Trevor Davies: Throw away blanket ban on use of green belt

Linus van Pelt needs his blue security blanket. Desperately. It makes him feel better. No matter how much Snoopy tries to steal it or Lucy pleads with him to abandon it and grow up, he hangs on tight. As Linus explains (in A Boy Named Charlie Brown) “This blanket is a necessity – it keeps me from cracking up. It may be regarded as a spiritual tourniquet. Without it, I’d be nothing, a ship without a rudder.”

Which is how we feel about our “green belt”. We hang on to it. Like a blue blanket it helps us not to grow up. With the new Strategic Development Plan for Edinburgh and South East Scotland (SESPlan) soon to hit the streets, it’s time to take a sceptical look at our continuous green belt. I think it’s even time to throw away that security blanket.

Before the uproar begins let me be plain. I’m in favour of green. I want to protect our public green spaces and improve access to them. I abhor the carpet-bombing of the countryside with pattern-book housing estates. I just don’t think a continuously encircling green belt around our cities and towns helps us with all that.

Though we may choose to ignore the fact, most of us now live in what was once a green belt of sorts around an older part of our town or city. Probably it wasn’t the strictly designated “green belt” we have today, just neighbouring fields, but mouthful by mouthful over the years those fields have been eaten up by the city. We still do it, even out of the statutory “green belt”, nibbling a bite here or a morsel there, providing homes for people to live and places for people to work. But that’s not the whole story. Those land nibbles don’t provide for everyone. As SESPlan will say, Greater Edinburgh now stretches from Leven, past Bathgate, beyond Galashiels to Eyemouth – we’ve played leapfrog over the green belt, spread our homes over green farm land miles away and, as part of getting back into the city, constructed huge dual carriageway roads and soon-to-be-two road bridges.

Now this isn’t a simple problem. Difficult and complex issues face those who plan our future. First, as we all know, there are simply not enough homes of the right kind at an affordable price for all of us – especially those with growing lives and young families. The average age for first-time buyers is creeping up to the late thirties and even then many rely on the “bank of mum and dad”. We need to build homes.

Second, we spend too much of our time and money just commuting to work or going to school or getting what we need. The trains are hardly taking the strain, roads always fill up, cancer-causing diesel lorries cover more miles than ever, delivering and picking up. We need to travel less.

Third, with all that moving about the fumes create air pollution, water pollution, climate change. We need to pollute less.

Fourth, our population hasn’t increased much, but the space we all take up has. We’ve spread, not grown. Serving and connecting all those new settlements over such a large area needs big public spending on new infrastructure – new bridges, roads, trams, railways, sewers, water supplies, and more. We find it hard to afford all that public investment.

These problems have taken an exponential leap since the time the green belt was invented. It’s a different world. But, as Linus asks, “How can you solve ‘new math’ problems with an ‘old math’ mind?” We hang onto the old mindset of continuous green belt like a security blanket, hoping it’s going to do some good. Then, by nibbling at it and leapfrogging it, we’ve actually made it part of the problem. We need a change of mind. Some “new math”.

Have you been to the green belt lately? I have. Plenty of fine open green fields fenced in with no public access and almost all optioned by developers hoping for the next “nibble”. And chunks of waste ground with nettles and rusting sheds, again optioned, where the developer argument is that it’s hardly worth keeping anyway. It’s not the “public green space” nirvana of the blue blanket brigade.

So – what to do. What is a “new math” mind? How do we build more homes, travel less, especially by car, pollute less and find the public money for infrastructure? And at the same time give more people more access to protected green space?

Try this simple experiment. Lay your palm flat on the table with fingers closed. That’s roughly how we grow our urban areas now – solidly continuous with only the people at the edge enjoying the green. Then open your fingers. Access to the green wedges between your fingers is so much longer. That “finger plan” describes Copenhagen, a city that in 60 years of operating its plan has moved from one of Europe’s poorest to one of its most prosperous. Protected green wedges add huge amenity to densely-built communities along finger bones of mass public transport. No continuous green belt here, but more access to green space than we enjoy. Sufficient housing, but, as more people live near public transport “bones”, fewer drive to work, causing less pollution. What’s more, a plan like this brings long-term possibilities to raise infrastructure finance from the land values created by development certainties. A green belt with fingers through it. Something similar was written in Edinburgh’s Vision for Capital Growth six years ago. It found much favour, was in line with the law and encouraged by Scottish Government planning policy. It’s still city policy. But the comforting pull of our security blanket is so strong that when SESPlan appears I think I’m going to be disappointed. As so often in our country, the “old math mind” will have its way. Poor Linus.

• Trevor Davies was convener of Edinburgh city council’s planning committee 2003-7