Response to Edinburgh Council’s current consultation on the draft Edinburgh’s Thriving Greenspaces 2050: A Vision and Strategy for the City of Edinburgh Council’s public greenspaces which is open for comments until 31st December 2022 via this link.
“This document sets a 2050 Vision for the city’s greenspaces with four strategic themes that will guide the management of the Council’s greenspaces and will be used to set priorities over the next 30 years.”
The New Town & Broughton Community Council (NTBCC) has responded to the consultation on Edinburgh’s Thriving Greenspaces 2050 through the Council’s Consultation Hub (‘Citizen’s Space’) – the online consultation response as submitted by NTBCC can be viewed here but we have also made clear in our response that the presentation and structure of the Vision and Strategy document and the very limited / general nature of the survey made it difficult to respond to this online consultation in a satisfactory manner.
Therefore, the Community Council is also responding directly, in more detail, on this important topic for many residents.
While NTBCC believes that the Vision and Strategy represents in general terms a positive initiative, the actual document itself is essentially a management plan with a long list of general aspirations. It contains few substantive actions about how the city’s greenspaces will be improved. This makes it difficult to assess with certainty the suite of changes and developments contemplated even in the short to medium term, never mind to 2050. Consequently, it is not possible to give meaningful and helpful answers to the questions set out in the consultation. More broadly, there remains considerable uncertainty about what changes are to be brought forward, when and with what means of accountability.
The four priority themes of Connected, Thriving, Valued and Resourced Greenspaces undoubtedly cover important considerations for improving greenspaces. However, each theme contains a series of statements that cover a range of principles and norms. The current breadth of, and the absence of prioritisation within, the themes make it difficult to get a good understanding of what exactly is at the core of each of them. This limits the depth of response possible regarding the themes, and certainly makes it impracticable to answer on a single scale whether they cover the right issues as requested by the Council’s survey
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