THE Karl-Marx-Hof on Vienna’s Heiligenstädter Strasse is hard to miss. Completed in 1930, it stretches for more than a kilometre, rises to six storeys and announces itself with an entrance archway of palace-like scale.

It housed 1,382 working-class families. It was built, quite deliberately, to make a statement: that the quality of homes provided to ordinary people is a measure of the seriousness of a city’s intentions towards them.

Nearly a century later, the Karl-Marx-Hof is fully occupied, well-maintained and well-regarded.

It has outlasted several political regimes, borne witness to tragic and seismic events and any number of fashions in housing policy. This is not sentiment. It is evidence that the decision to build well was also, in the long-run, the economical one.

Vienna has not abandoned this tradition. Around 60 per cent of the city’s residents live in subsidised or municipally-supported homes, managed through Wiener Wohnen or through limited-profit housing associations. The scale is remarkable. But it is the quality, not the quantity, that Edinburgh should dwell on.

These are not anonymous blocks. They are carefully-designed, robustly-built, and, crucially, varied in scale, tenure, and social mix.

This is where Vienna’s model feels particularly resonant in an Edinburgh context.

The city’s housing does not segregate affluence from affordability but deliberately interweaves them, producing neighbourhoods that are socially and architecturally diverse.

Large courtyard blocks sit alongside smaller interventions. Family housing exists beside homes for older residents. Subsidised rents coexist with market units. It is a composition that fosters stability without uniformity.

Such an approach echoes the urban thinking long associated with Patrick Geddes [considered to be the ‘father’ of modern town planning] and later defended by The Cockburn Association, a commitment to preserving a rich mix of scale, use, and social life within the city, particularly in the Old Town.

Geddes understood that cities thrive not through separation but through proximity: of incomes, of generations, of building types. Vienna, in its own way, has operationalised that principle at scale.

A Viennese social housing tenant does not live in an inferior building in an inferior part of the city.

She lives in a well-considered building in a mixed neighbourhood, maintained with the same care extended to everything else.

Buildings that people want to live in, because they are dignified, well-integrated and socially balanced, do not generate the same social or physical repair bills as those that people come to resent.

Good housing is a public good - not a welfare provision, not a residual category for those priced out of the market, but a contribution to the city that will be judged for a 100 years.

Edinburgh’s housing pressures are acute. Tens of thousands are on the waiting list for social rent.

Key workers and young households are being steadily pushed outward. The political response has focused, understandably, on numbers: how many homes, how fast, on which sites.

These are necessary questions. They are not the only ones.

A city that builds large numbers of poorly-designed homes does not thereby solve its housing problem; it defers it while creating new ones.

The record of several post-war and later housing developments in parts of Leith and north Edinburgh offers a quieter but no less telling illustration.

Estates built quickly and cheaply, with limited attention to materials, maintenance, or shared space, have required repeated cycles of repair, retrofit, and, in some cases, partial redevelopment.

They were not structurally unsound in any dramatic sense, but they often proved socially and environmentally fragile, places that could feel neglected rather than cared for.

Cheapness at procurement stage is rarely economy over the life of the building.

Edinburgh’s own housing history is instructive in both directions. The Garden City-influenced cottage layouts at Longstone and Stenhouse produced streets and shared spaces that remain genuinely pleasant nearly a century later.

These were not luxury buildings; they were considered ones.

The system-built estates at Wester Hailes and parts of Craigmillar, where industrialised construction was prioritised over design, produced environments that residents found difficult to inhabit and which the city has spent subsequent decades repairing at considerable public expense.

The flatted development that filled the Western Harbour from the early 2000s suggests the lesson was not fully learned.

Built by private developers in materials chosen for cost rather than durability, it looks poorly after barely 20 years: render stained, details mean, spaces between blocks cheerless.

Nobody has described these buildings as the heritage of tomorrow.

They are exactly what architecture critic, Owen Hatherley, meant - here, in Prospect magazine, in 2017 - when he wrote: “Much contemporary architecture in the city is judged not on what it does, but by what it doesn’t do - if it’s in keeping, if it’s not in the way of any of the sightlines, then wave it through.”

Vienna suggests a different standard is achievable on the same budgets.

