YOU YOU can almost hear the groans of disbelief that yet another master-planning exercise has been announced for the Waterfront of north Edinburgh (writes ROSS McEWAN).
Like buses, they tend to come in clusters. At least buses have a destination!
Not that anyone should be fooled by the terminology. The master-planning that is routinely announced for places such as north Edinburgh, tends to be ‘motherhood and apple pie’, sprinkled with a pinch of what might pass as radical thinking – usually applied for effect, until it is later realised that nothing of the sort is ever likely to happen.
Call it broken promises; dashed expectations. 15 years of nothingness for the community.
It sounds just so ‘comprehensive’, this word, ‘master-planning’. Except that, in my experience, it is anything but.
For ‘master-planning’ to be truly effective, you need to engage with every person, every inch and identify the community NEED.
That’s what colleagues and myself sought to do when, in 2015, we embarked on an exercise that many readers will have had direct experience of.
We were a not-for-profit social enterprise called the Granton Improvement Society, funded by the Scottish Government and also the Development Trust Association Scotland to undertake an ‘asset-mapping exercise’.
Our remit covered the area of land from Wardie, in the east, to Muirhouse, in the west, and from the waterfront as far south as Ferry Road.
It involved creating a map identifying every physical building. But it wasn’t just about the tangible assets of the place; we noted every community group, every activist, every place and tried to find the intangible assets. NEED was at its very heart.
But what is important to remember, is just how detailed our investigation was. You shouldn’t call it community engagement unless you have made every possible effort to speak to as many as possible, face to face.
You tend not to find that in standard-issue master-planning, which tends to engage at the level of public meeting (to which everyone is welcome, but invariably will not attend), which is simply not down and dirty enough.
What is on offer now is exactly the same old call to attend at x, y, and z. No effort other than a few emails to the usual suspects, a poster here and there and an online announcement. Lazy!
The disappointment is that the work undertaken by the Granton Improvement Society – to be later renamed 4CDT – appears to count for very little – if nothing – in the current version of seeking to masterplan north Edinburgh. Why?
We had accumulated an intimate knowledge of what was needed and what people were already saying, but – for reasons best known to the powers that be – weren’t invited to revisit our work.
Out of master-planning there often emerges blandness. That’s partly because the thinking underpinning conventional master-planning tends to be in large brushstrokes. A road here, a primary school and a few ‘affordable’ house there and so forth, a common formula in UK master-planning.
If you examine many of the most successful new urban areas especially in northern Europe – aesthetically, as well as socially – they have a huge degree of informality in both creativity and governance. Just remember what we are talking about here in size is almost a new New Town for Edinburgh.
How can you design that ‘informality’? It takes a lot of effort. It takes too an artistic hand and mind. not drawings generated from a computer.
That’s often THE problem with masterplans: they are spewed out of computers.
People matter. Need matters.
Ross McEwan is an urban designer.
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