Whatever about the actual buildings in the north-central Dublin markets scheme, urban space specialists have been drafted in to make the public spaces people-friendly, writes Emma Cullinan

THERE IS a lot of knitting going on in north Dublin and the result will be a whole new city fabric. In the DIT Grangegorman site, masterplan architects DMOD and Moore Ruble Yudel (along with other consultants) plan to create new routes through the site and knit it in to surrounding areas.

The same is now planned for the markets section of Dublin's north inner city - the area near the Four Courts from Capel Street over to the Motor Taxation office - which is to be redeveloped by a joint team comprising HKR Architects, Make Architects and Gehl Architects.

As with the Grangegorman scheme, Dublin practices have teamed up with architects from abroad, in this case Make, which is headed up by Ken Shuttleworth who used to work at Foster + Partners, and Gehl, headed up by Helle Søholt and Jan Gehl who wrote Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space in the 1970s (which was published in English in the 1980s).

It has become a seminal text among architects and urban planners and Gehl has been credited with the transformation of his home town of Copenhagen and the city's extensive pedestrianisation.

The developers are MRC (Markets Regeneration Consortium) which includes the Kelly and Linders families and Blackrock International (linked with Fyffes).

"We had a walkabout with Ken and Helle to get a response to the place and then sketched up ideas around a table," says Nick Sutton of HKR. "We wanted to find the character of the place and create something completely new with a great atmosphere while keeping that character."

When HKR worked on the masterplan for the Arnotts site they did studies that found Henry Street is one of the busiest streets in the world - "equal to Oxford Street - and yet it is just 200m away from the markets site. The markets are incredibly close, just a zig-zag beyond the end of Henry Street".

Sutton talks of Smithfield Square (where HKR did a scheme for the same developers) being a huge space that is still quite cut off from the rest of city.

"And the fruit and vegetable market is just 200m from there but it is out of people's mental map of Dublin."

The Heuston framework plan, Luas and hopefully more pedestrian friendly quays will help connect these areas to the city as will the new markets and Grangegorman schemes.

"The Luas passes the base of the market but you can't see it. Also the market activity happens very early and is pretty dead by late morning," says Sutton, who grew up in Cork, and cites how the English market has become part of that city.

The proposal here is to keep the original market building and 20 per cent of the scheme will remain in wholesale fruit and vegetable sales.

"We are looking at how to open up some of the gates or arches in the market hall, with the help of David Slattery, conservation architect."

They worked with the draft framework plan drawn up by Donnelly Turpin Architects, with its market hall in the middle of a formal square.

The Gehls proposed small spaces within that framework "to confine people so that they jostle together and live together in humane spaces. "Smithfield Square is massive and we were afraid of creating a second square of similar scale so close, so we tried to give a different feel to it," says Sutton.

"Hopefully it will act as a catalyst for other people to do things around it."