How can the benefits of town centre living support our wellbeing?

It’s easy to think about this in terms of the home itself – whether it’s warm, affordable to heat, energy efficient and well designed. But our health and wellbeing are also shaped by what happens when we step outside our front door.

Where we live. How we travel. Our access to green space and the opportunities we have to connect with others can all make a difference to our physical and mental health.

That’s why town centre living presents such an interesting opportunity.

As Scotland’s towns and cities evolve into more vibrant, mixed-use places, bringing more homes back into the heart of our communities could do much more than increase housing supply. It could help create places that support healthier, more connected and more sustainable lives – closely aligned with the theme of Scottish Housing Day 2026, ‘Healthy Homes - Healthy Futures’.

Of course, town centre living isn’t without its challenges. Increased activity can bring noise, while additional residents can create greater demand for services such as healthcare.

But these challenges can be addressed through good planning and design. Mixed-use neighbourhoods, noise-sensitive building design, improved primary care provision, traffic management and high-quality public spaces can all contribute to creating places that are genuinely liveable.

There is another challenge: how do we properly capture the full value of town centre living?

Until now, proposals have often relied on qualitative descriptions of the health, social and environmental benefits of bringing housing into town centres. While these benefits are widely recognised, they can be difficult to reflect in traditional value-for-money assessments, which tend to focus on direct economic impacts.

This can mean the contribution that wider benefits of town centre housing are not represented or understood when investment decisions are made.

To help address this imbalance, the Scottish Futures Trust has developed a new Impact Appraisal Framework for Town Centre Living.

With support from Dumfries & Galloway Council and South of Scotland Enterprise, the free-to-use Framework provides practitioners with a way to quantify a much wider range of benefits that housing can bring to residents, businesses and visitors.

The Framework is free to use and publicly available from the Scottish Futures Trust website, helping to inform the rationale for investment and better decision making.

The Framework has been tested in three towns – Ayr, Dalkeith and Dumfries – with each exploring a different type and scale of town centre living opportunity.

In Ayr and Dalkeith, the framework was used to understand the impact of specific town centre living projects, while in Dumfries it was used to test impact across a range of vacant buildings and gap sites with capacity for around 400 new homes.

The potential of town centre living is ultimately about more than where we build homes. It is about creating great places where people can live well and where services are accessible and resilient, places where developers want to build and where businesses want to invest.

Good town centre housing can support physical activity, mental wellbeing and social connection, while reducing emissions, supporting local economies and making better use of buildings and infrastructure that are already there.

The Framework gives practitioners a practical way to demonstrate these wider benefits and inform the case for investment.

This Scottish Housing Day, the message is a simple one: healthy homes need healthy places around them.

By understanding and valuing the wider benefits of town centre living, we can help shape inclusive, attractive and sustainable neighbourhoods that support healthier lives – and contribute to the ambition of Healthy Homes, Healthy Futures.

Mhairi Donaghy, Associate Director within the Place, housing and Economic Investment team at the Scottish Futures Trust