Hamish Kallin

If you’re ever a particular kind of bored, head along one of the main roads that run out of Edinburgh and play a game called ‘hunt the wee yellow signs.’ Nobody seems to notice them, but once you do, it’s hard to stop spotting them. They’re all clamouring to speak to the passing cars, clustered at junctions and roundabouts, turnings, and slipways. They cling to posts, sporting names for places that maybe don’t exist yet but sound like they could be nearby or anywhere, bucolic or dull. ‘Ashgrove’, ‘West Path’, ‘The Pines’, ‘Wallace Park’, ‘Ravensheugh’, ‘Carberry Grange’, ‘Dalhousie Gate’, ‘Eskbank Gardens’, ‘Yew Gardens’, ‘Heritage Grange’ and so on. I could fill pages with these names, but I don’t want to spoil your game. These are the signs to new housing developments of over 30 units or more, which developers put up to tempt potential buyers. Some of the names hint at local landmarks or landforms, whilst others are empty signifiers, plucked from thin air, or the plastic laminate of a PR person’s desk.
En masse, they tell us a lot of houses are being built, and a lot of money is being made. But they also hint at the form of those houses, which are divisible by the plots of land on which they’re built. The chorus of names suggest the developments are distinct and separate, both from the towns or villages they are loosely attached to, and from each other, even if they’re all strikingly similar.

Between 2001 and 2024, the council area in Scotland with the fastest rising population was East Lothian (27.7%). The second was Midlothian (23.4%), which in 2024 was the only area in Scotland to have more births than deaths. The third was the City of Edinburgh itself (18%), with West Lothian coming in fourth place (17.2%).1 In other words, this is a massive urban growth region for Scotland, but how exactly is it growing? Over that time period, marginally more new houses were built in those three council areas surrounding Edinburgh (47,251 units combined) than in the city itself (47,041).2 This is a dynamic shaped largely by unaffordability, as intense pressure on the housing market within the city limits pushes potential buyers further away. You can trace this shift through the yellow signs and the rapidly changing landscape, where formerly agricultural fields are covered in thousands of low-density cookie-cutter houses, segmented off into separate schemes, each sponsored by a different developer. As the houses near completion, the roads nearby are flanked by huge flags promising the good life. Something intriguing is going on, which pits our imaginary of Edinburgh and its boundaries against the reality of urbanisation. If we peer decades into the future, Edinburgh is growing beyond itself, and it needs to reckon with this.

Expert consensus on the future of Scottish cities imagines high enough densities and proximity to key services so that everyone benefits from reduced car reliance, with housing of good enough quality that distinct and integrated communities can be nurtured. The Scottish Government’s National Planning Framework 4 speaks in terms of holistic, healthy, and sustainable places that take us closer to net zero, with sustainability as a watchword, and these ideas trickle down mostly intact into the local development plans. But the juxtaposition between what we seem to know we should be building and what we are building often seems illogical, and the banal takes on the hue of the insane. It’s too easy, and too dangerously pointless, to slap the ‘15-minute neighbourhood’ label onto urban areas that are already dense with one hand whilst building a new dispersed playground for cars with the other.

The purpose of this intervention isn’t to judge those who end up living in these new houses, but to judge the companies building them, and the planning system that allows them to be built. We need to refuse to believe that it’s too late, or not worth it, to try and imagine a way to grow our cities and solve the housing crisis without relying solely on the endless exurb built for quick and expensive sale.

There seems to be an unspoken phobia of the urban that has a near-total grip on our current housebuilding strategy. If a place isn’t already urban in character, it is never allowed to become so. Within Edinburgh itself, the dominant housing typology on former industrial land (in Granton, Leith, Seafield, Pilrig, etc.) is blocks of flats, often brick-clad, tightly packed, and loosely nodding to an architecture of function or the inheritance of tenements. Inner city gap sites are filled at high densities too—increasingly, if not always, by build-to-rent blocks, hotels, or student housing, or a mixture of the lot—but beyond these specific contexts, the densities fall away, and the blueprint of individual detached houses, rarely if ever more than two storeys high, becomes the future of every plot of greenfield land for miles around. This means we risk incubating sprawl into a strategy that idealises quaint rurality, and we seem stubbornly incapable of believing that anything other than this is desirable.

The classic tool for preventing sprawl and maintaining a distinction between cities and their surrounding towns remains the green belt, formed from anxiety about the pace of growth and aiming to create a kind of buffer zone around British cities. Edinburgh’s was instituted in 1957, and whilst it still exists, it does not function as an irrefutable “barrier” to development, but instead a potentially constraining factor that developers can overcome with council consent. Between 1999 and 2003 over half the development proposals in the green belt were approved, whilst between 2021 and 2024, almost as many houses (3,198 vs. 3,850) were given planning permission on greenfield land vs. brownfield land within the City of Edinburgh Council limits.3 These are patchwork statistics, but the picture is pretty clear, and visible if you explore the outskirts or look at an up to date map: the green belt is slowly being squeezed, especially adjacent to or between already built-up areas. It is unlikely to disappear entirely, but it is increasingly going to become a set of disconnected parks and green spaces that are sandwiched between residential neighbourhoods, and it is not difficult to see why.

