Understanding Scottish Places
CLES is excited to be involved in a consortium in partnership with the Scottish Government to create a new toolkit for towns practitioners and communities. The work has been commissioned by the Scottish Government and follows the Trust’s contributions to the Town Centre Review.
The toolkit will function as an online platform called Understanding Scottish Places (USP). It will house a newly developed Scottish towns typology and have an emphasis on enabling users to better understand their town’s function, particularly in relation to the interrelationships and flows between towns. This innovative approach will give users a broad insight into the strengths and weaknesses of their town in its local context, enabling practitioners to build on the town’s existing assets to encourage resilience and growth. USP will also include a benchmarking package, allowing practitioners to assess progress as they implement change.
Crucially, the toolkit will provide accessible visual presentations of information grounded in relevant data which will help practitioners, decision makers and stakeholders work together to better understand the places in which they work, and to plan and evaluate strategies in what are often challenging times for our towns.
The project is a joint venture commissioned by the Scottish Government and created by the USP consortium which involves Carnegie UK Trust, CLES, Towns Alive, Scotland’s Towns Partnership, the University of Stirling and East Renfrewshire Council. The website is due to be launched in December and will be hosted by Scotland’s Towns Partnership. For more information please see the Carnegie project page here.
