This multi-authored volume is a social and urban history of the six new towns designated in Scotland after World War II. It sets out to answer three main questions. What was the contribution of new towns to the post-war project to build a modern Scotland? What did innovations in planning and design look like? And how did people get on there? Building Modern Scotland is a book of two halves: ‘Architecture’ and ‘Life’. The first deals with policy, planning and provision while the second interrogates oral history interviews with multiple generations of new town residents over an extended timeframe which ends with reorganization and devolution in the 1990s. If the structure juxtaposes ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ investigative approaches, then some of the most valuable insights are found in the join, particularly between the citizen and the welfare state, between individualism and communitarianism and between people and their built environment.

After a contextual introduction which sets out the emergence of the Scottish new towns from a legacy of planned urbanism and inter-war policies of regional planning, economic development and decentralization, part one, written by Kat Breen, Diane Watters and Alistair Fair, with contributions by Miles Glendinning, charts the development of planning and design approaches. These range from the self-contained, neighbourhood-based layouts of East Kilbride (1947) and Glenrothes (1948) to the compact, high-density housing and megastructural town centre of Cumbernauld (1955) and to the flexibility mobility and polycentricity which characterize Livingston (1962) and Irvine (1966). The curious blip of Stonehouse (1973), the last new town designation in the UK and – just three years later – the first to be wound up, is not afforded a chapter here, instead forming the subject of a companion article by Alistair Fair in this journal.

The second half of the book, by Lynn Abrams and Valerie Wright, is based on a close reading of life story interviews alongside written sources to examine residents’ perspectives and identities. A series of overlapping topics – homes, families, community and opportunity – frame topics such as changes in family structure, gender roles and new forms of social relations. By foregrounding individual agency and self-determination, the authors offer a corrective to official accounts in which citizens are treated as passive, fluid subjects (as suggested by the lexicon of ‘overspill’ and ‘decanting’). Accounts of intergenerational aspiration and opportunity are presented not as evidence for the loosening of social bonds but in terms of a reciprocal relationship between personal betterment and collective progress, contributing to a growing literature on the nature of community after 1945.

As its title makes clear, Building Modern Scotland places new towns at the centre of Scotland’s nation-building project. Its conclusion explores the inherent contradictions of places that simultaneously enjoyed the status of prototype or exemplar whilst serving as paradigms of the post-war social democratic settlement. Wider contexts are kept within view: Scotland built new communities other than the six designations, including towns implemented by the Scottish Special Housing Association and town expansion schemes. And late twentieth-century developments, such as the discovery of North Sea oil and the shift of attention back to inner-city regeneration, took Scotland’s modernizing agenda in very different directions. Three decades on from de-designation, the new towns have shed some of their early distinctiveness, undergoing the same processes of remaking (and lack of investment) as any ‘ordinary’ town. Yet, they remain special places; no two are alike. Multiple reasons could be put forward to explain why relatively few elements of the UK’s new towns have been singled out for statutory designation, but amongst them would be the compatibility of accommodating pieces of urban infrastructure within a value framework predicated upon individual monuments and – in the case of conservation areas – notions of townscape ‘character’.

Building Modern Scotland is an ambitious and far-reaching study which engages with recent thinking on modernization, community and the welfare state without losing sight of the particularities of place and voice. Articulate, accessible and deftly edited by Alistair Fair, the book introduces an array of theoretical and methodological frameworks with scant recourse to jargon. It is generously illustrated with a mixture of archival images and plans (there are relatively few contemporary photographs). Amid the partial renewal of Glenrothes, Cumbernauld and Irving (and talk of new planned settlements for England), Building Modern Scotland offers a timely and considered insight into the contribution of the new towns to the making of a modern Scotland.