ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the importance of understanding a city's connections as well as its boundaries. It explores how cities and city policy manifest in terms of the relationships between Westminster and Holy rood, as well as from Holy rood to Scotland's major city-regions. Cities and towns have been the key terrain shaping, and reflecting, Scotland's economic progress for at least 250 years. Policies for Scotland's cities have shifted over time, however the broad thrusts of policies, the framework of core ideas, and the chosen institutions and policy instruments have longer lives. The evolution of Scottish policies for cities was very different and much weaker. Scottish economic and social policy progressed from 1950 for a quarter-century without any explicit commitment to cities policies. In the 1960s the development of the North Sea energy sector turned Aberdeen from a gently declining economy into a major growth locus.
