Stimulating economic growth in silos results in missed opportunities.

Fiona Barbour, Mott MacDonald

I came to Edinburgh University over 20 years ago, quickly grew to love the city and have never left the area. As a local I very much enjoy those aspects that attract tourists; the beauty of the city, the Festival and Fringe and, in my younger days, the Hogmanay street party. Recently business has boomed, with the tourism sector generating a combined turnover of ￡7bn in 2017, employing 211,000 people (12 per cent of Scotland’s workforce) and contributing ￡3.8bn in Gross Value Added (GVA) terms. Due to this I support the changes that support a growing tourist economy such as the introduction of trams and now the upgrading of Waverley station which serve both tourists and commuters like myself. I have always thought that any costs, such as clean-up required after the visitors have left, are outweighed by the benefits of the money generated from tourism.

However, I am becoming increasingly aware that there are other costs to prioritising tourists’ needs. Is it becoming increasingly difficult to live and build communities within the city centre when so many properties are used for holiday lets. Figures compiled by the Scottish Green Party suggest there are now 6,200 flats available for short stay letting in Edinburgh, with the owner not being present in 66% of these. Imagine if you lived in a tenement where the majority of other flats were open to those coming and going on holiday? This could mean hundreds of people each year being given the key to your street access door, your garden space, hallways or other internal shared spaces. With very few permanent neighbours, where is your community?

This is just one example of where national and local government policies must consider cities more holistically, decisions to encourage tourism cannot be made in silos. We need to understand how encouraging particular types of economic growth may have an impact on other aspirations for a city. These systems all impact on each other so we need to understand all the links via ‘systems thinking’ to make sure we don’t end up with unexpected consequences, like the loss of housing to short stay lets, which are too hard to unravel after the fact. The opportunity to develop communities is lost.

Systems thinking for infrastructure was introduced in the 2017 update to “Doing it Differently: Systems for rethinking infrastructure, David Blockley, Patrick Godfrey, ICE Publishing”. The concepts are only just permeating the industry and are new to many. Just as the industry gets a handle on the fact that we need to understand these systems and their dependencies, the systems are changing.

As we are, hopefully, coming out of the “lockdown” phase of the COVID pandemic many people are reassessing their lifestyle. Working from home has become increasingly seen as viable and people are considering moving out of cities with the view of commuting in only a few days a week. What will that mean for a city centre? All we do know is that it will mean change. The City of London became a ghost town during lockdown because nobody lives there; do we want the same for Edinburgh? It could become a sort of historical “theme park” with, lots of people still visiting, but we would lose a lot.

Will businesses dependant on city centre workers decline, or adapt into something else? Will more amenities pop up nearer where people live providing the “20-minute city” for everyone, including those in rapid housing growth areas such as Dunfermline East Expansion (less than 30 minutes from the centre of Edinburgh) where I live. 

There are many possibilities for how we are going to recover and another hard recession would be bad for all, so we need to focus on promoting growth. We have an opportunity in these rapidly changing times to mould the future direction to greater benefit to all communities. To maximise these opportunities we need to understand the new systems, and then keep updating our understanding as they change. We need to be adaptable with policies and infrastructure designs to flex with this change.

The complexity of these dynamics can seem overwhelming, but it is worth developing the connected thinking required to realise the opportunity we have to building a better society .