Sounding Boards and Working Groups. The very existence of the Review triggered an active debate about Scotland's cities. The Executive has put this contextual, analytical statement in the public domain both to indicate the evidence base supporting the associated policy statement but also to inform further debate.

There is a need to sustain future thinking for our cities. This will require a continuing dialogue between the Executive and local authorities and other partners about mutually consistent visions and supportive actions for the future. It will also require all of the actors in Scotland's cities to develop a recurrent internal capacity and propensity to monitor and evaluate what is happening to progress in all of the cities.

Scotland's city policy-makers, both national and local, could be more spatially aware. Being aware will mean having an increased ability to develop key, recurrent indicators for city progress and problems, not least for economic development, quality of life, and environmental and social justice. And the development of these indicators will require cross-departmental and agency collaboration in ensuring that we know what is happening in our cities, and that we know quickly and consistently.

9.2 BEYOND THE LIMITS OF BOUNDARIES

The work of this Review, time and again, drew attention to the mismatch (in many instances) of formal political boundaries, and indeed internal administrative boundaries of Executive agencies and quangos, and the functional shape of the key daily activity systems of our cities. Labour markets, housing markets, shopping patterns, commuting maps do not mesh easily with formal council boundaries. They will never, of course, match precisely and indeed these activities focused around a core city may each suggest different limits. And these limits will change over time.

A clear implication of this Review is that effective local responses to the pressures that global economic change brings, or indeed the shifts that stem from locally devised change, should now be seen within a city-region framework. That is the case whether the change in question is felt within the city-region or also involves the relationships between different city-regions. A city should now be aware of all of the key geographic relationships that influence its progress. The city boundary defines not so much a sanctuary or a line delimiting powerful autonomy over all key areas of activity but rather the place at which a city has to start recognising and thinking about the key relations and alliances that it needs to succeed.

This approach to cities stresses their connectedness, to their labour market and service areas, to their wider hinterland. And it requires the capacity not to make sharp delineations between city, suburbs, town and country. We will misunderstand the roles and effects of cities, both good and bad, if we see political boundaries as closures.

The Executive should be careful before taking the approach to urban and city policies that some national governments in the advanced economies have adopted since the 1980's, where there has been a common pattern of giving greater responsibilities to local levels and advocating new partnerships as a panacea whilst policy resources were reduced. Devolution and appropriate partnerships are important priorities for the Executive in fashioning a better governance of Scotland, but so also is adequately resourced local government and clear overall strategy and direction.

In shaping policy for cities and places the Executive will have a lead role, as the higher level of government, in developing key aspects of policy and delivery. These include not just strategies for infrastructure provision, planning and the environment but also ensuring that effective co-ordination arrangements are in place both to promote central-local understanding and co-operation and to facilitate municipally-led cross-boundary action. The Executive also has an interest in ensuring that policies and actions it funds across different sectors of activity integrate locally to achieve progress on the high level goals of closing the gap, raising competitiveness and pursuing environmental justice.

Devolving resources and control and seeking local integration of policy action is not of course restricted to downward shifts from the Executive to councils. The same principles apply in relation to roles and functions that communities and community organisations can best undertake. This Review reveals that there is still much scope, in some of our cities, for councils to embrace communities as real partners in local change and to use more varied approaches and vehicles in the processes of area change and regeneration. And concerns remain about the extent to which many public-led partnerships and bodies are committed to engaging effectively with the 'private sector' in creative visioning for our cities and their regeneration.

9.2.1 Shared Vision

In this enabling, partnering approach the Executive will be called upon to resource and allocate fairly. But it will also have to help develop a shared view of where and how Scotland will develop in the future.

Our history, and that of all other nations, has always involved geographically uneven growth and the future is not likely to be different. It must be recognised that some patterns of employment or population change are difficult but reversible whilst others are not only difficult but are unlikely to be resolved within the realms of budgets and economic constraints. This is a difficult task, but it is the city-regions and regions that are adaptable and flexible which are likely to do best in the long term. The Executive has given explicit recognition of this fact for example in its Framework for Economic Development in Scotland. This is not an argument for abandoning less prosperous places and less prosperous people to the vicissitudes of market choices. Rather it requires a clearer understanding of the longer-term roles and capacities of places and to identify what requires to be done to help people and places to adjust.

