Arterial world: How our towns hold the key to city success, by Ross Martin, SCDI

Scotland’s seven cities play a crucial role in attracting investment and must compete for business with other global urban centres. But it is our towns, where the majority of Scotland’s population is found, that hold the key to the success or failure of these cities.

In every city, surrounding towns supply the vital fuel of people, working during the day, going out in the evenings and shopping at weekends. Our cities need our towns to drive their economies, to provide labour, intellectual firepower and soul.

Scotland’s towns also help to define their home city, shaping their regional hinterland with individual and collective character. They are so much more than the "dormitory" towns of popular parlance.

This relationship between Scotland’s towns and the seven cities is a crucial part of the economy and wider society, but their interdependence is often missing from the public policy debate.

The wide variety towns offer can be an integral part of any city’s response to the three key challenges of poor productivity, low levels of innovation and a lack of internationalisation. Towns can play a vital part in attracting the diversity of people needed to create the mix and churn needed to overcome these three barriers to growth.

This is particularly true of internationalisation of the economy. Our towns already have links into markets all around the world that we could make much more use of.

There is also a balance to be struck in each city region. While planners may like to cluster potential passengers around neatly spaced stops on a suburban network, maintaining the unique character of our outlying towns matters to us all.

Distances are effectively shrinking with improvements in reliability and standards of regional transport, and crucially, in the quality of
the experience.

And the roll out of super-fast domestic broadband and the ability to work on the inter-city transport network is also making a real difference to the way we organise our lives.

Whether they relate directly to our larger urban centres or they lie more on the periphery, the variation in character and function of our towns is critical to the attractiveness of our cities.

Scotland’s towns also provide a variety of economic conditions, suited to an array of different businesses across sectors that are as diverse as the economy itself.

These towns, which so many of us call home, reflect and shape the character of the population in the city region.

Town squares, and other well-designed and used public spaces, can support cultural and social activities as well as economic transactions. Indeed, a number of our cities could learn lessons from our towns – many city squares do not perform these functions at all well.

There is work under way to ensure Scotland’s cities work together to the benefit of all.

The Scottish Cities Alliance is the collaboration of Scotland’s seven cities and the Scottish Government is working to attract external investment, stimulate economic activity and create jobs and business opportunities.

A strengthened relationship between each city and the towns within its own region will help them develop their individuality – identifying the key, regional characteristics that make them attractive places to invest, to work and to live.