Taking a wide-angle lens, between 2004 and 2025, the population of Edinburgh has risen significantly (up 19%), but average house prices have risen much faster (up 84%), outpacing the rise in average wages (up 66%) by some margin.4 Average rents have risen faster still (up around 100% across all property sizes in the private rented sector between 2010 and 2025).5 The social and economic impact of this trend is not subtle: there are around 7,000 households in Edinburgh without a permanent home, whilst almost one in three families in the city are pulled into poverty solely due to their housing costs.6 In this context the impetus to build more and more houses comes from both reformers and profiteers, and between the two, the green belt begins to look antiquated. But it’s beyond that old municipal mechanism of spatial constraint that the real drama is happening, for this level of mounting unaffordability hides within it a dynamic of displacement, whether direct or indirect, which fuels development outside the City of Edinburgh Council limits.

It’s difficult to explain the scale at which this dynamic is remaking the landscape of the Lothians, but let’s try by using an example. Wallyford is a small town in East Lothian that has sustained continued expansion over recent years. In 2001 the population was 2,480, doubling to 4,475 by 2022.7 Over 2,000 new homes are being built in a belt of land that physically surrounds the town, meaning the population will likely double again in the near-future, and there are no signs of this trajectory stopping. The urban corridor between Wallyford and Edinburgh proper isn’t continuous yet, but it’s not far off it. Eventually, Wallyford will merge into Musselburgh (a single line of fields separates them at present). There’s been a rail connection to central Edinburgh since the mid-90s, with a journey time of under 15 minutes, and that proximity is increasingly valuable as Edinburgh’s housing market becomes more and more unaffordable. People who can’t afford to buy houses in Edinburgh can maybe afford to buy them here, and that dynamic animates the boom in housebuilding beyond the city, precisely because it is close enough to the city. There’s nothing particularly unique about this suburbanisation drive aside from its speed, but in context it’s a pretty dramatic shift. As a former coal mining town, Wallyford has a proud working class history that is sharply distinct from Edinburgh’s. The shift in economic function to commuter town profoundly unsettles the identity of such places.8

Who is building these homes? The familiar names are never far away (Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Barratt Homes, etc.), and their power in the housebuilding business is difficult to reckon with. Most of the profit they make leaves the UK, for they are majority owned by overseas investors whose pressure to maximise returns from selling houses is in direct competition with the interests of those seeking to live in them.9 “This process cannot achieve equilibrium,” because it is directly against the interests of these companies to ever build enough houses.10 Moreover, they hold fast to a suburban blueprint of rampant repetition partly out of efficiency—reusing house designs all across the UK with minimal local tweaking speeds things up and negates the necessity to employ more architects—but also because low densities keep the housebuilding targets nicely unreachable, and a lot of money can be made in that ‘meantime’ lasting forever.11 It’s an amazing fallacy that we rest our hope of solving the housing crisis on companies whose bottom line is best served by not solving it.

Incidentally, the Lothians contain some of Scotland’s most fertile farmland, and in an era of food insecurity that will undoubtedly reach wartime levels of catastrophe in the far-too-near-future, there’s something acutely odd about ripping up fields so desperately. Housebuilders and local authorities can boast about how many homes they’ve “delivered”, but never talk about how much land they are using up. All of the new houses have driveways or garages or roads wide enough to accommodate on-street parking, sometimes all three. Car ownership is explicitly part of the package, and because of the low densities, it has to be. It’s a striking figure to grapple with, but estimates suggest that 40% of the world’s population live in spaces smaller than an off-street parking lot, a juxtaposition that might seem very far away but speaks to a competition that is close at hand when you see how often the land used by the driveway and the garage constitutes a sizeable proportion of the land used for housing.12

Mass transit solutions work best in contexts where enough people live near enough to each stop, and we seem to have abandoned the possibility of those densities anywhere it doesn’t already exist. The developers quietly boast of their climate-conscious credentials. Some houses are bedecked with solar panels, most are decently insulated for energy efficiency, many contemporary schemes have on-site suds basins to cultivate pockets of wetland habitat nearby, all of which is good, but none of which can overcome the form of the housing, and the inherent inefficiency of the land-use it requires or the car-use it bakes in, which flies in the face of the climate emergency with the kind of wild abandon that history may judge harshly.

