Edinburgh: a sustainable city?

SUMMARY

Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, is unique in that it has established the Lord Provost's Commission on Sustainable Development to advise on the ways in which the city can contribute to sustainable development. This paper briefly considers the sustenance space and the problems of unsustainability for cities. Section two then describes the growth of Edinburgh and emphasises weak and strong measures of sustainability for cities. The third section then considers some of the problems of unsustainability faced by the citizens of Edinburgh. Some of these problems are bequeathed by earlier periods of urban development and others are contemporary in nature. These problems include social exclusion and poverty; economic development problems associated with housing, employment and related transport congestion and land uses; and ecological problems concerned with maintaining natural capital and human capital in a changing urban milieu. Whilst many of the social, economic and ecological problems are specific to Edinburgh, they are also common to other cities in Western Europe. Section four describes some of the new ways in which these problems are being addressed under the tutelage of the Lord Provost's Commission on Sustainable Development in an attempt to make Edinburgh an exemplar of sustainable urban development. Finally, on the basis of this description, some of the lessons learned from this attempt to make a capital city sustainable will be critically discussed with recommendations for further development of programmes to manage Edinburgh as a sustainable city.

Key words:

• sustainable development
• urban environmental problems
• policies
• governance