A City That Knows How to Grow Well Regensburg: on heritage, growth, and the pressure to insist on quality

Crossing the Steinerne Brücke in Regensburg, the bridge that has carried people across the Danube for nearly nine centuries, the relationship between a city and its own past becomes unexpectedly legible. The stone façades of the old town rise on either bank — dense, ordered, readable without effort. The UNESCO inscription came in 2006, but the city’s confidence in its own character long predates any formal recognition. Regensburg does not need a listing to know what it is.

Edinburgh will understand some of this. We live in a city of layered history, where the relationship between old and new is rarely simple and never without argument. The Festival of Europe Scotland, which runs this month, offers an invitation to look outward — not for novelty, but for honest comparison. Across Europe, cities with histories as complex as our own are grappling with the same pressures: how to grow, how to house people properly, how to expand without eroding what makes them worth living in. None of this is easy. All of it is possible.

It is in this spirit that the Cockburn Association is contributing to the festival with a focused discussion on one of the most pressing issues facing historic cities today. Homes or Homecomings? Managing Tourism Tensions with European Partners brings together perspectives from across the continent to explore how cities like Edinburgh can balance visitor economies with the needs of residents — addressing questions of housing pressure, short-term lets, and the long-term sustainability of living communities. The event forms part of a wider European conversation about responsible tourism and civic responsibility, and tickets and further details can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/homes-or-homecomings-managing-tourism-tensions-with-european-partners-tickets-1983449951197?aff=oddtdtcreator

This four-part series explores four cities. Each offers a specific lesson. Taken together, they put a question to Edinburgh that we have not yet answered convincingly: are we expecting enough from the places we are shaping?

Regensburg is the right place to begin because it resists the most tempting response to a precious historic city, which is to treat it as a museum. The Old Town is protected, yes — but protection is not confused with stasis. The city’s ambitions show most clearly not within the historic core, but in the buffer zones and development sites that connect the medieval centre to the wider city. These transitional territories are where planning convictions are really tested.

Here, new development is expected to meet demanding standards. Scale, materials, and urban grain matter. Architectural competitions are used routinely to select designers on the basis of talent rather than price. Social mix is taken seriously too: a meaningful proportion of housing in these areas is affordable, ensuring the city remains inhabited by people of different means, not only by those who can afford to live inside a postcard.

Authenticity is not only architectural. It is social. A city of beautiful empty buildings, inhabited only by the wealthy, has already lost something that no amount of conservation can recover.

Edinburgh knows this tension without having resolved it. The Old and New Towns — World Heritage Site since 1995 — are under quiet but sustained pressure: tenements converted wholesale into short-term lets, working households displaced from the centre, development proposals contested in the setting of Calton Hill and along the Cowgate. These are not abstract planning debates. They are questions about who gets to live here, and in what.

The more revealing comparison with Regensburg, though, lies not in the historic cores of either city but in what surrounds them. Edinburgh’s equivalent areas — the edge of the New Town, the hinterland of Leith’s conservation area, sites along Leith Walk and Easter Road — have produced a troubled record. Small-scale successes, yes: careful infill where individual architects were given the latitude to work well. But too much development that was approved for avoiding breaking rules, rather than for achieving anything worth having.

The critic Owen Hatherley, writing in Prospect, caught the pattern: “large-scale disasters and small-scale triumphs.” Leith Shore — unfussy infill between older buildings — has worked. The vast Western Harbour, filled in the pre-crash years with speculative flatted blocks in materials that have worn badly in the North Sea climate, has not. The SoCo development on South Bridge, a significant opportunity on one of the Old Town’s principal streets, was described by Richard Murphy as a “fantastic opportunity wasted.” These failures did not happen because Edinburgh lacked the skill to do better. Nobody required that it should.

Murphy is the most credible critic of this failure. His practice has won more RIBA awards than any other in Scotland; his buildings include the Scottish Storytelling Centre, the Fruitmarket Gallery, and the original Maggie’s Centre. In 2014 he told The Scotsman that Scotland was “about the worst place in Europe to be an architect” — not for want of talent, but because public procurement selects architects by price. “It doesn’t matter how good you are, you cannot get a job.” Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands use open design competitions for public buildings as routine. Scotland does not.

The seventeen schools built across Edinburgh under PFI contracts illustrate the point. All were temporarily closed following the collapse of a wall at Oxgangs Primary School in 2016, after inspections revealed widespread structural defects. The episode shows how poor procurement, fragmented responsibility and inadequate quality assurance can result in unsafe buildings.

They had to be closed after a wall collapsed — structurally deficient, and by any honest account architecturally bleak, communicating in every detail an indifference to the children who used them. Poor procurement produces poor buildings. The relationship is direct.

Regensburg’s approach is not impossible to emulate. High expectations, applied consistently, create cumulative quality over time. The development sites surrounding Edinburgh’s World Heritage core — in Leith, Granton, the Canonmills area north of the New Town — are not peripheral to the heritage argument. They are part of it. The character of a historic city is shaped by what it adds, not only by what it keeps.

Edinburgh has the talent. What is too often denied to its best practices is the kind of public commission that a rational procurement system would deliver to them. Regensburg has decided what it expects of the places that surround its heritage, and it expects it consistently. That is, stripped back, the whole lesson.

Next week: Lyon Confluence — what a former industrial wasteland on the edge of a historic French city can teach Edinburgh about building growth areas with genuine purpose.

Further reading

UNESCO World Heritage — Regensburg with Stadtamhof  —  outstanding universal value statement and management plan

Owen Hatherley, ‘The Slow Ruin of Edinburgh’, Prospect (2017)  —  essential reading on Edinburgh’s architectural failures and their structural causes

Richard Murphy, interview in The Scotsman (2014)  —  on procurement failure and its consequences for design quality

Historic Environment Scotland, World Heritage Site Management Plan 2021–26  —  Edinburgh Old and New Towns

Cockburn Association  — Campaigning for Edinburgh

Image: hpgruesen / Pixabay – Steinerne Brücke, Regensburg — a historic crossing into the Old Town.