This Review lends support to the Executive's proposals for rethinking structure planning in Scotland and developing a national context statement for plans. These developments match with emerging evidence and ideas about the importance of city-regions and connections between them. There is also much in this review that supports Community Planning. However there are perhaps three gaps in the frameworks for thinking about communities and land uses in Scotland, all of key importance for the cities.

• Firstly, there is a need to clarify how the current patchwork of regional partnerships and places fit together and connect to community planning, including connecting community and land use planning processes and outcomes;
• Secondly, many of the officials and firms involved in the Review process took the view that there needed to be a much wider use of masterplans or action plans for projects and area revitalisation efforts. Authorities, agencies and developers were beginning to use such approaches more widely; and
• Thirdly, the practice of city planning has changed greatly over the last two decades. Public authorities have become more familiar with market issues and roles and the private sector has begun to understand more of the accountability and governance requirements of city regeneration. However, those involved in planning and urban design have a sense that their contribution has not been sufficiently recognised and the education and training of planners has not paid sufficient attention to ensuring that they have the skills required to create places of enduring quality. There is a sense that a strong Scottish tradition is being left to wither on the vine just as the Executive recognises the importance of place making and place management. The publication of Designing Places in November 2001, the first Executive policy on urban design is an important landmark in improving the quality of development in Scotland. It is now being taken forward in a number of ways;

9.2.2 Removing Limits to Balanced City Growth

This Review lays to rest the notion that the modern city is inevitably a locus for demographic decline, economic disadvantage and physical decay. Rather, it stresses that the cities are all different, though they have commonalities. They all have sectors and signs of growth and at the same time all manifest the scars of decay. Variety is the nature of city change, but the overall direction is now positive.

In relation to demographics, the populations of Edinburgh and Aberdeen have been increasing over recent decades and Glasgow and Dundee declining. However the number of households within the cities have been increasing, so that overall housing demand numbers have not been declining.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of home owners living in new homes on brownfield site developments. This process has been extensive in Glasgow and has been led by the City Council since the early 1980's, so that 'urban renaissance' is a well established feature of Scottish urban change. But where population has been declining, with less rapid rates of net new households, there are still stocks of unused brownfield land and high vacancy rates in public housing indicating a switch away from low quality public housing to other options as employment rates and incomes have risen for city residents in recent years.

This raises the question of whether, allied to appropriate economic measures, these cities have the capacity to help address Scotland's overall population decline. In contrast to the period 1950 to 1990 city problems are no longer the principal causes of Scottish population decline. This is a new question for policy, how can we use city assets to raise migration to Scotland?

The politics and economics of migration will be major challenges for national and regional governments throughout the EU in the decades ahead. Western Europe is set to experience a labour shortfall as population grows more slowly, all in a context of faster growth in less prosperous countries. This issue has been widely ignored, until recently, in Scotland because there is an inheritance of thinking of the key economic issue for Scotland as mass unemployment. This Review has stressed the imperative of further reducing worklessness in our cities, especially Glasgow and Dundee, but the evidence of the last decade is of a major set of shifts in employment in Scotland's cities.

9.3 LIMITING SHORTAGES

Well-managed macroeconomic policies allied to structural economic shifts favouring cities have meant that in all our cities job numbers and incomes are growing and that a major shift in perspective is required. Scotland's cities, in very broad terms, are moving from labour surplus to labour shortage. Mass unemployment is no longer the key challenge, but improving skills and attracting new workers have become the critical issues. Whilst reducing worklessness and removing poverty traps have to remain as priorities it is important to recognise that we are likely to enjoy another decade when economic change favours the cities.

To sustain the changes evident over the last five years in cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, a programme enhancing skills and human capital will be essential and it is likely not just to involve training but migration. Growing employment, moderate housing prices by UK standards and a high quality of life in Scotland's cities should be city assets in attracting and retaining labour, whether executives, students or successful asylum seekers. The attributes of quality places and quality educational institutions are not only migration attractors but especially through the largely city-based university sectors likely to foster invention and innovation.

