Pat Kane: Urban playgrounds need to reimagine their place in the world

The travel app leads them down dark gothic alleys to a keyboxed doorway. Miraculously, the code works first time, and they stumble into the odd box of a flat, making the best of the idiosyncratic bedding.

But the next morning they’re up, out, and into this wondrous new urban playground ...

... Which happens to be Edinburgh. And, as such, is in something of a crisis about them visiting here in the first place.

Edinburgh City Council’s new 2030 housing plan suggests that “short-term lets” (shorthand itself for owners putting their properties into Airbnb) should be subject to a “control area”, in the city centre at least.

And this is a reaction to the Scottish Government’s proposals last week that short-term lets should be licensed, inspected and taxed – rather than simply flourish below the regulatory radar, making money for opportunist property owners inside Airbnb’s cowboy networks.

Our discreetly tattooed hipster tourists, now carefully sipping and surfing at Brew Lab in South College Street, may well already have come across the local resistance on their devices.

Websites like Reimagining The City (the logo compressed to CTZN, standing for Citizen), or PLACE (Protecting Liveable, Affordable Communities in Edinburgh), are up and flourishing, with thousands joining their platforms and events.

Mike Small, founder of Citizen and Bella Caledonia, makes a typically bold gesture of it. There was an era of Scotland (and its protest culture) that was defined by a certain ratio – 7:84. That’s 7% of the population owning 84% of the wealth (and also the name of the famous 70s-90s radical theatre company).

Small suggests we are facing another iconic ratio: “The annual UK Housing Review shows that in the City of Edinburgh alone there are over 10,000 Airbnbs. With a population of 485,000, that means there is an Airbnb for every 48 people in the city. That compares to a figure of one Airbnb per 105 people in greater London, meaning Scotland’s capital has more than twice as many per head. So 1:48 is the new 7:84.”

There’s another fusillade of stats available – 3548 short-term let houses are unoccupied most of the year round. In the midst of a generally accepted housing crisis, there are 19,791 Edinburgh local authority houses – but also 11,985 Airbnb listings in the same area.

And as our tattooed travellers traipse off to meet their first set of postgrad pals, near the School of Informatics on the university campus, they’re probably frowning a little under a mild weight of guilt.

They deliberately avoided what has already begin to look like a somewhat crass Hogmanay event in Edinburgh – why on earth would they have come from Mitteleuropa to sample a Bavarian beerfest? And the flying-fox Santa (shudder)!

READ MORE: Edinburgh Hogmanay organisers criticised over home passes confusion

But it’s not as if their own national capital – a deeply civil, thoroughly post-communist place – doesn’t also suffer from hordes of affluent-country partygoers, staying in foreign-owned short lets, despoiling and rowdily disrespecting their heritage and neighbourhoods.

The couple tread carefully through the Old Dame’s streets, meeting only pleasant locals, but stepping gingerly over what seems like a surprising number of street sleepers...

“Who is a city like Edinburgh for?” is the question generally being asked in this debate. The social policing, environmental trashing and financial opacity that characterised Underbelly’s production of this year’s Edinburgh’s Hogmanay seems to have breached some boundaries. The new chair of the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group Donald Emslie recently acknowledged they must respond to an “anti-tourism feeling” among the citizens.

Edinburgh Hogmanay seems to have breached some boundaries

YET you couldn’t claim the tumbrels are rolling everywhere. A rumbunctious speech by Marketing Edinburgh’s Gordon Robertson last December wondered what exactly was wrong with the “Disneyfication” of Edinburgh. “At least they’ve invested in their sites, they have a plan, it provides thousands of jobs, their well trained staff provide a fantastic experience and they’re extremely profitable, which is used to invest back into the product ... It’ll never catch on here.”

Is that the fate of the standard historic European capital, under conditions of what has been called “overtourism”? The architectural backdrop of its triumphs, the quirkiness of its development, become a mere stage-set – where fake bonhomie performs for a weary, easily sated tourist gaze?

Mr Robertson’s crassness can be easily shelved. Yet there are various strong, structural and qualitative reasons why Edinburgh’s model – for tourism, accommodation and events – has to change.

One is hard-core environmental. We simply can’t predicate the expansion of an economic sector on the basis of cheaply taken international flights. As one of the most toxic behaviours in terms of carbon emissions, this verges on the ecologically criminal – however much the easyjetters plump up short-term indicators of the city’s economic performance.

This is far from an easy call, on many levels. The mythical hipsters wandering through this piece are living out a dream of Europa – prosaically rooted in various forms of integration, openness and common standards, to be sure.

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But in recent years, inexpensive and plentiful flying has turned that into a genuine popular culture, as well as just an “acquis communautaire”. Indy-minded Scots may still harbour their Eurodreams – but they can’t now be based on the careless jetting to the capitals of our European cousins.

And even when we feel able – or perhaps in some more regulated eco-future, are allowed – to get the dust of Europe on our shoes, what kind of cities do we really want to land in? Shallow and performative urban theme parks? Or nexuses of bustling enterprise, diversity and ambition, who don’t mind if you enjoy them as they do their own thing?

Out of nostalgia a few weeks ago, I found myself downloading the mid-80s Wim Wenders movie Wings Of Desire. Its luminous depiction of Berlin (before the fall of the wall) incited all my old lusts—that I must spend some time in my life rolling around this soulful, grandiose, melancholic city.

But then I read in the last few days about Mike Small’s recent urban activism in Berlin. Since 1989, the city seems to have been trying to profit – by means of privatisation of public space and housing stock – from the romanticised longings of bourgeois bohemians like me.

BUT as what the locals call “rich man’s ghettos” of empty luxury towerblocks spread along one side of the old wall, Mike and his comrades are campaigning for a local referendum that can reverse the expropriation of Berlin’s properties to corporate interests. Legally, they’re even citing Article 15 of the German constitution, which “allows for the socialisation of land and the means of production”.

I’ve also noted that this week, the city of Barcelona – which has been alert to, and willing to act against, overtourism for a number of years – has done the very opposite of a “2030 visitor plan”.

They have instead declared a full climate emergency as a city, and 100 substantial measures – backed up by €563 million of investment.

As you read through their plans for healthy food markets, urban farms, pedestrian-friendly zones and much else, you want to wish this most radical and expansive of cities your very best. What a beautiful experience it might be, at one point in your life, to enjoy their mix of culture, busyness and sustainability.

But for planetary, and for humane reasons, we’ll have to start presuming this isn’t as easy as filling in that open week on your calendar entry and then hitting the tourist apps. Deglobalisation will improve the quality of life where you are – but it will reduce our capacity to sample everyone else’s.

The same must go for Edinburgh. That image of the Princes Street showground this year – a neon excrescence plonked into a civic space, dumb and loud and wasteful – already seems like an out-of-time embarrassment.

Can we start to think of ways Edinburgh can embrace the world sustainably, and in tune with its own quiet, pensive, creative genius? My imaginary hipsters on their cheap flight home, happily arm in arm but thoughtful, would doubtless agree.