RESIDENTS of Cumbernauld are well used to the de haut en bas sneering of the Scottish commentariat typified by Andrew McKie's selective account of the town in which they live ("The brutal truth about towns like Cumbernauld", The Herald, March 4).

Setting aside his wrong-headed understanding of Gregory's Girl (in fact a love letter to the things that create home, wherever we are), Andrew McKie will, I trust, forgive those of us who view with some scepticism the romance of incremental urban development against which he contrasts the fortunes of Cumbernauld.

It was precisely from these spontaneous and unplanned urban histories, with their overcrowding, squalor and rat-infestations, that our parents fled some 50 years ago, seeking a better place to live and raise their families.

Those of us who have retained our commitment to Cumbernauld, and the optimistic new town ideals of environment and community with which they faces the pervasive challenges of post-industrial Scotland, have few lifestyle lessons to learn from Craig Ferguson and still fewer cultural insights to absorb from Andrew McKie.

Professor Robert A Davis,

17 Meadow View,

Cumbernauld.

UNFORTUNATELY Andrew McKie's article appears to recycle old arguments about new towns and planners which are based on approaches taken more than 60 years ago.

The combined population of the five new towns of Scotland is around 250,000 people and, if taken together, they would equate to the third-largest town in Scotland behind Glasgow and Edinburgh. I suspect that the levels of fondness for home among the majority of residents of these towns is no greater and no less than anywhere else in Scotland. As someone who was brought up in Cumbernauld, I can say that the town was a good place to grow up in. It is not perfect, but it should not be demonised.

And can we please move on from peddling myths that planning continues to work in the same way as in the 1950s and 1960s? You have to think about the time when the new towns were built, where there was pressing demand for post-war new housing, and where a range of professions, not just planning, developed approaches they felt would help to meet these needs.

The system and the people involved have changed markedly since then, with planning now a much more inclusive activity where planners work hand in hand with communities, investors and developers to agree a future for places.

It is a shame that Andrew McKie resorted to cliché and myth. The planning profession is at present debating how best to ensure that we have the right approaches, skills and resources to ensure that we help to create great places for people to live in.

Craig McLaren,

National Director, Royal Town Planning Institute Scotland,

18 Atholl Crescent, Edinburgh.

ANDREW McKie's article skates haphazardly over the surface of a huge and complex issue.

Love them or loathe them, the UK new towns were a product of their time that responded effectively to the pressing issues of the day, including the desperate requirement to replace private sector slums with houses fit for human habitation, coupled with an urgent need to stop the deaths of thousands from the likes of tuberculosis and polio. Life was generally much tougher and shorter in the slums of post-war Britain than for any of our current batch of new town residents and without state intervention these slums would still be with us today.

As for the new towns' current problems I am not about to defend the highly dubious aesthetic appeal of Cumbernauld town centre. However, I am also not about to apologise for the good intentions of the people employed at that time to make ordinary people's lives better. Perhaps, in hindsight, the planners of the day were wrong to assume the continuation of a civilised society when they and the many others involved who designed and built the new towns, including the underpasses that have saved far more lives than those lost to gangs of rampaging muggers. Perhaps they also assumed that people would have employment opportunities or have viable alternatives to drink and drug addiction. Then again, who could have predicted the wanton destruction of our industrial base by successive governments since the Second World War?

The new towns have been hugely successful in not only providing thousands of new homes and much modern business space but also in paying back all their outstanding loans, sometimes several times over, while also producing handsome capital receipts for the UK Treasury.

Unfortunately, this fiscal and physical success has led to successive UK governments severely restricting the reinvestment of monies raised in these communities. Matters have been exacerbated by excluding new towns in subsequent rounds of urban regeneration programmes. Hence the crumbling, inadequate and out-of-date infrastructures we find ourselves faced with today, made worse by the ongoing economic situation.

Andrew McKie's concluding proposition that the state-free, residents-led approach to planning produces enriching places where people want to live is based on the flawed understanding that the free market can meet the basic needs of the many.

Fergus Murray, 73 Argyll Street, Lochgilphead.