THREE EVENTS, MANY MISGIVINGS
City of Edinburgh Council has announced times and venues for further consultation on the future design of Picardy Place.
‘Stakeholders’ will attend (by invitation only) an event in the City Chambers on 20 November.
Members of the public can go along to either an event at the City Art Centre on 21 November (10am–7pm) or another at Broughton St Mary’s Church in Bellevue Crescent on 22 November (3pm–7pm).
According to a Council press release issued yesterday, attendees will be able to ‘submit opinions on designs and hear from the Council on how plans have evolved since their inception’.
They will also be shown refinements made to the plan since the derisory consultations held in September. These will apparently include increased provision for pedestrians and cyclists.
‘Views will also be sought on the piece of land at the top of Leith Walk, where a roundabout currently sits. Feedback will be used to inform the final designs, which are expected to be discussed by the Transport and Environment Committee at the beginning of next year.’
We understand that the events will seek to explain how we come to be here. The design principles and transport layout which have evolved based on feedback since 2006, and the Place Development principles approved by Council in 2009 will form part of this explanation. So too will the alternative options (and their impacts) which have been considered.
We can also expect limited clarification of the contractual commitments in place for the proposed road layout.
Pig in a poke?
Some consultation is certainly better than none at all, and we would urge everyone to go along and take part.
But what’s on offer is still far too little too late and too vague. Saying ‘views will inform the final designs’ is not the same as saying ‘views will affect the final designs’.
The public events do not appear to involve the kind of painstaking discussion stakeholders have been asking for, involving prior access to the detailed blueprints and measured face-to-face discussion over time with the relevant experts.
Despite calls from many quarters for clarification, it remains obscure to what extent further changes can be made, and so to what extent any feedback is genuinely useful.
We have seen no guarantees about how public responses will be noted for the record and responded to.
Flabbergasted
No wonder, then, that so many are flabbergasted that the Council can invest in such a careful, publicly accountable reassessment for George Street (Issue 268) while still appearing to hurry through Picardy Place plans which just about nobody likes or admires. The huge response to a counter-proposal published by Spurtle on 13 October shows that there is a public appetite for something altogether friendlier.
Unfortunately, there is a growing sense that for all these fig-leaf consultations, the project has taken on a momentum and direction of its own. There are misgivings that it is now driven in general by the obscure terms of the GAM deal between CEC, developers and the Scottish Government, and in particular by Council anxiety over potential extra costs.
We argue that if the terms of the deal cannot deliver a decent public space for the city, then the deal will have to be renegotiated.
Given all these problems and concerns, it is perhaps not surprising that there were calls from members of the public at Monday’s New Town & Broughton Community Council for stronger political leadership over Picardy Place and the reining-in of officials.
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