Housing planning co-ordination, please - John McLellan

​Whether you want to live beneath a busy flightpath or not, thousands of future Edinburgh householders will have the airport for a neighbour.

Apart from the developments at Cammo and West Craigs, a plan to build 11,000 homes straddling the tram line next to the A8 is out for consultation and now a previously blocked scheme to redevelop land around a disused Edinburgh Airport runway is being revived.

Known as Elements Edinburgh, there was a suspicion the planning application went into a bottom drawer at the City Council because it was competition with the A8 plan, but Crosswind Developments is working up a new plan that aims to build at least 2500 homes, around 900 of them affordable.

With the housing shortage as acute as ever, it’s hard to see how the council could continue to stymie the plan while promoting a neighbouring scheme, and when its Cityplan 2030 blueprint prioritises development on brownfield land.

The open land between Maybury and Gogar will be the biggest single expansion of Edinburgh since the war, a new community of some 30,000 people, twice the size of Dalkeith, which will dwarf the regeneration of Granton.

As wrangles over new schools in West Craigs have shown, providing the necessary infrastructure will be a monumental challenge, but that’s not a reason to call a halt, especially as there is a virtually unused railway station with the capacity of Haymarket at the heart of the nascent district.

The expansion will take years to complete, maybe decades, but the council should work with the airport, not against it.