At Granton Waterfront, where the city council holds the majority of the land and leads the first development phase, there is an unusual opportunity: to commission housing that reflects what the city actually believes its future residents deserve.

Vienna’s Gemeindebauten are not extravagant - they are carefully-made, humanly-scaled and built for the long-term.

The practical difference between a building worth living in after a century and one deteriorating in 20 years is primarily a matter of priorities.

Craigmillar, where the masterplan is still producing new housing phases, and Leith Fort, where regeneration of the former military site north of the Kirkgate is under way, offer similar openings.

Public bodies are direct commissioners in all of these places. They have a choice that private developers on speculative sites simply do not.

Exercising that choice well requires procurement that rewards quality.

In Scotland, the structure of public procurement too often does the opposite: fee competition continues to favour bids selected on cost rather than design ability or long-term value.

Germany and the Netherlands use paid design competitions for public housing as standard.

The result is visible in the cities.

Scotland has an Architecture and Design Scotland agency, a government architecture policy, and strong placemaking commitments in the National Planning Framework (fourth edition).

It also has a procurement system that makes the realisation of all of this difficult for the practices best equipped to deliver it. These things cannot coexist without consequence.

Several Edinburgh practices have already demonstrated that publicly-commissioned housing in this city can be well-made and worth living in.

What they need is not encouragement or policies or further consultation. They need commissions. That is a political choice, available right now.

James Garry is assistant director of The Cockburn Association.

A version of this article appears on the Association’s website, here - for which, grateful thanks.

Image details: New housing in Craigmillar; copyright Mike Wilson

AT the southern tip of Lyon, in eastern France - where the Rhône and the Saône rivers converge - a peninsula of railway sidings, warehouses and contaminated industrial ground has been transformed into a neighbourhood of 25,000 residents over the past two decades.

The Lyon Confluence project (here) is not primarily a story about what was there before. It is a story about knowing, in advance, what you want a place to become - and having the institutional means to get there.

The Musée des Confluences - by Viennese practice, Coop Himmelblau - makes an architectural statement.

But the project’s real achievement is the coherence of the whole.

The Confluence was designed to become a city quarter - not a collection of individual planning consents that happened to share a postcode.

It achieved this through three things: (1) a co-ordinated masterplan, (2) a public development company - the SPL (Société Publique Locale) - with the authority and long-term mandate to enforce it, and (3) a political will that survived multiple election cycles.

That third element is the hardest to replicate. It is also the most important.

Edinburgh faces versions of this challenge across several sites, simultaneously.

The Granton Waterfront programme - Granton, Newhaven, the northern edge of Leith - is the largest development opportunity the city has faced in generations, with 3,500 homes planned at Granton alone alongside employment uses and a public waterfront on the Firth of Forth.

Shawfair has been under outline permission since 2003 and is only now beginning to feel like a community rather than a construction site.

At Blindwells, in East Lothian, and Winchburgh, in West Lothian, new settlements are taking shape on Edinburgh’s functional edge, housing people who would otherwise have been competing for homes in the city itself.

Growth areas are not peripheral. They are the city in the process of becoming itself - and what they become, Edinburgh will live with for a very long time.

Lyon’s lesson for all of these places is the same: they need a governing idea, held consistently across phases, developers and decades.

Without it, ambition dissolves quietly.

Environmental commitments made at outline stage soften as viability arguments accumulate.

The housing mix promised in the planning statement concentrates into a minimum affordable quota on the least prominent plots. Public realm shrinks. Quality disappears by a thousand small decisions, none of which individually triggers a refusal.

This is not a theoretical risk.

It is what happened at the Western Harbour in Leith.

Here was a site of comparable scale and real opportunity: a former industrial waterfront connected to the historic port, capable of becoming a genuinely mixed urban quarter.

The masterplan existed. The ambitions were stated. But development proceeded piecemeal, driven by speculative developers, in materials - thin render, plastic windows, cheap cladding - that have deteriorated visibly in the coastal climate.

The promised public spaces are inhospitable. The social mix never materialised. A generation of people now lives there and deserve something better.

The contrast with Lyon is institutional before it is architectural.

The SPL could set the terms of development and hold them across 20 years of changing market conditions.

It could select architects through competition rather than simply approving whoever a developer appointed.

It could refuse permission when proposals fell short.

