Caring for the City: Why Civic Resilience Matters Now

Edinburgh spends a great deal of time debating what comes next. Development frameworks, infrastructure pipelines, housing numbers and cultural investment all rightly attract scrutiny, and the Cockburn Association has long been at the forefront of that conversation. But recent months have exposed a more immediate and less comfortable question.

How well is the city looking after what it already has?

This winter has brought the issue into focus. Prolonged cold spells and repeated freeze-thaw cycles have taken their toll across the city. In areas with historic setted surfaces and stepped closes, such weather typically loosens materials and creates hazards, especially when slush refreezes overnight. Drainage systems already under pressure struggle to cope with sudden thaw, leading to familiar patterns of pooling water and blocked gullies. Across the city, uneven paving and poor surface water management have prompted resident complaints. None of this makes headlines. All of it shapes how the city is experienced.

In this context, civic resilience is not an abstraction. It is whether Edinburgh’s everyday fabric can cope with pressure, weather and use without slipping into managed decline.

Maintenance Matters

With the peculiar exception of roads, maintaining the rest of the city’s fabric rarely makes the headlines or ignites local or national debate. When it does, it’s usually in the aftermath of a disaster – masonry falling on Princes Street, as tragically happened in June 2000, when a piece of stonework fell from a central Edinburgh building

The prolonged cold at the start of this year offered a reminder. Winter damage does not announce itself dramatically. It accumulates. Materials loosen one winter, trip hazards appear the next, and before long temporary fencing becomes permanent. Delays to long-running projects such as North Bridge (now scheduled for completion in summer 2026 after years of setbacks) have only reinforced public frustration with a system that appears reactive rather than anticipatory.

Maintenance is too often treated as discretionary, something to defer when budgets tighten. The result is higher costs later, greater disruption, and avoidable risk.

Stewardship under pressure

Edinburgh’s experience reflects wider pressures across Scotland. Heritage bodies and councils face ageing assets, rising construction costs and increasing climate stress. Historic Environment Scotland and the Climate Change Committee have both noted that wetter winters, heavier rainfall and more frequent freeze-thaw cycles are accelerating decay across the historic estate, with limited progress in adapting heritage assets to these risks.

Managing decline is not a viable strategy for Scotland’s capital. Preventative care is not a luxury; it is the most cost-effective form of conservation. Cities that invest consistently in routine inspection and early intervention avoid the cycle of emergency repair and closure that undermines public confidence.

City of York Council’s long-term stewardship of the York City Walls provides a useful comparison. Through routine inspection, planned maintenance and a conservation management plan developed in consultation with Historic England, the Council has prioritised preventative care over reactive intervention.

Access, risk and responsibility

Recent debate around Holyrood Park, and the future of the Radical Road in particular, has brought questions of safety, access, and liability to the fore. The Cockburn Association’s recent blog on the proposed partial reopening advocated strongly for full reopening. A maintenance plan that manages vegetation and mitigates against further rock fall prevents blanket closures, and keeps heritage accessible.

This matters because historic landscapes in Edinburgh are not remote monuments. Arthur’s Seat is a daily commute, a local walk, a shared civic space. Its condition, like that of the city’s cobbles, the Old Town closes or New Town railings, shapes how people use and trust the city. Paths that are properly drained, inspected and maintained are safer. Neglect undermines access far more effectively than any risk assessment.

The ordinary city matters most

Much of Edinburgh’s heritage is uncelebrated. It lies in kerbs and steps, railings and retaining walls, drainage runs and surface materials. These are not the elements that feature in strategy documents or visitor literature, but many are listed, noted and admired, and they add to both the form and the function of our UNESCO World Heritage site.

Their importance is often recognised only when they fail. A blocked gully becomes visible when water pools across a footway. Uneven paving attracts attention only when it deters movement or causes a fall. Over time, such failures alter how people use the city, narrowing routes, discouraging walking, and quietly excluding those with limited mobility.

The character of Edinburgh does not reside solely in its landmark buildings. It is sustained by the cumulative condition of ordinary infrastructure, much of it historic in origin, all of it essential to daily life. When that fabric is allowed to deteriorate, the loss is not only physical but social. The city becomes harder to navigate, less inclusive, and less resilient to further pressure.

Civic resilience, understood this way, is not about preserving the city as an artefact. It is about maintaining the ordinary systems that allow its historic character to be lived in, used and trusted.

New development, existing strain

Edinburgh continues to grow. Residential development at the urban edge and intensification within established neighbourhoods are both planned and under way. This growth is necessary, but it cannot be considered separately from questions of maintenance and resilience.

New housing places additional pressure on existing infrastructure: roads, pavements and drainage systems, much of it historic and already under strain. Developer contributions tend to focus on immediate capital requirements (new junctions, utility connections, or on-site public realm works). What they rarely address is the cumulative maintenance burden placed on the wider city fabric.

Surface water from new development enters older drainage networks downstream. Increased footfall accelerates wear on historic paving. Old buildings wear differently with new neighbours or exposure through prolonged adjacent development. Streets designed for lower levels of use are asked to absorb more activity without corresponding investment in their long-term care.

Resilience requires that planning for growth includes honest provision for maintaining the infrastructure that growth, and the city’s appeal, depends upon.

What needs to happen

The argument is straightforward. Maintenance of the existing city must be treated as core civic infrastructure, not as an afterthought. That means clearer long-term funding commitments, better integration between planning and maintenance teams, and honest accounting of what a historic city actually costs to maintain.

There is an immediate opportunity. National consultations on heritage management and climate adaptation are under way, including Historic Environment Scotland’s consultation on sustainable stewardship (closing 23 January 2026). Edinburgh’s experience should inform them. The city has positioned itself as ambitious. It now needs an equally strong culture of care.

This is not only a matter for officers and budgets; it is a case for residents, community councils and civic bodies to insist that maintenance is treated as a first-order planning and civic issue. In a historic city, everyday acts of stewardship, keeping gutters clear, caring for shared closes and stairs, attending to small defects before they become hazards, form part of the wider maintenance ecology of the city. Such neighbourly care cannot replace public investment, but it can reinforce it. The success of Edinburgh’s tourist levy may depend on whether this shared responsibility is taken seriously.

The Cockburn Association has always argued that stewardship is an active responsibility, not a passive inheritance. A culture of care sits firmly within that tradition. It is about looking closely at the city as it is, noticing where small failures are becoming familiar, and recognising that care operates at multiple scales: from national policy and municipal budgets to the everyday management of communal space. Care, maintenance and repair must be recognised as essential public goods.

If Edinburgh is to manage change well, it must first prove it can look after itself.

 

Further reading

• Climate Change Committee – Progress in Adapting to Climate Change 2025 (heritage and built environment sections): provides national context for increasing weather-related risk to historic places, including wetter winters and freeze-thaw impacts
• Historic Environment Scotland – Properties and Collections Strategy consultation on sustainable stewardship (closing 23 January 2026, 11:59pm): addresses climate risk and preventative conservation across Scotland’s historic estate
• City of Edinburgh Council – Roads and Infrastructure Investment: Capital Delivery Priorities 2025/26 (£25.686m allocation for carriageways, footways, drainage and reactive repairs)
• Cockburn Association – Reopening the Radical Road: Access, Risk and Civic Heritage (January 2026): sets out a practical approach to balancing access, safety and long-term maintenance
• City of York Council – City Walls conservation: a case study in routine inspection and preventative stewardship of historic infrastructure

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