Extending the City with Purpose Lyon Confluence: what a governing idea looks like, and what happens without one

At the southern tip of Lyon, where the Rhône and the Saône converge, a peninsula of railway sidings, warehouses, and contaminated industrial ground has been transformed into a neighbourhood of 25,000 residents over the past two decades. The Confluence project is not primarily a story about what was there before. It is a story about knowing, in advance, what you want a place to become — and having the institutional means to get there.

The Musée des Confluences, by Viennese practice Coop Himmelblau, makes an architectural statement. But the project’s real achievement is the coherence of the whole. The Confluence was designed to become a city quarter — not a collection of individual planning consents that happened to share a postcode. It achieved this through three things: a coordinated masterplan, a public development company — the SPL (Société Publique Locale) — with the authority and long-term mandate to enforce it, and a political will that survived multiple election cycles. That third element is the hardest to replicate. It is also the most important.

Edinburgh faces versions of this challenge across several sites simultaneously. The Waterfront Edinburgh programme — Granton, Newhaven, the northern edge of Leith — is the largest development opportunity the city has faced in generations, with 3,500 homes planned at Granton alone alongside employment uses and a public waterfront on the Firth of Forth. Shawfair has been under outline permission since 2003 and is only now beginning to feel like a community rather than a construction site. At Blindwells in East Lothian and Winchburgh in West Lothian, new settlements are taking shape on Edinburgh’s functional edge, housing people who would otherwise have been competing for homes in the city itself.

Growth areas are not peripheral. They are the city in the process of becoming itself — and what they become, Edinburgh will live with for a very long time.

Lyon’s lesson for all of these places is the same: they need a governing idea, held consistently across phases, developers, and decades. Without it, ambition dissolves quietly. Environmental commitments made at outline stage soften as viability arguments accumulate. The housing mix promised in the planning statement concentrates into a minimum affordable quota on the least prominent plots. Public realm shrinks. Quality disappears by a thousand small decisions, none of which individually triggers a refusal.

This is not a theoretical risk. It is what happened at the Western Harbour in Leith. Here was a site of comparable scale and real opportunity: a former industrial waterfront connected to the historic port, capable of becoming a genuinely mixed urban quarter. The masterplan existed. The ambitions were stated. But development proceeded piecemeal, driven by speculative developers in materials — thin render, plastic windows, cheap cladding — that have deteriorated visibly in the coastal climate. The promised public spaces are inhospitable. The social mix never materialised. A generation of people now lives there and deserved something better.

The contrast with Lyon is institutional before it is architectural. The SPL could set the terms of development and hold them across twenty years of changing market conditions. It could select architects through competition rather than simply approving whoever a developer appointed. It could refuse permission when proposals fell short. Edinburgh’s planners have some equivalent powers — development frameworks carry real weight when properly enforced — but the willingness to use them has not always matched the stated ambitions. And the moments when standards erode are usually small enough, individually, to pass without triggering the scrutiny they warrant.

As Miles Glendinning and others have observed, Edinburgh’s planning debates often concentrate on heritage protection — on preventing bad things in sensitive places — rather than on driving quality where heritage constraints are absent. Growth areas, where the majority of new Edinburghers will live, receive a fraction of the attention that a disputed dormer on the Royal Mile can generate. This is understandable, given the Cockburn Association’s own history and remit. It is also a problem that compounds with every phase of development that slips below what was promised.

Lyon also demonstrates something Edinburgh is slow to act on. The Confluence has not increased pressure on the city’s UNESCO-inscribed historic districts — Vieux-Lyon, the Presqu’île, the Croix-Rousse hillsides. It has relieved it. Growth accommodated elsewhere, at genuinely high standards, takes demand off a historic centre that cannot and should not absorb it all. Investing in quality at Granton is therefore an argument about the World Heritage Site as much as about Granton itself. A waterfront neighbourhood worth choosing reduces pressure on a centre that is already strained.

At Granton, the council now holds the majority of the developable land — the kind of direct ownership the SPL had. The Development Framework was adopted in 2021. First-phase housing is under construction, with Anderson Bell Christie delivering the Edinburgh Home Demonstrator: a pilot programme for net zero homes that, if it works, sets a template for the phases that follow.

But the Western Harbour also had a masterplan, a development company, and political support. What it did not have was the sustained institutional discipline to hold those ambitions as development dragged across fifteen years and two financial cycles. Granton will take similar time. The question is simply whether Edinburgh will hold the line for that long. Lyon, over twenty years, did.

These questions — about growth, liveability, tourism pressure, and what kind of city Edinburgh is trying to become — will also form part of the discussion at the forthcoming Homes or Homecomings? Managing Tourism Tensions with European Partners event, bringing together perspectives from across Europe on how historic cities can absorb change without losing themselves. Further details and tickets are available via Eventbrite.

Next week: Vienna — and the question of what standard of housing a city believes its people deserve.

FURTHER READING

• Lyon Confluence — official project site — project documentation and phasing strategy, English version available
• Musée des Confluences — architectural context and Coop Himmelblau commission
• Edinburgh City Council, Granton Waterfront Development Framework — adopted 2021
• Miles Glendinning, The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation — on the institutional culture of heritage protection and conservation policy
• Miles Glendinning and David Page, Clone City: Crisis and Renewal in Contemporary Scottish Architecture — critique of contemporary Scottish development culture, conservation, and urban quality
• Owen Hatherley, ‘The Slow Ruin of Edinburgh’ — on the Western Harbour failure and its institutional causes
• RTPI Scotland, Planning for Good Places (2023) — placemaking standards in large-scale housing development

Image: Lyon confluence – Prométhée / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)