Placemaking in post-devolution Scotland: The gap between aspiration and implementation

This paper investigates the framing and implementation of a distinct placemaking agenda that emerged in Scotland after devolution. Developed over a period of some twenty-five years, Scotland’s placemaking agenda is often upheld for its ambitious commitment to ‘design value’ and pursuit of social and environmental policy goals. Despite this, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of the agenda and its implementation. This paper’s originality lies in its comprehensive response to this gap, which it addresses in two ways using a rigorous methodology combining primary interview and survey data, archival research, and direct observations of the built environment. First, we trace the evolution of Scotland’s post-devolution planning and urban design policies and highlight their relative divergence from those in the other nations of the UK. Second, we examine the implementation of the placemaking agenda on-the-ground in a series of housing development case studies. From this analysis, we demonstrate that a distinct and progressive commitment to placemaking has emerged in Scotland post-devolution but reveal that implementation has struggled to keep up. We argue that a series of stubborn barriers to implementation have prevented the full realisation of Scotland’s placemaking agenda. Through a fine-grained focus on the cultures of design governance practice that facilitate delivery, we contend that these deeply engrained barriers cannot be addressed by policy change alone, and require a more substantial rethink of Scotland’s placemaking practice. The conclusions are of theoretical and practical significance for understanding the context-dependent cultures of implementation within which design governance and placemaking occur.