This is a weighty book, at 2.6kg. Produced by the Irish Cities 2070 think tank, which is backed by the Irish Academy of Engineering and the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, it also deals with weighty issues – primarily how, and where, we might accommodate an anticipated population of up to 11 million on this island within the next 50 years.
Irish Cities in Crisis is a wide-ranging compendium of illustrated essays by multiple authors, all experts in their own fields. It’s billed as a “call to arms” for active engagement in reaching a consensus on how to meet this challenge – anchored by “sound planning principles” and the common good, rather than “individual or corporate agendas”.
The biggest obstacle, as its authors note, is the centralisation of power in Ireland, which leaves little autonomy for regional and local authorities – unlike in Europe, where successful city governments are “led by skilled mayors, politicians, planners, urban designers and others who collaborate to envision, plan, design and manage urban development”.
Given that five times as many planners here are currently employed in the private sector as in the public service, they argue that a paradigm shift is needed. “That is what this book is about – it describes where we are now, what changes need to be made in Irish attitudes to urbanism, what might the future of cities look like and how might we get there”.
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Decrying a rural bias that has bedevilled Irish planning for decades, it stresses the importance of cities as the “primary vehicles for economic growth, cultural development, education, sustainability and democracy”, and says the map of Ireland should be redrawn to create regions with a minimum population of 700,000, each anchored by a city of scale.
Although there is an acknowledgment that the Dublin region has “grown disproportionately, leading to severe regional imbalances across the country”, the authors put forward no prescription for rectifying this. Quite the contrary, in fact. Any attempt to curtail the capital’s growth is seen by demographer Brian Hughes as equivalent to the “self-harm” of Brexit.
Figures compiled by the Southern Regional Assembly show that the Dublin metropolitan area’s population increased by more than three times the combined figure for Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford between 2016 and 2022. This rather undermines Hughes’s contention that the 2018 National Planning Framework imposed a “growth cap” on Dublin.
Disappointingly, among the smaller four, only Galway gets detailed treatment in the book, which includes an already published Irish Cities 2070 analysis of the city, its strengths and weaknesses. Even though this stressed the need for better public transport and more active travel, it also endorsed the proposed N6 “relief route” that could facilitate yet more ex-urban sprawl.
Some of the most valuable insights in Irish Cites in Crisis are actually about cities elsewhere in Europe – Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Bristol, Copenhagen, Eindhoven, Freiburg, Leipzig and Málaga – and how they have managed planning, transport and urban design by contrast with us. The book also includes useful tool kits and checklists for practitioners.
But taking steps to ensure that each of the Republic’s “second-tier” cities acquires critical mass is barely addressed. Instead, the authors accept as inevitable that Dublin’s population will double by 2070 and that “the focus of much of Ireland’s future settlement expansion will continue to be in Leinster” – surely a recipe for consolidating regional imbalance.
As for where people would live, architect Tony Reddy puts forward a bold plan for “Nova Eblana” (Ptolemy’s name for Dublin) to build up to 70,000 homes on the 265 hectares of land occupied by Dublin Port – after it was replaced by a new port at Bremore, north of Balbriggan. Obviously, this new settlement would need to be protected from sea-level rise.
The emerging agglomeration around Drogheda – including Bettystown, Laytown and Mornington – is seen as a future city. Confusingly, it is rendered as “Drogheda BLM”, “Drogheda LBM” and even “Drogheda LBMD” in different tables in the text. Neither could I find any reference to the appalling levels of vacancy and dereliction in the town’s medieval core.
In a hard-hitting foreword, Freiburg’s former chief planner Prof Wulf Daseking condemns the “characterless” uniformity of new development in Ireland, saying “it is clear that investors dictate what happens” here. “The question of who is planning the city and who is responsible for it is crucial for the future: show me your city and I’ll tell you who you are!!!”
However, any idea that Ireland could move to more inclusive community-based planning has been set aside by the replacement in its entirety of the progressive 2000 Planning Act with the dystopian legislation recently rammed through the Oireachtas. It goes in the opposite direction, by reinforcing rigid centralised control over what happens at local level.
Frank McDonald is The Irish Times’s former environment editor. His books include The Destruction of Dublin, The Construction of Dublin, and A Little History of the Future of Dublin