Training, migration and innovation will all be essential to raising productivity and growth in the cities. But city productivity is not simply attributable to human capital and it is essential that the overall supply and detailed structure of property provision expands to match new city-based demands.

In Glasgow, and to a lesser extent Dundee, there is a coexistence of rising land and property prices with extensive tracts of unused, brownfield land. Market failures in assessing the risks in upgrading, and in the market for the new locations often involved have hampered development. But it can be argued that policy and delivery failures have also been involved with, for much of the last decade, no coherent strategy for brownfield land renewal nor the commitment to fund change.

To a large extent city renewal is about recycling land from old to new uses with some rapidity but this Review suggests that the cultures, competences and vehicles to deliver required change have been absent and there has been a protracted failure to achieve consistent delivery. The Review argues a case for increased public resources to make these changes but leaves open to debate the vehicles for change.

In other cities, notably Edinburgh and Aberdeen, growth pressures will often have to be accommodated on green-field sites although the redevelopment of large areas of Edinburgh's waterfront is a notable exception. Whilst planning often has to confront economic development with an awareness of its social and environmental consequences, it is imperative that there is better local understanding of the economic costs of unduly restrictive land availability.

Scottish Enterprise plays a crucial role in shaping patterns of change in the Scottish economy. It is used to working on thematic, sectoral and area based projects. Its predecessor had strong city renewal roles (in the GEAR and Leith projects, for example) and more recently Scottish Enterprise has been involved in the Edinburgh Waterfront and the Clyde corridor.

Scottish Enterprise has given attention to the issues of 'Competitive Place' and the Review Team learned much from that work. There is also a case for Scottish Enterprise to set out more explicitly the spatial aspects of strategies, for the Enterprise Networks and their spatial impacts.

9.3.1 Limited Vision, Limited Movement

The Review process revealed that often, in the past, the local and national approach to infrastructure was to provide too little and too late. Action tended to follow signs, often acute signs of shortage or congestion. The Executive, through strengthening land use planning, housing planning and transport strategy, are anxious that clearer, coherent forward visions shape investment. And in the accompanying policy statement there are specific measures to help cities to cope with growth pressures. This new emphasis is best reflected in the expanding commitment to transport investment.

Not only has transport infrastructure, between and within our cities, been neglected and under-funded for decades but there has been too little emphasis in economic development strategy of how transport impacts on the Scottish economy and indeed the well being of particular places. In recent years both the Executive and the UK Government have moved beyond a 'jobs/training' emphasis in urban and regional policies to give attention to a range of factors which foster local growth and productivity. For example, science, land and planning and transport all now receive their due consideration.

Action for transport has started. Forward estimates suggest that, without policy action, traffic demands will grow sharply in Scotland over the next two decades and that growth will be fastest in the cities and city-regions. This review has indicated the new emphasis given to a strategic approach, the possibilities for new investment and the likelihood of new organisational and pricing systems for city access and transport. It can be expected that in the decade or two ahead there will be continuing expansion of travel to work areas, increasing the overlaps between city spheres of influence and the need for co-operation, and that there is likely to be a growing demand for accessibility (not least because of the rising value of travel time) to city cores.

Links within Scotland and between Scotland and the rest of the UK, Europe and the world also require attention. The Review has made clear how the economic prospects for the cities have improved over the last decade with new opportunities increasingly outweighing the shrinking, older economic base. A great deal of policy is fighting the consequences of the inheritance of history. But we also have to deal with our geography, and this is evident in the development of Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness. A more peripheral location within the nation damages the prospects of all of these places and better, faster integration of these places into the regional and national economy should be a major long term objective for Scotland. Similar remarks can be made about all of Scotland's cities in relation to road and rail links to much of the rest of the UK and to air links to Europe.

The emerging strategy for, and commitment to, improving transport within our city-regions now has to be matched with hard, forward strategic thinking about inter-regional and international transport links. And this has to be driven by a vision of future Scotland. The new approach to planning will inform this vision but this is the kind of issue where Executive and local authorities should perhaps seek to evolve towards an agreed view of how to proceed if a tyranny of small decisions is to be escaped.