Edinburgh’s planners have some equivalent powers - development frameworks carry real weight when properly enforced - but the willingness to use them has not always matched the stated ambitions.

And the moments when standards erode are usually small enough, individually, to pass without triggering the scrutiny they warrant.

As Professor Miles Glendinning (here) and others have observed (such as here and here), Edinburgh’s planning debates often concentrate on heritage protection - on preventing bad things in sensitive places - rather than on driving quality where heritage constraints are absent.

Growth areas, where the majority of new ‘Edinburghers’ will live, receive a fraction of the attention that a disputed dormer on the Royal Mile can generate.

Lyon also demonstrates something Edinburgh is slow to act on.

The Confluence has not increased pressure on the city’s UNESCO-inscribed historic districts - Vieux-Lyon, the Presqu’île, the Croix-Rousse hillsides.

It has relieved it.

Growth accommodated elsewhere, at genuinely high standards, takes demand off a historic centre that cannot and should not absorb it all.

Investing in quality at Granton is therefore an argument about the World Heritage Site as much as about Granton itself.

A waterfront neighbourhood worth choosing reduces pressure on a centre that is already strained.

At Granton, the council now holds the majority of the developable land - the kind of direct ownership the SPL had.

The Development Framework was adopted in 2021.

First-phase housing is under construction, with architects, Anderson Bell Christie, delivering the Edinburgh Home Demonstrator: a pilot programme for net-zero carbon emissions homes that, if it works, will set a template for the phases that follow.

But the Western Harbour also had a masterplan, a development company and political support.

What it did not have was the sustained institutional discipline to hold to those ambitions, as development dragged across 15 years and two financial cycles.

Granton will take similar time.

The question is simply whether Edinburgh will hold the line for that long. Lyon, over 20 years, did.

James Garry is assistant director of The Cockburn Association

This article is a tweaked version of a column on the Association website, here, for which grateful thanks.

Further reading: on BuildEdinburgh: Another Take on Granton, here.

Image details: Granton; copyright Mike Wilson

CROSSING the Steinerne Brücke in Regensburg - in Bavaria, Germany - the bridge that has carried people across the Danube for nearly nine centuries, the relationship between a city and its own past becomes unexpectedly legible.

The stone façades of the old town rise on either bank - dense, ordered and readable without effort.

The UNESCO inscription (here) came in 2006, but the city’s confidence in its own character long predates any formal recognition.

Regensburg does not need a listing to know what it is.

Edinburgh will understand some of this.

We live in a city of layered history, where the relationship between old and new is rarely simple and never without argument.

The Festival of Europe Scotland, which runs this month, offers an invitation to look outward - not for novelty, but for honest comparison.

Across Europe, cities with histories as complex as our own are grappling with the same pressures: how to grow, how to house people properly and how to expand without eroding what makes them worth living in.

None of this is easy. All of it is possible.

It is in this spirit that The Cockburn Association is contributing to the festival with a focused discussion on one of the most pressing issues facing historic cities today.

‘Homes or homecomings? Managing tourism tensions’ brings together perspectives from across the continent to explore how cities like Edinburgh can balance visitor economies with the needs of residents - addressing questions of housing pressure, short-term lets and the long-term sustainability of living communities.

The event forms part of a wider European conversation about responsible tourism and civic responsibility.

This four-part series explores four cities. The others are Lyon Confluence: what a governing idea looks like and what happens without one; Vienna: on what a city says about itself when it builds homes for ordinary people; and Hammarby Sjöstad: on closing the gap between what plans say and what buildings deliver.

Each offers a specific lesson. Taken together, they put a question to Edinburgh that we have not yet answered convincingly: are we expecting enough from the places we are shaping?

Regensburg is the right place to begin because it resists the most tempting response to a precious historic city, which is to treat it as a museum.

The Old Town is protected, yes - but protection is not confused with stasis.

The city’s ambitions show most clearly not within the historic core, but in the buffer zones and development sites that connect the medieval centre to the wider city. These transitional territories are where planning convictions are really tested.

Here, new development is expected to meet demanding standards.

Scale, materials and urban grain matter.

Architectural competitions are used routinely to select designers on the basis of talent rather than price.

Social mix is taken seriously too: a meaningful proportion of housing in these areas is affordable, ensuring the city remains inhabited by people of different means, not only by those who can afford to live inside a postcard.