Edinburgh was once a tiny sliver of what it is now, a cramped corridor of housing crammed between lochs and walls. When we consider how it expanded, it did so by incorporating the villages and towns that stood nearby. It wasn’t until the mid-1660s that Edinburgh gained notional control over what were then the suburbs of Potterrow and Canongate, now the centre of the city.13 When the Edinburgh Suburban & South Side railway was being planned and promoted in the 1880s, its route—linking Gorgie, Craiglockhart, Morningside, and Newington—took it through open country or sparsely populated neighbourhoods outwith the city boundary, which are now the inner city, with the tenement as the dominant form of housing.14 This might seem like an irrelevant trip in a time machine, but it is important to see how the supremacy of the low-density semi-detached car-dependent house is a choice. Whose choice is it? Aren’t these the houses that people want? Can we answer that question without asking what it is they cannot afford? Can we survive as a species if we design our world through an open promise of delivering whatever corporations say people think they want, without any attention to the ideological, political, and economic forces that constrain and shape those choices? It’s no coincidence that this new round of rapid suburbanisation comes at the same time as a worsening housing crisis, where the dynamic relationship between displacement and aspiration are profitably blurred, where the promise of 95% mortgages is offered as seduction even whilst it signals just how dramatically unaffordable the housing on offer is.15 We seem to be trapped in this trajectory, where desire and desperation converge uneasily.

In principle, Scotland has some of the most progressive and idealistic placemaking policies in the UK, but the gap between these aspirations and their implementation remains striking.16 Why? Planning departments have been hard-hit by austerity, outsourcing, and deskilling for over a decade, and their decision-making processes work through the ‘soft power’ of negotiation on a case-by-case basis. Planners can make demands of a developer (have this much density, that much parkland, these amenities, etc.), but those demands are not legally binding. They’re based on the Scottish Government’s ideals about what makes a ‘successful place’, which are relentlessly open to interpretation. Interpret them the developers assuredly do, always on the look-out for ways to cut costs, speed up construction and maximise returns. These negotiations rest on an uneven balance of power (where the developer has the money, the expertise, the right to appeal, the capacity to build, and, usually, multiple interests nationwide), and this is further exacerbated on ‘speculative sites’ in high-demand areas. Where the developer buys up land and then applies for planning permission using their own blueprint (rather than responding to a design brief on a specific site earmarked by the local authority), plans are routinely approved if the council hasn’t met the housebuilding targets as set out by the Scottish Government themselves. In the Lothians, that target acts as a horizon that compels approval of developments at pace.17 The National Planning Framework is thus deeply contradictory, unable to hold the balance between its social and environmental aspirations and its faith in economic development and market logic. The pressure to build eclipses the concern as to what is built.

Imagine, instead, if we boldly, even if slowly, tried to build a city region? What if we constructed a high capacity, high frequency tram corridor and built densely around each stop, adapting the tenement form for a modern era, with high energy efficiency, shared gardens, local shared energy generation, and controlled rents? What if we actually built new high streets, with space for community centres, youth centres, gig venues, libraries, cafes, restaurants, industry, and hence work nearby? It is a crude way of thinking about it but if we doubled or even tripled the height of each house, “attached” them into terraces, lost or dramatically trimmed the car parking space, and clustered them around amenities and transport hubs, we could save such huge swathes of land for agriculture or biodiversity. We could urbanise fewer spaces, create more housing in the process, and plant forests on the rest. None of that is particularly radical in the context of urban planning in many other contexts, aside from the fact that it’s the opposite of what we’re doing. Oh, and see how around 5.5% of Edinburgh’s land-mass is golf courses? Expropriate a few of them and build some new neighbourhoods within the city boundary, four storeys high just like most of the older neighbourhoods. No small city needs that many golf courses.

Who would do this? Almost certainly not the dominant players in the volume housebuilding game, who routinely push local authority planning departments to water down their demands, and whose entire business model is wedded to a spatial form that does not belong to the future. In Scotland, we have lived through many watershed moments of suddenly seeing the urban landscapes built by our predecessors as incompatible with shifts in our ideas of what makes a humane and desirable future. We’re overdue another gear shift, and the companies that churn out low density suburbs need to know they’re living on borrowed time.

Given the scale of this development, there’s an urgency to stopping this, to dreaming of new and better ways to house us and to enforce those standards. The volume housebuilders show themselves to be incapable or unwilling of building the future, reticent to do anything other than carbon copy what already doesn’t work. The shift occurring in the Edinburgh region isn’t unique, but it speaks to the full extent of the housing crisis. The multiple processes of gentrification, touristification, studentification, and financialisation (or the ascendancy of a rentier society more broadly) have rendered the city increasingly unaffordable for many. What kind of ‘solution’ is this, if we let the frontier of profitability eat up our land with so little care? We know what sustainable cities look like, and this profoundly isn’t it.

