Increasingly, Government and local authorities are putting ‘place’ at the centre of their policymaking.  In Scotland, the Scottish Government along with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) has adopted the ‘Place Principle’ to underpin their policies.

This paper explores how this principle has been applied in recent Scottish Government legislation on Community Empowerment and on Planning services.  The first of these requires the establishment of community planning partnerships in each local authority area to drive service innovation to better meet the needs of places and neighbourhoods and create successful places.  The revised planning arrangements, concerned with land use and development are to focus on similar place-based planning.

The eBook is concerned with how communities of place are represented in the new structures, the extent to which the processes empower communities,  and considers how public authorities are operationalising ‘place’ in a context in which there is continuing debate about the concepts of ‘ place’ and ‘placeness’.

John Tibbitt