9.4 LIMITING PLACES AND LIMITED VARIETY

In our cities we have the worst of places, we have the best of places. The Executive has recently set out its core ideas for neighbourhood renewal in Scotland and the Cities Review has contributed to that approach. It is clear that in the wider UK and European context that Scotland's cities, and particularly the poorer areas where policy action has been relatively intense, the community sector and the not for profit sector are quite extensively developed. This Review has highlighted how Glasgow is now reinforcing that process by creating community ownership in housing and how that approach could potentially make financial and renewal sense for Edinburgh and Dundee, in particular.

The great cities of the world are increasingly led by those who concentrate on the strategic, future issues facing their places and generating the visions and means to address them. Enabling, and trusting, communities to do what they can do best, and much of housing management falls into that category, and concentrating on the big, external change issues may be the best strategy for city governments in the future.

Of course it is not just less affluent Scots that live in neighbourhoods or indeed communities. Although the quality of life in our cities, and city-regions, is regarded as high, improvement and neighbourhood quality across the income spectrum or age spectrum, is an issue requiring more thought. Whilst many analysts have been predicting for the last fifty years that geographic neighbourhoods would become less and less important all the evidence is that the vast majority of Scots place value on good neighbours and good neighbourhoods; places and localities matter to us in our homes and social lives. There is a widespread view that developers should give more attention to quality and design in suburban and city private housing, to foster a sense of place.

The Review identified two areas where public policy needs to deliver the diverse product mix of neighbourhoods that a modern city requires.

• Firstly, especially in Glasgow, but also in Dundee (both with extensive vacant land) there has been a failure to deliver new family neighbourhoods within the city, despite well established latent demands for such neighbourhoods (although this has been recognised by the Council and Scottish Enterprise Glasgow). Of course security and schools have to be high quality in such localities. In consequence 'renaissance' has had to be driven by demands from single persons and households without children. We have already noted above the importance of more effective recycling of brownfield land, and the Executive has committed to increase resources for this task, and we have argued for better monitoring of progress. It is also important that new developments contain, as a whole, a mix of income groups and that development models are designed with benefit for communities in mind
• Secondly, there is a view that planning for some city centre neighbourhoods is too 'conservative' in that it neither recognises the 24/7 characteristics of elements of the modern labour force and their preferred leisure and lifestyle arrangements. Households' housing and neighbourhood preferences are much more diverse that three decades ago and if our cities are to compete effectively for residents then the product mix has to be varied.

9.4.1 Limiting Prices

It also has to be affordable. Just over a third of Scots still find their housing, in our cities, in the non-market or social rental sector. And this proportion, which has changed much over the last two decades with Right To Buy, is likely to change slowly in future. Much of this housing is being modernised and improved but much still needs to be done. However there has to be a growing policy concern as to why, despite the relatively gentle demographics of household formation in Scotland, house prices have risen so rapidly not just in Edinburgh but parts of Glasgow and the other cities. On balance, rising house prices are not good for regional competitiveness and growth and we need a clearer view of trends, impacts and policy implications.

9.5 REMOVING CREATIVITY LIMITS

Quality neighbourhoods, housing and public services will all be attractors to our cities. But the vitality of our cities is also critical in shaping rennaissance. Our cities have to be good places to shop, visit, eat, play, watch, listen, learn; good places to live. A number of policy areas can contribute more to city vitality.

The Review concluded that whilst there were significant improvements in city centre quality in some of our cities over the last decade this progress was uneven, for instance Glasgow had made more progress than Edinburgh, and that each city should now systematically track their own city centre competitiveness. There is a case for each city, working with Scottish Enterprise and other key agencies (such as Visitscotland and the Scottish Arts Council) to construct a city centre strategy within the framework of the community plan and land use plans. A key concern of that strategy would be improving the public realm. The Review has continued the case for a wider use of Business Improvement Districts to achieve such aims, but the public sector will need to continue to contribute. The centre has to be a fit stage for the modern city.

On that stage, Executive planning guidance will continue to emphasise that thriving city centre retailing is a priority. Scotland's cities, have in the main, been successful as retailing centres, but there is a continuing need to ensure that there is coherence of city centre and city-region approaches to retailing.

