Alive, alive-o . . . the face of Dublin’s future
19 December 2010
A vision for Dublin’s future will be revealed on Wednesday, when the city’s new development plan comes into effect.
The plan spans the six years from 2011 to 2017, but its creators see it as setting the tone for a much longer period. ‘‘As part of the public consultation, we asked people how they wanted to position the city, not just for the next six years, but for the next 20 or 25 years.
What sort of a city did they want for the next generation,” said John O’Hara, deputy city planning officer at Dublin City Council (DCC), with responsibility for special projects and the city development plan.
Work on the plan started more than two years ago, but O’Hara said it quickly became apparent that it would face different constraints to the plan for the previous six-year period.
‘‘We weren’t long into the review when the first indications came that the surge of the past ten years wasn’t going to continue. So we had a really radical reappraisal of where we were early in the review,” he said.
The new plan has three key objectives. For the first time, the city’s development plan has economic activity in the capital as a central tenet. ‘‘Economic recovery is paramount,” O’Hara said.
‘‘The second big thing is developing a sustainable, compact city, a European-style city,” he said. ‘‘And third is the idea of creating good neighbourhoods in the city.”
Attracting families back into the city centre is a key focus of the plan. O’Hara said a big part of this was moving away from the ‘‘monolithic apartment blocks’’ that had become more popular in the last five or six years. He said the city needed new types of housing that catered for different types of people at different stages of their lives.
Eileen Quinlivan, senior executive officer for the planning department at DCC and a close colleague of O’Hara in producing the city’s development plan, stressed the importance of creating quality living space for families. ‘‘It is important to make sure that the facilities are there in an area as well.
There’s a mix of things that people need,” she said.
As part of the plan to creating a living, breathing city, with family life at its heart, the city council is looking at developing older red-bricked residential areas as hubs of family activity and also increasing the quality and size of apartments to encourage families to view them as a viable living space.
However, as planners, they face a difficult balancing act, marrying Dublin’s heritage with its future.
This is a challenge that O’Hara feels the city is managing well. ‘‘The old part of the city has kept its intimate character, its narrow streets.
The test of the success is that people can point to the aberrations very easily,” he said, adding that easily identifiable examples of where the city had got it wrong meant that, ‘‘by and large the rest of the city is intact’’.
Quinlivan said that the new plan has an eye to both the future and the past. ‘‘There are policies in there looking for good contemporary modern architecture, but we also have designated a number of architectural conservation areas,” she said.
According to O’Hara, Dublin has 9,000 protected structures, which he thinks is too many. ‘‘You don’t need each individual house in a terrace of Victorian or Edwardian houses to be protected. But they do merit being in an architectural conservation area,” he said.
By relaxing the rules on listed buildings, O’Hara said it made it easier for families to move into some of the city’s oldest quarters.
Currently, hefty insurance premiums and expensive upkeep costs associated with listed buildings deter many families. ‘‘We want to take the burden off the individual but maintain the character of these areas,” he said.
In his view, maintaining an area’s aesthetic quality is important. ‘‘You keep the chimneys, the slates, the red brick fronts, the railings in front and that sort of character,” he said.
Juxtaposed with this charm and character is a modern Dublin, a city characterised by glass and chrome and sleek lines. High buildings continue to play a part in the city’s future, but only in appropriate areas, O’Hara said.
‘‘Amid all the discussion, there has been a general acceptance that the areas identified for mid-rise and high-rise are the right areas. Areas like the Docklands, Heuston, George’s Quay and bits of the north fringe, near Ballymun,” he said.
Developing a more compact city with higher density gives rise to other issues. ‘‘The corollary of that is that you have to have quality green and blue space,” O’Hara said. ‘‘The coast is an important part of that.”
As a coastal city, with rivers and canals, Dublin is somewhat defined by the flow of water. Quinlivan cited the development of the city’s east/ west axis, from Heuston to the Docklands, as one of the biggest successes in recent years.
‘‘It gives the opportunity for the river to be more of a part of the city,” she said. Further ahead, Dublin’s water could play an even bigger role in the city. ‘‘In the long term, there’s a thinking that perhaps – like places like Barcelona – more could be made of the coast by bringing residential and recreational [development] to areas like Poolbeg,” O’Hara said.
However, developing coastal areas of the city would require consideration of the future of Dublin port. ‘‘It has a valuable economic function where it is. You wouldn’t think about opening up the coast totally until you had an appropriate relocation for the port,” he said.
Economic considerations feature heavily in the new plan, as economic objectives overlap with issues such as social planning and urban regeneration. For example, the city council proposes to undertake an audit of vacant buildings.
‘‘With the recession, there is an increasing number of vacant shop units and also vacant sites,” O’Hara said. ‘‘It’s important for the vitality of the city. Areas of dead frontage give a poor image.
There’s a creeping negativity about it.”
The city plans to curtail urban sprawl and try to attract businesses back into the city centre, to ensure vacant space is used.
Another plan to revitalise jaded parts of the city is to allow artists to temporarily use vacant buildings as studios. O’Hara pointed to cities like Marseille and Bordeaux as positive examples of cities that have reinvented themselves, describing them as ‘‘a bit jaded in the past’’, but now ‘‘made civically attractive’’.
‘‘Everything that’s in the plan is about building on the features of the city and what’s good about the city, so that it becomes a place where people want to live and work,” Quinlivan said.
Making the city an attractive place to be also has broader objectives, and feeds into the economic recovery theme that underlies many of the proposals in the plan.
‘‘We have an emphasis on branding Dublin and trying to identify what the city is and how we can market ourselves internationally,” Quinlivan said.
No city has just one identity, one brand, one key feature. O’Hara sees cities as fluid creatures, changing at every twist and turn and developing alongside their populations. ‘‘Dublin is an intimate city, where people get to know each other very quickly.
There are multiple identities really – the Georgian architecture, the Liffey, the Guinness brewery and so on.”
This intimacy that small cities breed is one of Dublin’s strongest features, according to O’Hara.
‘‘Cities are about trade, and trading ideas. If you have the facility in a city whereby people can trade ideas, that means the city becomes a creative one and there is a buzz about it,” he said.
‘‘As planners, we can’t make that happen, but we can facilitate it with good quality urban design.”
He recognises that there are other things that planners can’t do and other issues that this new plan can’t fully tackle.
‘‘There’s always an ambition to have amore socially integrated city.
That’s my biggest regret, but I don’t know what planning can do for that. It’s a bigger issue than planning alone.”
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