Authenticity is not only architectural. It is social.

A city of beautiful empty buildings, inhabited only by the wealthy, has already lost something that no amount of conservation can recover.

Edinburgh knows this tension without having resolved it.

The Old and New Towns - World Heritage Site since 1995 (here) - are under quiet but sustained pressure: tenements converted wholesale into short-term lets, working households displaced from the centre, development proposals contested in the setting of Calton Hill and along the Cowgate.

These are not abstract planning debates. They are questions about who gets to live here and in what.

The more revealing comparison with Regensburg, though, lies not in the historic cores of either city but in what surrounds them.

Edinburgh’s equivalent areas - the edge of the New Town, the hinterland of Leith’s conservation area, sites along Leith Walk and Easter Road - have produced a troubled record.

Small-scale successes, yes: careful infill where individual architects were given the latitude to work well. But too much development that was approved for avoiding the breaking of rules, rather than for achieving anything worth having.

The architecture critic, Owen Hatherley, writing in Prospect magazine, here (in 2017), wrote, in an article headed, ‘The slow ruin of Edinburgh’, that “the pattern has been large-scale disasters and small-scale triumphs”.

Leith Shore - unfussy infill between older buildings - has worked. Much less so the vast Western Harbour, built during the ‘pre-crash’ years with speculative flatted blocks in materials that have worn badly in the North Sea climate.

‘Failures’ do not happen because Edinburgh lacked the skill to do better.

A clue might be found in an article published (here) by The Scotsman newspaper in 2014, where celebrated and highly-decorated local architect, Richard Murphy, was quoted saying that Scotland was “about the worst place in Europe to be an architect” - not for want of talent, but because public procurement selects architects by price.

He is further quoted, as saying: “Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands almost always have design competitions for new buildings – and are not spending ridiculous amounts.”

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The 17 schools built across Edinburgh under Private Finance Initiative contracts illustrate the point.

All were temporarily closed following the collapse of a wall at Oxgangs Primary School in 2016, after inspections revealed widespread structural defects. The episode (reported here, by the BBC) shows how poor procurement, fragmented responsibility and inadequate quality assurance can result in unsafe buildings.

Regensburg’s approach is not impossible to emulate. High expectations, applied consistently, create cumulative quality over time.

The development sites surrounding Edinburgh’s World Heritage core - in Leith, Granton, the Canonmills area north of the New Town - are not peripheral to the heritage argument. They are part of it.

The character of a historic city is shaped by what it adds, not only by what it keeps.

Edinburgh has the talent.

What is too often denied to its best practices is the kind of public commission that a rational procurement system would deliver to them.

Regensburg has decided what it expects of the places that surround its heritage, and it expects it consistently.

That is, stripped back, the whole lesson.

James Garry is assistant director at The Cockburn Association

This is an edited version of article that appeared yesterday, here, on the Association’s website, for which grateful thanks.

Image details: Old Fishmarket Close (a Richard Murphy design, here); copyright Mike Wilson

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THERE are moments in the life of a city when the quieter decisions matter most.

The recent designation of the former Lads’ Institute - at 27–29 Ratcliffe Terrace - as a category C-listed building [as noted here, on BuildEdinburgh] is one such moment.

It may not command the skyline like Edinburgh’s great set pieces, nor draw the crowds of our better-known landmarks, but its value lies elsewhere, in the everyday fabric of the city, and in the lives it once served.

Built between 1906 and 1907, the Institute is a remarkably intact example of an Arts and Crafts building designed with purpose.

Its restrained detailing and careful proportions speak to a period in which architecture was expected not only to endure, but to contribute meaningfully to civic life.

This was not simply a building, it was an idea made solid: a place of education, recreation, and moral improvement for young men at the turn of the 20th century.

Such institutions once formed part of a wider network of social provision across the city, reflecting a belief that the built environment could shape opportunity and aspiration.

Today, few survive in anything like their original form. That this building does is significant.

Historic Environment Scotland’s decision to designate the former Lads’ Institute is important not just because of the building’s external appearance, but because of what survives inside it.

The designation recognises that the interior layout, fixtures, rooms and circulation spaces all help to tell the story of how the building was used, who it served, and why it mattered to its community.

