Michael McDowell: Dublin’s planners are failing to help our capital to flourish

Recent debate about the failure to provide a sense of security for Dubliners in the inner city, and especially in the north inner city, poses fundamental questions for those who love our capital and want it to flourish.

The contrast between night-time on O’Connell Street and its surrounding areas and, say, South William Street is obvious. One area is menacing for lone pedestrians; the other is raucous, perhaps, but not frightening. Even in daytime, the contrast exists in a slightly different form.

It is not a simple matter of policing, important though that is. For one thing, the south inner city is — excuse the phrase — a good deal more gentrified. That aspect of Dublin is not something new (the gentry mainly lived northside for a century), but we have to ask whether we are planning for and building an inner city that is truly liveable.

With few exceptions, urban planning in Dublin died with the reconstruction of O’Connell Street and the building of housing at Marino in the 1920s

Some people think that liveable means traffic-free, pedestrian- and bike-friendly. But liveability is far more than that. The most pleasant parts of our city were planned and built to be pleasant in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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With few exceptions, urban planning in Dublin (as distinct from the chaotic system of building permits which now passes for planning under the auspices of Dublin City Council and An Bord Pleanála) died with the reconstruction of O’Connell Street and the building of housing at Marino in the 1920s. Abercrombie’s plans for regeneration of Dublin have never been matched with any architectural vision since then.

Instead, we are left with a sprawling mess of recent inner-city building little of which is designed to be pleasant and much of which is discordant, ugly or at best sterile and bland. The architectural fetish of function dictating form is, in general, lacking in aesthetic coherence with surroundings streetscapes and places.

[ Una Mullally: Why has street life in Dublin city become so depressed? ]

Take, as one example, Kevin Street and Cuffe Street, the avenue between Georgian Dublin and what’s left of the Liberties. It’s a shocking mess — a jumble of discordant developments and misfitting edifices sited partly along an abandoned road-widening plan. Nobody has been required to adhere to a streetscape plan with any aesthetic component. The council’s own contribution (with the exception of the 1920s Mercer Street flats) is pitiful.

The former DIT Kevin Street site is now being massively redeveloped with three 14-storey blocks of build-to-rent apartments and 11-storey office blocks, leaving a 19th-century public library building as a stranded piece of architectural flotsam along the original street building line.

But the real question is whether anyone who walks from St Patrick’s Cathedral to St Stephen’s Green in two years’ time will say: “This is a fine and beautiful part of Dublin city”, or even “I’d love to live here”, or “Thank heavens that we had a planning service that had a vision for this urban avenue”. Fat chance.

Indeed, the very idea of a street seems to exist only as an inherited concept. When the City Council decided to knock down its own 1960s urban redevelopment in Ballymun, it created that master plan for what is still mainly an unattractive urban wilderness.

Dublin City Council simply doesn’t, and can’t, plan in any real sense of that term. It presides over an urban design accident with a few zoning restrictions. The council simply can’t build social housing any more. It used to do so on infill sites. It can’t be bothered doing so these days.

Taking two or three buses to do a daily commute, or to socialise, is not realistic

It seems that we have collectively surrendered to an era of engineering. Bus Connects is an example. A small group of social and traffic engineers have decided that a new layout and web of bus routes is the answer to urban mobility. But the routes, as planned, will not bring people to and from where and when they want to go. Taking two or three buses to do a daily commute, or to socialise, is not realistic.

Has anyone really studied the economic effects of large-scale bans on cars (even electric cars by 2030) on the commercial life of the inner city? Bike or bus doesn’t suit everyone. Just look at the largely empty buses that pass us down often deserted bus lanes in the inner city. Most people can’t afford to take a taxi to shop weekly in Lidl or Aldi — it doesn’t make sense.

The engineers tell us that spending between €15 billion and €20 billion on the metro is better value than spending that sum on a network of very light rail tramlines for Dublin and its suburbs. But is it?

The traffic engineers are now adjusting their traffic lights to create quarter-mile traffic jams even on Sunday mornings in the leafy suburbs where there were none two years ago. To what end?

None of this will be solved by a mere change in city management. We need real reform of local democracy — and we need it urgently.