The conversation around a vision for the capital city has begun with the publication of the Sustainable Cities Index 2016 by Arcadis. You can read the whole report at the end of this article, but the basis of the report is People, Planet and Profit. Clearly the report is deserving of a lot more reading than we have yet had time to devote to it, and we hope you will let us know what you think of it.
The report explains that these three criteria will demonstrate social, environmental and economic sustainability and are a good place to start in assessing what the city is like now.
They do not appear to explain why they chose the 100 cities, except that their coverage has increased from the 50 prominent cities they studied previously, to the 100 chosen now ‘both developed and emerging, around the world’.
The purpose of Edinburgh 2050 is to set out a vision for what Edinburgh might look like at that time. That might mean that everyone walks everywhere, it might mean that development of new buildings is dealt with differently. It could mean that there is less or no inequality among people living here, it might mean that poverty is no more. Â It all rather depends on your perspective and what matters to you.
The City of Edinburgh Council has started the conversation and is keen that you register and have your say. The edinburgh.org website has been taken back from VisitScotland who were using it for a time, and is being used for this and Marketing Edinburgh’s other projects in selling the city to the world.
But the council will not be formulating the vision. You and others like you will. So make sure you have your say here.
Green Group Councillor Gavin Corbett has had his say on his blog here. He has written about the whole basis of the sustainability study by Arcadis which he condemns.
He questions the fact that Edinburgh has been ranked 13th out of the top 100 sustainable cities and explains that the term sustainability has to be examined more carefully. His argument is that the profit element of the Arcadis equation skews the city’s ranking.
He explains that Edinburgh would not have scored so highly if more or different cities had been chosen, or chosen on the true interpretation of the word sustainability.
But Arcadis have used profit as one of the three principles on which their report is written, and they have chosen cities from around the world both developing and emerging. In truth we are not worried about what is happening elsewhere except in so far as we can learn from it. What we are really interested in is what Edinburgh is and what it can become.
It will be a melting pot of ideas at the very least!
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Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