In this case, the interior is not incidental decoration. It is central evidence of the building’s social, educational and communal role.

Historic buildings are often valued for their façades, but their interiors can carry equal, and sometimes greater, significance. Interiors reveal patterns of everyday life, collective activity and social purpose that may not be visible from the street.

Protecting only the exterior risks losing precisely the elements that explain why a place mattered in the first place.

What is equally striking is the strength of public feeling behind its recognition.

The consultation process (here) revealed overwhelming support for listing, with 98 per cent of respondents in favour.

In a city where debates about change can often be polarised, this level of consensus is notable.

It suggests a shared understanding that heritage is not only about grand monuments, but about the places that tell quieter, more local stories.

The timing of this designation is particularly welcome.

In 2025, the then-unlisted building faced a planning application (here, ref: 25/02904/FUL) for its demolition and replacement with purpose-built student accommodation for 66 beds.

That application was refused by the city council’s Development Management sub-committee last October [as noted by BuildEdinburgh, here], with subsequent attempts to pursue demolition separately also unsuccessful.

Strong local representations, alongside input from community councils and heritage organisations, helped highlight the building’s architectural and social value.

In that sense, the listing reflects not only appreciation, but a timely recognition of significance that might otherwise have been lost.

For community stakeholders involved in development or reuse proposals, this designation highlights the importance of having a full understanding of heritage value, not just what is visible externally.

Decisions made on partial information can unintentionally damage or erase nationally- and locally-important assets.

A comprehensive understanding of both exterior and interior significance allows communities to engage more confidently and constructively in planning processes, challenge assumptions that interiors are easily replaceable, and argue for reuse approaches that respect cultural meaning as well as architectural form.

Crucially, recognising interior significance helps reframe heritage as a living community resource, not simply a decorative shell.

It strengthens the case for thoughtful adaptation that retains identity, memory and social value alongside physical fabric.

In doing so, it supports better outcomes for heritage, communities and future use alike.

For [heritage body] The Cockburn Association, this outcome reflects a principle we have long sought to uphold in the face of continuing development pressures: that Edinburgh’s character depends as much on its modest, well-loved buildings as on its internationally recognised icons.

The Lads’ Institute is part of a broader townscape, one that gives texture and continuity to the Southside, and which risks being incrementally eroded if not properly recognised.

Listing does not freeze a building in time, nor should it. Instead, it provides a framework within which change can be managed thoughtfully.

It acknowledges significance while allowing for adaptation, an approach that is essential if historic buildings are to remain part of a living city.

There is also something worth noting about how this decision was reached: the consultation process allowed local voices to be heard, and they were heard clearly.

In an era when engagement can sometimes feel procedural rather than meaningful, this is a reminder that participation still matters, and can shape outcomes.

The recognition of buildings such as this one is rarely accidental; it is often the result of sustained civic awareness, careful scrutiny, and the willingness of individuals and organisations to speak up for places that might otherwise be overlooked.

Edinburgh is often celebrated for its dramatic vistas and historic grandeur. But its true richness lies in the layering of stories, some prominent, others easily overlooked. The former Lads’ Institute is one of those quieter stories, now given the protection and attention it deserves.

And that is something worth marking.

James Garry is assistant director at The Cockburn Association.

A version of this article appeared on the Associations’s website, here - for which grateful thanks.

Image details: copyright Mike Wilson

Three weeks ago, BuildEdinburgh carried an article on 'Woonerf’-style street design (here). Now, James Garry - from The Cockburn Association - offers his own take on designing streets…

A CONSULTATION (here) is now open on what is being described as the ‘North Edinburgh Connections’ project, previously known as NEAT.

Though framed as an ‘active travel’ scheme, it is more consequential than that label suggests.

It will reshape some of north Edinburgh’s most important streets and, with them, the everyday experience of the communities they serve.

The project centres on West Granton Road, Pennywell Road and Ferry Road.

These are key corridors linking established neighbourhoods with an area undergoing significant change, particularly around Granton, where ambitious regeneration plans have been underway for some years.

The proposals include reducing sections of Pennywell Road to one lane in each direction, introducing segregated cycle routes, widening pavements, improving crossings, upgrading bus stops, and adding trees and planting.

Taken together, this represents a substantial reallocation of space: less priority for general traffic, more for walking, wheeling and cycling, and a stated intention to improve the public realm along these routes.

