Architecture, Urban Design and Public Policy

The recent publication of the National Economic & Social Council Report Housing in Ireland: Performance & Policy and the launch of the multi-media exhibition ‘Reflecting City: Reconstructing Dublin’ provide two very different perspectives on the need for sustainable and integrated development in our cities and towns.

The NESC report outlines an analysis of the economic, social and policy mechanisms at work in the housing system and the key problems that now need to be addressed. The report identifies the issues and anxieties concerning housing that have been expressed by citizens, the social partners and others in recent years.

It provides an analysis of the Irish housing system, interpreting it as dynamic and unbalanced. The report contains a series of policy recommendations. It is of particular interest to architects and urban designers that two general findings inform these recommendations.

Firstly, the report concluded that the instruments that can address the core challenges are to be found more in the areas of planning, urban design infrastructural investment, land management and public service delivery rather than in manipulating tax instruments to alter the supply or demand for land or housing.

Secondly, it found that increased housing quantity and better quality neighbourhoods can be complementary and, indeed, mutually reinforcing. The report states that this requires a clear vision of the kind of high-quality, integrated, sustainable neighbourhoods that can and should be built.

Reflecting City: Reconstructing Dublin is a multi-media exhibition, intended to give citizens an accessible and clear sighted understanding of the development of the architecture and urban planning of their city from an historical, present and future perspective.

The Reflecting City Exhibition and website focuses on the regeneration of Dublin over the past 20 years. Incorporating images, articles, virtual tours, 3D imagery, interviews and display boards, the exhibition assesses the ongoing development of urban renewal projects including Ballymun, Docklands, the North East Inner City, Temple Bar, the Historic Quarter and Heuston Gateway.

The primary message of the exhibition is that high quality urban planning, design and architecture transforms cities and impacts on citizen’s lives in a positive way. To achieve such good planning and architecture an integrated vision is required, which is shared by the local authority, developers and the wider community.

Sustainable Neighbourhoods and Integrated Development
The magnitude and significance of the challenge in creating sustainable neighbourhoods and social balance needs to be recognised. It can be compared with some of the other challenges, which we have faced in the post war period:

• The opening of the economy in the early 1960s and entry into the EEC.
• The creation of a new economy through partnership in the mid-1980s.

The renewal of Dublin, from the 1990s onwards, as articulated in the Reflecting City Exhibition seemed to be unattainable at the beginning of that decade.

The challenge is similar in a number of ways: It is essential to the social and economic future of Irish society. It requires a shared understanding and consistent approach by a range of public and private institutions.

Achievement of the new principles of urban development and social integration seem to be blocked, more than anything else by the belief that we in Ireland are so attached to dispersed development and so divided between different social groups and interests, that we cannot create quality, sustainable, socially cohesive cities and towns. The frustrations expressed in relation to the planning system in the two recent by-elections in Kildare in March are indicative of this trend.

In recent years there have been important developments in the implementation of strategies that govern spatial developments and residential settlements. These include the National Spatial Strategy, Regional Planning Guidelines, Local Authority Development plans and Residential Density Planning Guidelines.

These initiatives contain five clear principles:

• Sustainable urban densities
• Consolidated urban areas
• Compact urban satellites
• Rapid communication networks
• Sustainable urban settlement

This evolution in policy is potentially of great significance. The characteristics of sustainable neighbourhoods are now understood at least at a policy level. Such neighbourhoods have distinct social economic and environmental advantages over the low-density suburban development common throughout Ireland in the last half-century.

These advantages include lower level of car dependence, greater social integration, less single use zones and greater access to social, community and commercial services. However, while there is a degree of consensus on the concept of sustainable neighbourhood, there is a risk that lack of coordination of government policy will effect the implementation of the new principles.

The National Spatial Strategy objectives have already been put to use by the Government’s decentralisation policy. Instead of concentrating on the decentralisation of its various departments to the gateways and hubs, government has opted for a solution, which disperses them randomly.

The inevitable effect of this policy will be for the city-region of Dublin to continue to grow and the prospect of balanced regional development to recede. This is a major challenge, which bears comparison with other challenges that Ireland has faced in the last half century.

It is essential to the social and economic future of our society. The achievements in reviving our capital city could not have been cancelled at the time of the Dublin – A City in Crisis conference in 1985. Let us hope that the next two decades can produce a similar success in the implementation of public policy for sustainable neighbourhoods and integrated development in the new extensions to our cities and towns.

To achieve this, however, we require a more widely shared understanding, and consistent implementation of the public policy principles by government, local authorities, planners, urban designers, architects and all those involved in the development of our cities and towns.