Glasgow and Edinburgh have also performed well in attracting events and visitors seeking arts and culture. The Review Team concluded that more cooperation between places and a cross-sectoral strategy are needed and that should be given attention to both the level and distribution of funding support if all of the Scottish cities are to participate effectively in this competitive area of activity. The recent attention of the arts and culture providers to issues of social justice and inclusion is to be lauded and the arts can play a significant role in community regeneration. However, perhaps a new clarity is also needed about the extent to which arts and culture activities in our cities impact not just visitor numbers but the employment and creative potentials of our cities.

A safe but stimulating public realm, good services and shopping and a changing variety of events and culture/arts opportunities are all key factors in attracting visitors to our cities. City tourism has grown significantly over the last decade. For this growth to continue the Review argues that faster, cheaper access to the Scottish cities will be required. And to help visitors from outside of Scotland to make best use of the opportunities spread around this small country co-operative strategies for distributing visitors should be developed further. VisitScotland's commitment to develop city tourism is one step forward; another would be more obvious signs of co-operation between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

9.6 SUSTAINABLE LIMITS

As home to the majority of Scots, the city environment is important for two main reasons. Firstly, Scotland's sustainability, in large part, depends on the sustainability of the city-regions. Cities produce the majority of waste, consume the lion's share of energy and are the locus of the majority of journeys, either within or between cities and their regions. The Review concluded that tackling the cities' appalling track record on waste management, increasing the proportion of trips undertaken by 'sustainable' forms of transport and tackling energy inefficiency are all priorities. If Scotland aspires to meeting UK targets, we must deliver on these aspirations in the cities. Secondly, Scotland's cities provide the daily backdrop for most Scots. Yet this review has found that disadvantaged communities too frequently are subjected to a less healthy, less pleasant environment than their better-off counterparts. Tackling Scotland's legacy of poor quality environments is a challenge that the Executive, together with the cities, has to meet.

9.7 TIME AND RESOURCE LIMITS

City policies confront a complex and challenging agenda. They can reduce the tensions between the global pressures of competitiveness and the local consequences of inequalities by facilitating the re-training of labour and the recycling of land. That perspective on policy sees the purposive use of resources 'today' as part of the solution of the likely 'problems' of tomorrow. By being 'city smarter' we can be more successful in reducing the inevitable tensions between fairness, growth and the quality of the environment.

Policy has to address and resolve a series of policy dilemmas including:

• The need to make a difference for the poorest of present Scots but yet recognise that we need more, and more skilled, people if our economy is to expand;
• The coexistence of surpluses and shortages in labour markets but in a context that is shifting away from mass unemployment as the background to policy thinking;
• A similar coexistence of surplus and shortage within city housing markets in a context where city household numbers are rising and show the potential to rise further;
• The need to invest more in schools and children as demographic ageing begins to manifest its effects on service demands and tax revenues; and
• The importance of city vitality and 'buzz' but at the same time neighbourhoods of some tranquility, peace and quiet;

This context and evidence statement for the Cities Review has essentially been about identifying the policy challenges for the Executive, for local authorities and for citizens in our main settlements. In auditing existing challenges and trying to anticipate those that might confront policymakers over the next few Parliaments it is inevitable that a daunting set of issues emerges. However, there is a strong tradition of urban renewal in Scotland and these are some real achievements on which to build.

It also has to be recognised that Reviews identify issues that need further assessment, that change requires resources, including human resources. So it would be wrong to expect immediate action on all the issues identified. It must be recognised that in many areas of policy a great deal is already being done and that the Scottish Budget will allow further action.

Many of the issues and challenges identified in this report do not primarily revolve around a claim for more resources but rather of better design of policy and better delivery of services.

This Review, has sought to develop a better understanding of how Scotland's cities are changing. Reviewing these changes, and the mix of growth and decline, problems and opportunities makes it all too clear that our city policies are not simply about redistributing resources from successful to less successful places. Rather, city, or place, policy is also essential in dealing with market and policy failures that limit productivity growth. City policies have to be creative as well as redistributive and they have national as well as local benefits. They support local change, creativity and adjustment which are all essential to wider national progress.

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