PART I - Planning: Edinburgh and the New Town

Summary

Planning made Edinburgh an Enlightenment capital. Theextension and physical transformation of Edinburghwas based on a long-term plan that needed to benegotiated, endorsed, standardised and carried out.There was a complex relationship between mapping andurban development as the plan – or, rather, plans –became highly contested and endlessly updated.Sometimes a particular plan was presented as aninflexible document of how the city should be. Othertimes it could be altered to incorporate thepolitical will or property boundaries of thepowerful. On occasion, multiple competing plansexisted. In this process, architects and mapmakersattempted to assert themselves as professionalplanners, as specialists who could present acompelling and accurate vision of a futureEdinburgh. Planning as a technical and politicalintervention in space was vital here: the ability tosee empty fields – and indeed to see them as empty –and envision a grand, ordered New Town. Planning hada persuasive function too: plans needed to bepresented, often through commercial mapmakers andprintsellers, to the public, and not only for theirpolitical consent. Edinburgh residents were thepeople who would ultimately make the New Town aliving city suburb, by choosing to buy property init, make their lives there and walk the streets asplanned. Planning was a negotiation between more orless persuasive plans of a future city andEdinburgh's citizens who needed to be persuaded ofsuch plans. But this was no organic, community-leddevelopment: major landowners and the city'sprofessional elites – especially lawyers and bankers– dominated the urban development agenda, andlow-status commercial mapmakers had to be responsiveto their desires.

Planning also helped to construct Edinburgh as anEnlightenment capital through the ‘improvement’ itrepresented and, by extension, the elevated statusit bestowed. Although the New Town was perpetuallyincomplete throughout the period discussed here, andalthough large parts of it remained merely a ‘plan’,or at least a building site, for decades, itnevertheless functioned throughout as a symbol ofrefinement and progress. The very proposition of arational and ordered New Town was evidence ofEdinburgh taking its place among the advanced andprogressive cities of enlightened Europe. The NewTown was understood to be, even before it was halffinished, the legacy of the age, standing above thecrude architecture and monuments of Scotland's past.It was built to last as a symbol of Edinburgh'sadvancement and superiority.