EVERY morning I travel by bus up the main artery between Glasgow’s south side and the city centre, passing an area of the city that has been knocked down and rebuilt more times than Beirut.

I talk, of course, of the Gorbals, once a by-word for poverty, deprivation and disastrous public housing policy. These days, however, thanks to some ambitious thinking, it is more used to winning urban planning awards.

And the latest stage of this regeneration, in Laurieston, is perhaps the most ambitious yet, showcasing landmark modern architecture and community-building at its best, with light airy flats, cycle paths and green spaces, all within a stone’s throw of the city centre. It is the epitome of 21st century urban living.

If this was London, these flats would no doubt cost upwards of half a million each and be snapped up by bankers and foreign investors. But this is Glasgow, and as the homes have been built by a consortium of housing associations and private builders, part of a long-term urban improvement plan funded by the council and the Scottish Government, they must be made available to social housing tenants as well as private buyers. Those that are for sale must be affordable - prices started around £80,000, with Government incentives on offer. Shops, business spaces, community spaces and a hotel are also part of the masterplan, as the planners learn the lessons of past mistakes.

Developments like this break the stigma of this painful past and give locals and incomers the chance to rebuild and reinvent communities together. I applaud the authorities for having the vision to tackle generations of poor housing and broken promises; it’s pragmatic too, of course, in that there is now at least a chance of creating a sustainable community out of the sizeable financial investment - much of it public - it represents.

Socially-focused developments like Laurieston are too rarely the norm in our city centres, but if the latest figures showing homes in Scottish cities are at their least affordable since 2009, they clearly need to be.

According to the Bank of Scotland, the average house price in cities rose by nearly 3 per cent last year to £186,000, compared to a rise of just 1 per cent outside of them. The result of this has been that average city home affordability worsened for the fourth year in a row, going from 5.2 to 5.3 times gross average earnings.

This is particularly bad news for young people, of course, straddled as they so often are with student debt, low starting salaries and zero-hour contracts, at the mercy of greedy and unreliable private landlords.

Don’t get me wrong, this 5.3 ratio would no doubt seem wonderfully affordable to Londoners, where homes costs, on average, an eye-watering14 times average earnings. But we shouldn’t get smug when the reality is that crippling unaffordability already means many Scots have little chance of ever owning a home in large swathes of the country, including Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee.

If we want our cities to thrive in the longer term, we need them to be populated by people who want to put down roots and feel invested in the communities in which they live, whether they were born here in Scotland or on the other side of the world. We also need them to start businesses and employ people, to come up with creative ideas that will diversify our economy and, in turn, encourage others to come and do the same. They cannot do this if housing costs are prohibitive.

Laurieston isn’t finished yet, and will no doubt take many more years of building, both physically and in terms of community cohesion, to make it a long-term economic and social success. But it at least provides a tangible and inspiring model for affordable, responsible urban development.