The language of ‘active travel’ is useful shorthand, but it can obscure what is truly at stake.

Streets are not simply corridors for movement.

They are the most immediate and widely shared public spaces in any city.

For decades, many of Edinburgh’s arterial roads have been shaped around vehicle throughput, often at the expense of pedestrian comfort, safety and environmental quality.

North Edinburgh’s main roads are a clear example: wide carriageways, fast-moving traffic and fragmented crossings have created places that feel inhospitable, particularly for those on foot or using mobility aids.

Rebalancing that space is both necessary and overdue.

Safer conditions, cleaner air and more greenery are all outcomes worth pursuing. But the success of this project will depend not on intent alone, but on execution.

Edinburgh’s experience of street redesign over recent years offers some instructive lessons, and not all of them are encouraging.

Cycle routes interrupted at junctions, planting that feels incidental, materials that age poorly, layouts that do not reflect how people actually move through an area: these are not minor imperfections. They erode confidence in the process and limit the long-term value of the investment.

There is a risk that schemes of this kind become standardised exercises, applied uniformly rather than shaped by place.

North Edinburgh is not a blank canvas. It has its own character, formed by its communities, its landscape and its history.

From the post-war housing schemes of Muirhouse and Pennywell to the emerging waterfront at Granton, these corridors carry layers of social and built history that deserve thoughtful integration, not off-the-shelf templates.

If road space is to be reduced and reallocated, the resulting public realm must be of a quality that justifies and sustains that change.

The consultation refers throughout to walking, wheeling and cycling.

That framing matters, but only if it translates into streets that genuinely work for everyone.

Inclusive design must be a non-negotiable standard, not an aspiration.

This means older residents, people with limited mobility, families with prams, and those who rely on vehicles for essential journeys.

Improvements must support women’s safety design principles and encourage active travel, mitigating the nationwide decline.

It means crossings that are safe and convenient rather than merely compliant, surfaces that are consistently usable in all weathers, and routes that are coherent from end to end rather than broken up by compromises at difficult junctions.

It is also important to be candid about the adjustments these changes will bring.

Reducing traffic capacity will affect journey times, deliveries, servicing and parking for some residents and businesses. With financial and wellbeing impacts at stake, interventions need to be carefully thought through, and mitigations put in place to avoid any negative consequences.

At the same time, the current situation is not a neutral baseline.

It already favours vehicle movement over other uses of street space. The question is not whether change is warranted, but whether it is carried through with sufficient skill and care to produce a bespoke and positive community outcome, deserving of Scotland’s capital city.

This consultation offers the chance to ask a broader question about what the city is trying to achieve.

Is the aim to retrofit active travel infrastructure into existing streets?

Or is it to create places that are genuinely attractive, coherent, and built to last?

The distinction matters. Edinburgh’s reputation as a city of quality rests not only on its historic centre, but on the care given to all its neighbourhoods.

North Edinburgh deserves the same standard of attention to detail, innovation and civic spend.

The consultation is the moment when the detail begins to take shape: the positioning of crossings, the treatment of junctions, the continuity of routes, the choice of materials, the placement and species of planting.

These are the elements that will determine whether the scheme succeeds or falls short in practice.

Local knowledge is critical.

Residents and regular users understand how these streets function, where the difficulties lie and what would actually improve matters. Their input should shape not just whether change happens, but exactly how it is delivered.

North Edinburgh Connections has real potential.

It could deliver safer, greener and more usable streets, help reconnect communities and support the area’s continuing transformation.

But potential must be matched by quality of delivery, responsiveness to local experience, and a genuine commitment to treating streets as civic assets rather than engineering problems.

Edinburgh’s future as a liveable city depends on getting these everyday transformations right.

North Edinburgh deserves no less.

James Garry is assistant director at The Cockburn Association

This article first appeared on the website of The Cockburn Association, here, for which grateful thanks.

Image details: Granton; copyright Mike Wilson

After the explanation, three weeks ago (here), as to how Granton might provide a template for future urban regeneration, here’s another take…

IN a parallel universe, you could be admiring the bold architecture that skirts the Oslo Fjord in Norway.

