About Understanding Scottish Places
The Understanding Scottish Places platform was commissioned by the Scottish Government and was launched in April 2015. A comprehensive update to the tool, USP 2, was launched in January 2017. A second updates was then inveiled in November 2018. It offers a mechanism for understanding the similarity of places across Scotland. Deliberately designed to avoid a simplistic ranking of places as better or worse, USP focuses on the shared characteristics of towns.
The platform is formed of three parts. The first two elements have been created using national data sets – a new typology of Scottish towns, and an assessment of towns’ inter-relationships. The third part of the platform is the USP Your Town Audit, which is designed to help users gather local information which complements the national data available through USP.
