In one of Edinburgh’s university environments, the urban complexity, accumulated over 200 years was being threatened. George Square and its immediate environment was the Georgian precursor to the more famous Georgian New Town. Apart from a controversial new library (the new brutalism of Basil Spence), nearby there were sturdy Edwardian residential tenement buildings. They were demolished. The site then lay empty for over 20 years! Those apartments retained complexity in part of the city that would otherwise, be turned into a single function urban system; a university precinct. Eventually, a new university building was erected but the living complexity—the residential apartments, to break the functional and visual monotony of the university precinct—was lost. Nearby, Lauriston Place had a beautiful terrace of Georgian flats. It was a stretch of residential use in an area dominated by institutions: the Edinburgh College of Art, George Heriot’s School and the Royal Infirmary. The college wanted to buy, demolish and build a new education function. If permitted, that whole portion of the city would have become a lifeless place; a single function (institutions) and thus with no semblance of urban—i.e. living—complexity. Happily, the art college was thwarted. More strategically, with a new general hospital built on the outskirts of the city, the former infirmary has been converted to residences. That portion of the city now remains vibrant because of the mix of land-uses; that essential urban complexity.