Edinburgh: a sustainable city?

Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, is unique in that it has establish ed the Lord Provost's Commission on Sustainable Development to advise on th e ways in which the city can contribute to sustainable development. This pa per briefly considers the sustenance space and the problems of unsustainabi lity for cities. Section two then describes the growth of Edinburgh and emp hasises weak and strong measures of sustainability for cities. The third se ction then considers some of the problems of unsustainability faced by the citizens of Edinburgh. Some of these problems are bequeathed by earlier per iods of urban development and others are contemporary in nature. These prob lems include social exclusion and poverty; economic development problems as sociated with housing, employment and related transport congestion and land uses; and ecological problems concerned with maintaining natural capital a nd human capital in a changing urban milieu. Whilst many of the social, eco nomic and ecological problems are specific to Edinburgh, they are also comm on to other cities in Western Europe. Section four describes some of the ne w ways in which these problems are being addressed under the tutelage of th e Lord Provost's Commission on Sustainable Development in an attempt to mak e Edinburgh an exemplar of sustainable urban development. Finally, on the b asis of this description, some of the lessons learned from this attempt to make a capital city sustainable will be critically discussed with recommend ations for further development of programmes to manage Edinburgh as a susta inable city.