Tony Reddy
Anthony Reddy Associates
Architects & Urban Designers

New Urbanism - Understanding the Problem
Much of the suburban development in Irish towns and cities which occurred in the postwar period is bereft of character when compared to the places we regard as models of good urban design - the Georgian and Victorian cores of Dublin and other major towns and cities or the heritage quarters of Galway, Kinsale or Kilkenny. However, while we admire such places, we frequently build something very different - the familiar sprawl of modern suburbia.

Our planning regulations, as articulated in the Development Plans of our towns and cities, facilitate, indeed encourage single-use zoning, which makes it virtually impossible to incorporate the urban-design qualities we associate with existing towns and cities. Few planning codes facilitate the creation of the network of public spaces which characterise the towns and communities we admire. If planning permission were sought today for a new street similar in scale to a Victorian residential street or a medieval High Street the reasons for refusal would be lengthy indeed. However, all around us we can see examples of these streets working satisfactorily.

We live in an age of public concern for the built environment, yet we are only beginning to grapple with what is essential about town making. On the one hand, our planning system seems to be mired in bureaucratic policy formulation unrelated to the spatial design of communities. On the other hand, architects, planners and concerned members of the public, are obsessed with the detail and image of individual developments. Consequently, we continue to build vast tracts of repetitive development that form poor quality neighbourhoods, towns or cities.

Each of us, actively or intentionally, shape the built environment. Only a few have the mixed privilege of being architects, planners, engineers, developers, politicians or policymakers who make direct decisions about the form of our towns and cities. The rest being the majority, make more oblique but no less consequential decisions regarding the form of our environment through the selection of candidates as part of the political system. For the most part we make these choices with particular interests in mind and with at best a loose value system about 'community' or the 'environment'.

However, all of us, and in particular the professionals and policy makers involved with the built environment, have difficulty in fully understanding or interpreting the scale and character of contemporary urbanisation. Like other countries in the developed world, we see a society that is generating vast undistinguished urban forms, with the same array of road systems, electricity and telephone cables and satellite dishes whether it is city or suburb, town or country, or more properly, sprawl. The concept of sprawl has been with us since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Almost two hundred years later, as we look at the sprawl of almost every city and town in the developed world and our own Hibernian interpretation of the model, and the myriad examples of change to our environment, who can doubt that we need to do something about this problem?