Alf Young: Is it lights out in dormitory towns?

AS YOU read this, my son Jamie and I are making our way to Dingwall.

It's the opening Saturday of the Scottish Football League season and my home-town team, Greenock Morton, are away to Ross County, opponents we've struggled to get the better of in recent seasons. Hope springs eternal.

What follows, I hasten to add, isn't about the occasional highs or more frequent lows of a being fan from the lower divisions of Scottish football.

Apart from the damage that inflicts on your pride and your finger nails, following your team, home and away, takes you to almost every corner of Scotland. There are only two grounds I've yet to set foot in - Pittodrie in Aberdeen and Galabank, home to Annan Athletic. Along the way I've spent many a Saturday in towns, large and small, all over Scotland.

Season after season, it's been an opportunity to gauge how a great swathe of urban Scotland is coping with its post-industrial destiny. A chance to assess what marks - good and bad - successive swings in the economic cycle have left on those diverse communities where most Scots live.

There are occasional city breaks. We go to Dundee and to Firhill in Glasgow. But my football journey has mainly been from town to town, from Stranraer to Brechin, from Peterhead to Berwick, from Methil to Dumbarton. Watching my team in victory and in defeat. Observing, all the while, how towns like Elgin and Cowdenbeath are performing in a much more serious game.

It's one where success isn't measured by how many times a ball hits the back of a net. One where what counts is whether jobs and life chances can be sustained, whether a decent quality of life and a vibrant community spirit can survive the loss of a town's historic reasons for being. Not the beautiful game. Rather the bewildering challenge of securing collective economic wellbeing, when the rules of this game appear to have changed utterly.

Last Saturday I was in Alloa for a cup tie. I arrived early so I could wander round the town centre again. They are putting the finishing touches to a new campus for Forth Valley College. But a town that in the last century boasted nine major breweries, whose port once exported many Scottish-made goods to mainland Europe, is now besieged by supermarkets.

Morrisons dominates its eastern approaches. In the centre Tesco and Asda scowl at each other across the by-pass. All this in a town of less than 20,000 people. Alloa's last big brewer, Maclays, stopped producing in 1999.I remember it fondly, squeezing my way from its pitch pine grain hoppers, in and out of a warren of old buildings housing the mash tun and other processes, through to final bottling.

All that's survived the demolisher's hammer is now a cheery pub restaurant. New panel railings in front of a modern block of flats tell the story of the old Thistle Brewery. There's still a big glass works to the west. And since 2004 there's been a new brewery in Alloa too, a modern microbrewery where the Williams brothers produce a range of ales, including Fraoch, the heather ale.

But Alloa, like many of the towns I visit each season, appears deeply uncertain about what happens to it next. It seems far removed from Ludlow, the first community featured in Nicholas Crane's new BBC/OpenUniversity series about the evolution of towns and what the future holds for them.

Crane believes towns, the original building blocks of civilisation, will become the communities most of us will want to live in in future. He urges us all to fall back in love with the places that first quickened our ancestors' pulses. It's easy to see why people fall in love with Ludlow, capital of the Welsh Marches in South Shropshire. John Betjeman called it the loveliest town in England.

Built around a medieval castle on the River Teme, this thriving market town boasts more than 500 listed buildings, a host of independent retailers and two Michelin-starred restaurants. When Tesco came to town, the store was only built when plans were adapted architecturally to what an assertive local community wanted, not the other way round.

In their search for a viable future, Scotland's post-industrial towns don't even have the policy makers on their side. The prevailing consensus in current economic development thinking is that cities will be the dominant hubs for generating future growth. So, this logic inexorably concludes, that's where the lion's share of public initiative and public investment must be directed.

It's already happening. Just as east London is the main beneficiary of the eye-watering 9bn being spent on new year's Olympics, so east Glasgow is getting by far the biggest share of Scottish government regeneration spending, to help it host the 2014 Commonwealth Games. The new Forth Crossing is all about buttressing Edinburgh's role as Scotland's financial services capital.

For many decades after the Second World War, a major objective of Scottish economic development strategy was to create a series of brand new towns, places where people could escape the city slums, live in modern homes and find rewarding work within these same communities. Only Prince Charles tries to build new towns now.

Meanwhile, what happens to our old industrial towns - the ones I visit every other Saturday - is that they are pushed more and more to the margins of policy making. The Scottish Government now has a minister for cities. It has no minister for towns.Towns have been shorn of many of the industries that first shaped them. Many of their high streets are under threat from proliferating supermarket capacity and online shopping. So consumption isn't going to save them either.

What will? If they have any of Ludlow's characteristics, they can try to become a visitor attraction. But without a significant change in prevailing thinking, many of these towns are destined to become little more than overspill dormitories, sending their daily quota of workers to the nearest city hub. Good to see that Alloa has had its rail link to Stirling and Glasgow restored then.

No doubt there will still be some emphasis on making those towns attractive places to live and bring up families. Another round of town centre regeneration funding perhaps?

But making them more attractive is easier said than done if Scotland's cities are increasingly favoured as the primary engines of economic growth while our towns are discouraged from seeing themselves as anything more than satellite dormitories.

It's a policy choice that doesn't appear in any party manifesto. Many policy makers avoid being too explicit it's even been made. Collectively, many more people live in towns than live in Scotland's cities. Don't they all at least deserve an open debate about whether it's the right choice for Scotland?