Malcolm Fraser: Mean green machine should be brought to halt

In fact, in relation to climate change, any city, town or village is a good place. Our existing settlements are our "renewable resources". They already contain the infrastructure necessary to make a community live, from schools and shops and places to work, down to roads and sewers. They already have postal addresses and broadband, political representation and potential friends around the corner.

And they contain gap sites, from wee forgotten pockets through to huge swathes of brownfield - former industrial land. Redeveloping them brings new life to our old settlements: new children to support the local school, new business in the local shops and bars and a general renewal of purpose for an old community.

So the most sustainable, eco-friendly or low-carbon places (all the usual phrases) to build are in our existing settlements. However, the value of our cities, towns and villages lies not just in some need to huddle together against rising sea levels, for our essential creativity and conviviality depends on our human genius for communal living.

I met someone I'd been at school with. I'd not seen him for 30 years, but his first question to me was not about kids or jobs, but "What's your commute like?" I answered, honestly, that it was a nice 10-minute cycle across city parks.

My old pal stared at me. "Bloody green nonsense!", he exclaimed.

Startled, I listed what was less-than-nonsense about it: it was quicker than any other method, kept me reasonably fit, was cheap and - yes - it used a minimum of the world's resources.

However, later I realised that those reasons were only part of the bigger story. At breakfast, with three children, there's much panic, shouting, flying porridge and mad hunts for dinner money. My office is, I'm afraid, much the same. The cycle - the open air and exercise, the trees and the Old Town skyline - is a welcome oasis of calm, but it's also nice to meet friends, builders and developers I work with, and clients or colleagues on the way. I might learn something from them.

In other words, such social places are good for business and for creative interaction and the like. Edinburgh is especially good at those sort of chance, creative bumpings-into, an exemplar of such a social city.It has a compact, civilised, integrative three-dimensional dynamo of a city centre, a peerless urban forum whose history of social and intellectual interaction is manifest in an urban environment that is itself an extraordinary drama. It's no accident that it provided the principal arena for that most sociable, creative and radical of moments, the Scottish Enlightenment.

It's also full of empty buildings, vacant sites and huge swathes of brownfield - and not just along the foreshore, but right into Princes Street. So you would expect that successive governments, full of talk about smart, successful, creative and so-on Scotlands, making very bold commitments towards fighting climate change, would do all they can to encourage such sensible and sustainable development and discourage motorway sprawl.

Well, yes and no. The city council is trying hard to raise finance to assist investment in the city through new tax increment finance schemes. But times are hard. Looking at the financial disaster we have suffered in the last few years, one sure lesson we should draw is that, in our attitude towards the built environment, we should be less reckless - demolish less, take more care and, crucially, make sure to fortify existing settlements.

But Big Business tells us the opposite: times are hard, so let's try and do things a bit cheaper. And, yes, we all know that the greenbelt is there to fortify our existing settlements and avoid the placeless sprawl that devalues our nation and forces us all into the traffic … but didn't we say that times are hard, so give up your greenbelt or nice farmland for us to build on, it saves us all the hassle of dealing with existing sites, and we can market with a nice "green living, but next to the motorway" line.

A week of planning and "community engagement" on Sir David Murray's vastly-ambitious plans for greenbelt and farmland land round the M8 ends tonight with a presentation at the Edinburgh College of Art. The aerial image describes the proposals well: a "T" shape of development, with the top of the T stretching north-south along the ring road from the Glasgow Road up towards the Lanark Road, and a long tail sprawling out along the motorway towards West Lothian.

This is the development magnet: housing, business parks and entertainment features, all handy for the motorway. A new, shared ground for Hearts and Edinburgh Rugby (though neither seem to want it) and a new big garden feature called The Calyx - neither of which might be fundable, but both of which will act as Trojan horses for the suburbs and retail and business parks that will bring in the money. In the shadow of all this languishes Edinburgh, with its hills and foreshore.Edinburgh is the "brand" that "adds value" to Murray's site, but this development would dilute the value of that brand - string out and disperse our dense, walkable, liveable place - and suck new investment out of it, out past the ring road.

Defending against such a prospect is, definitively, what the greenbelt is for. Greenbelt legislation is not a perfect instrument, but it is incredibly important. There is no reason to expect that Edinburgh's councillors, and their planning officials, would be fooled into forgetting this. Indeed, yesterday's Scotsman reports had high-profile Edinburgh politicians being remarkably forthright about its dangers.

However, the Edinburgh Garden District website, and the week-long public-engagement circus, makes you think that it's a done deal, with the public generously invited to admire its pizzazz, and consult on its details.

Leading the band is international New Urbanist superstar Andrs Duany, loved and used by all from Prince Charles to the Scottish Government (and very generously remunerated out our taxes), whose philosophy is used to justify building on farmland, woods and water meadows from Ballater to Lochgelly.

The money being ploughed into all this dwarfs the squibs Edinburgh has to conduct similar exercises in proper brownfield sites within the City. It's a considerable investment, but if Murray gets his way the returns from this development will be vast.

We should trust our politicians and planners to apply policies evolved to defend the integrity of the city. But Murray's great coup has been to have the Scottish Government's chief planner, Jim Mackinnon, launch the week-long engagement process - seeming, to many observers, to present the spectacle of the national planner undermining the integrity of national policy, and the freedom of local democracy to properly examine and determine major local initiatives.

Such centralisation runs counter to oft-repeated concerns for local democracy, or the "big society". However, it mirrors the sort of centralised prodding that has characterised developments in and around Aberdeen, at Donald Trump's golf development, and with the proposed infilling of Union Square, Aberdeen's version of Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens.

Would that Murray team up with Forth Ports and turn his attention - and his money, initiatives and the undoubted talents of his huge team - to our languishing but full-of-potential foreshore. Until then, the city should hold its nerve: apply policy, send this packing.