ABSTRACT
Small town revival has begun to reverse a long drift from country to city. If this trend continues, then city domination would be broken and a new urban future would have begun. Only a minute proportion, 0.7 per cent, of Scotland’s houses was built before 1851. Two-thirds have been built since 1919, the majority being local authority houses. The result could well be a sad city with an ageing, under skilled workforce, an obsolete industrial structure, a housing stock unattractive to incomers, much of the inner city lying as urban fallow, and human problems such as vandalism, all fostered by the crash programmes of the 1950s and 1960s. Edinburgh has embarked on a major programme of conservation. A great deal of effort has been expended by the town council, but so far the majority of Conservation Areas have been designated, not in the old town, but in peripheral residential areas.