And then you notice the weeds poking up between the paving slabs, the abandoned broken bicycles, the discolou…

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SINCE I arrived in Edinburgh - from the continent, just a couple of months after the Brexit vote (!?) in 2016 - I’ve tried my best to enmesh myself in the city's cultural life and learn to understand it, which isn't always easily done when you move somewhere in your 20s.

Since then, I have sometimes despaired about Edinburgh - wishing there was much more…

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A PROPOSED redesign of George Street may be currently on hold - not least because of an estimated cost of £35m (here) - but the question has to be asked as to why the notion ever gained any amount of traction in the first place.

Is it possible that it was an idea that, once aired, was then deemed politically too embarrassing to abandon?

Meanwhile, is it p…

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AS housing pressures reach breaking point across Edinburgh and south-east Scotland, an ambitious regeneration project at Granton is set to redefine how cities invest in homes, infrastructure and community wellbeing.

With several local authorities in the region declaring housing emergencies, the challenge is urgent.

By 2033, Edinburgh and south-east Scotl…

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EDINBURGH is justifiably proud of what the city offers: a great quality of life, a beautiful ‘green’ environment, good connectivity and a world-renowned natural, cultural and built heritage. It is an enviable place to live.

And its City Plan 2030 aims to keep it that way as the capital continues to expand, with the expectation that new homes will be buil…

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STAND in the heart of Gilmerton - in south-east Edinburgh - and you can still trace the outline of the old village.

Stone cottages line Drum Street. The 18th-century schoolhouse survives. Beneath the streets lie the mysterious hand-carved chambers of Gilmerton Cove.

These are not grand buildings, but they tell a story of a mining settlement absorbed int…

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WHEN it comes to the marketing of new housing developments for sale, it is kind of remarkable how little information is provided.

In almost all cases, it’s usually limited to price and the number of bedrooms. And also floorplans. Plus, location, of course.

While such information is obviously key to our decision-making, there is so much more, besides, that…

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BY any standard, it has to be viewed as something of a social media phenomenon, especially when you consider her X (formerly Twitter) account is about the relatively esoteric subject of architecture.

Says USA-based Alicia Pederson (described as a ‘citizen planner’; she admits to having no formal qualifications): when she launched @UrbanCourtyard (here), …

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AS Edinburgh moves into 2026, the scale and pace of development across the city is becoming increasingly clear.

Dozens of building projects - ranging from housing-led regeneration and infrastructure works to cultural and commercial schemes - are now either planned or underway.

Taken together, they point to a period of significant urban change that will …

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EDINBURGH, like most communities, faces the twin crises of loneliness and lack of affordable housing, affecting both younger and older people.

Housing remains one of the main concerns of younger generations, priced - as they frequently are - out of the housing market.

At the same time, as a recent ARCO (Associated Retirement Community Operators) report (…

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ACROSS Scotland, there are groups of neighbours who have chosen to share their cars with each other - sometimes using nothing more sophisticated than the messaging service, WhatsApp.

However, the large majority of the estimated 21,144-plus Scots who are members of a car sharing scheme (according to the ‘shared transport’ charity, CoMoUK) tend to do so vi…

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IT has been more than two years and the repair work has yet to begin.

On paper, the idea of flat owners coming together to manage the maintenance of their building - as recently considered, here, by the Scottish Law Commission - makes a lot of sense; after all, prevention is likely to be significantly less expensive than cure.

It was three years ago when…

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‘GUERRILLA gardening’ sounds more rebellious than it actually is.

In an urban landscape, such as Edinburgh, there are so many opportunities to grow.

We’ve got allotments (here) - albeit with a very long waitlist - local parks and community gardens.

The corten steel planter in Arthur Street (here, on Google Maps), just off Leith Walk, has become my personal…

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THE Cockburn Association has long championed a city that evolves without erasing its layers.

Brutalism: raw, bold, and born of post-war optimism, tests that ethos like few other styles.

In Scotland, it wasn’t just concrete; it was a blueprint for better lives. Yet, today, as demolition looms for icons like Argyle House (pictured), we are reminded that c…

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THE built environment industry in England, Scotland and Wales is an economic powerhouse hiding in plain sight.

New research by GLA Economics and the London School of Economics – commissioned by NLA – shows that the organisations that plan, fund, design, build and operate our towns and cities generate nearly a quarter of total economic output (£568bn in G…

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