City-visions: Visioning and delivering Scotland's economic future

The theme of this paper is the current practice of vision and visioning in land use planning in Scotland. The recent allocation of £90 million as part of the Building Better Cities Growth Fund required Scotland's six principal cities to prepare a city-vision. This was based on the perceived necessity of shared visions in providing a clear framework to guide development. The paper examines the contested concepts of visions and visioning and asks whether the prescriptive approach to the city-visions provides for inspirational or aspirational visions.