Understanding Scottish Places helps you to better understand and compare the places where you work and live.
Organise
We organise all of the places in Scotland with populations higher than 1000 into a typology.
Visualise
We visualise how different towns inter-relate and how they depend on others around them for different services and functions.
Audit
We also offer the USP Your Town Audit which can help you with the collection of local data to understand even more about your towns.
"The Scottish Government has been closely involved in the creation of this new version of Understanding Scottish Places. I'm delighted it's now available for use by all those who work to improve Scotland's towns."
Kevin Stewart MSP
"The tool is for anyone involved in improving their town - local authority economic and planning teams, town centre partnerships, development trusts, traders' associations or business improvement districts."
Jennifer Wallace, Carnegie UK Trust
"Users are invited to interact with the data in order to compare and contrast their town with others providing useful insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each place and how these relate to other towns."
Leigh Sparks, University of Stirling
"Understanding Scottish Places is an evolving tool that makes the most of data to inspire better decisions for our towns."
Phil Prentice, Scotland's Towns Partnership