A road with black and white chevron signs and a blue circular sign indicating a left turn is shown next to a grassy area with a stone wall in the background.
Fig 1 A yellow sign points to your future home (Wallyford). Photo by the author, 2026.
A muddy construction site with machinery, fencing, and signs set against a backdrop of green fields and a partly cloudy sky.
Fig 2 Barratt Homes under construction (Wallyford). Photo by the author, 2026.
A dirt path leads through green bushes and trees toward a construction site with building materials and partially built structures under a cloudy sky.
Fig 4 Taylor Wimpey’s Sinclair Gardens (near Roslin) expands. Photo by the author, 2023.
A construction site with excavated earth, construction machinery, and workers near newly built houses and a wooded area in the background.
Fig 3 Taylor Wimpey’s Greenlaw Mains (near Penicuik) under construction. Photo by the author, 2023.
A quiet suburban street lined with modern houses featuring solar panels on the roofs under an overcast sky.
Fig 5 David Wilson Homes’ Sinclair Mews (near Roslin),
where the dominance of the car in the architecture can be clearly observed. Photo by the author, 2023.
Two newly constructed houses with white walls and dark roofs face each other across a dirt road with construction equipment and materials visible in the background.
Fig 6 Wallace Park (near Wallyford). ‘Spacious, Smart, Sustainable’. Photo by the author, 2026.

Notes

  1. National Records of Scotland, ‘Council Area Profiles’, 2026, https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/council-area-profiles/. ↩
  2. Scottish Government, ‘Housing Statistics Quarterly Update New Housebuilding and Affordable Housing Supply’, 2026, https://www.gov.scot/publications/housing-statistics-for-scotland-new-house-building/. ↩
  3. Alan Prior and Jeremy Raemaekers, ‘Is Green Belt Fit for Purpose in a Post-Fordist Landscape?’, Planning Practice and Research 22, no. 4 (2007): 590, https://doi.org/10.1080/02697450701770100. ↩
  4. This uses the population estimates from the National Records of Scotland, sales data from the UK House Price Index and average weekly wages from the Office for National Statistics. I have not adjusted these for inflation because the rise in house prices is itself a form of inflation, but it is in relation to wages that its unaffordability is actually visible. ↩
  5. Scottish Government, ‘Private Sector Rent Statistics, Scotland, 2010 to 2025’, 2025, https://www.gov.scot/publications/private-sector-rent-statistics-scotland-2010-to-2025/documents/ ↩
  6. City of Edinburgh Council, Housing and Homelessness Deep Dive, 2025, https://www.parliament.scot/-/media/files/committees/local-gov/correspondence/2025/edinburghcouncilsubmissionhousingemergency.pdf ↩
  7. City Population, 2024, https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/scotland/east_lothian/S52000634__wallyford/ ↩
  8. Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialization in Postwar Scotland, 1st edn (University of London Press, 2021), 98, https://doi.org/10.14296/321.9781912702589. ↩
  9. Tom Archer and Ian Cole, ‘The Financialisation of Housing Production: Exploring Capital Flows and Value Extraction among Major Housebuilders in the UK’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 36, no. 4 (2021): 1367–87, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-021-09822-3. ↩
  10. Tom Archer and Ian Cole, The Invisible Hand That Keeps on Taking (Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, 2023), 1. ↩
  11. Petter Törnberg, ‘The City as an Anti-Growth Machine’, Antipode 58, no. 2 (2026): e70145, https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70145. ↩
  12. Patrick Miner et al., ‘Car Harm: A Global Review of Automobility’s Harm to People and the Environment’, Journal of Transport Geography 115 (February 2024): 9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2024.103817. ↩
  13. Aaron M. Allen, ‘Conquering the Suburbs: Politics and Work in Early Modern Edinburgh’, Journal of Urban History 37, no. 3 (2011): 423–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144211400383. ↩
  14. A. A. Maclean, The Edinburgh Suburban and South Side Junction Railway (The Oakwood Press, 2006). ↩
  15. Hamish Kallin, ‘In debt to the rent gap: Gentrification generalized and the frontier of the future’, Journal of Urban Affairs, 43:10 (2021), 1393-1404, https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2020.1760720 ↩
  16. Robert Richardson, James T. White and Gareth James, ‘Placemaking in post-devolution Scotland: The gap between aspiration and implementation’, Progress in Planning 203:1 (2026), 1-41, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2025.101031 ↩
  17. The numbers come from the Minimum All-Tenure Housing Land Requirement, amounting to 6,500 for East Lothian, 8,850 for Midlothian, 9,850 for West Lothian, and 36,750 for the City of Edinburgh, as outlined in the same National Planning Framework that demands sustainable development. These figures cover the decade after 2023. Available from: https://www.gov.scot/publications/national-planning-framework-4/pages/8/ ↩