If the development plans for Dublin city of the past 30 years may be said to have had themes, those of the 1960s and 1970s had a bias towards engineering; and those of the 1980s and 1990s were concerned with getting the land uses of the city right. The 1998 Draft Plan has civic design as its theme.
The draft will replace the 1991 plan and is two years late. It is a tighter, slimmer document than its predecessor - nine maps compared to eight in the last one, 81 pages of a written statement compared to 304 pages last time, and the number of zones has been reduced from 18 to 15. It builds upon the success of the 1991 plan - and the 1991 plan was very successful in delivering its objectives. The draft plan recognises that the future engines of growth in the city will be finance, arts/culture and tourism, whereas the drivers of the 1980s plans were retail, office and education. The natural and manmade amenities of the city are seen as its principal strengths.
The emphasis is not purely on conservation however, and good new architecture is welcomed, particularly where it will contribute to the two principal civic design objectives - the reinstatement and development of the quays as the city's unifying civic design element, and the development of a civic thoroughfare from Christchurch Place to Parnell Square. These initiatives reflect the civic design interests of the City Planning Officer, Mr Pat McDonnell, and the input of the City Architect, Mr Jim Barrett.
This civic design-led approach is to be extended throughout the city. In a most helpful initiative, it is intended to prepare guidelines for each of the conservation areas, indicating in design terms the nature of development which is acceptable on each site.
This will go hand-in-hand with the development of a network of non-statutory Integrated Area Plans, together with a flexible approach towards the preparation of Local Plans, so that specific area-based initiatives can be pursued.
The reinforcement of the core of the city is the key strategy of the plan, with the present city centre zonings extended eastwards and westwards along the Liffey. Other significant changes from the previous plan include:
Where institutional or public facilities are developed for residential purposes, a minimum of 20 per cent of the site will be required as public open space, whilst residential uses are removed from the "Permissible" into the "Open for Consideration" category, presumably to try to hold on to the valuable facilities which these institutions represent. At the same time, new residential land is brought into the city land bank at Pelletstown and the "North Fringe".
The central shopping area of the city is extended significantly to the west of Capel Street and two new pedestrian bridges are proposed to link the north and south city areas with a new pedestrian walkway constructed along the inner wall of the Liffey between Capel Street Bridge and O'Connell Street.
In the suburbs, a major speciality leisure/retail development will be provided at Oscar Traynor Road and a hotel/conference centre at Alfie Byrne Road, Fairview, in tandem with a feasibility study to examine the creation of a marine lake at Clontarf. In the Rathmines, Ranelagh and Rathgar areas, the possibility of securing new public parks or a number of pocket parks will be investigated.
A new zoning category has been introduced for the central area, whose objective is "to identify, reinforce and strengthen its civic design character and dignity", which contrasts with the previous zoning whose objective was simply "to provide for and improve city centre activities". The plan is to be based on a partnership with local communities, particularly in the preparation of local plans for their own areas and neighbourhoods. For a system over-stretched with development control in the current boom, one hopes the devotion of staff resources to this admirable aim can be achieved. As a connoisseur of development plans, I think it would have been helpful if some of the more enticing civic design initiatives had been fleshed out. It contains some interesting anomalies and nuggets, such as the location of the Taoiseach's Office in a zone whose objective is to improve recreational amenity, and the introduction of a long-overdue policy on the regulation of pigeon lofts.
To the ordinary citizen, this may seem a rather legalistic document, but enthusiasm and ambition keep breaking through. If this plan can be swiftly adopted, the next five years should be exciting.
Fergal MacCabe is a planning consultant and a past president of the Irish Planning Institute