Commuter Counties: The losses from failing to plan effectively for the future are enormous, write Prof Frank Convery and Dr Peter Clinch, in response to The Irish Times series on Dublin's expanding commuter belt
The point of planning is to give ourselves and our successors the best possible quality of life. The evidence presented in The Irish Times over the past 10 days shows that we can outline a vision and prepare spatial plans, but we have great difficulty implementing them.
Psychological research tells us that people feel much more intensely about the costs of losing than the benefits of winning. So why, when it comes to spatial planning, do we afflict ourselves in this way, and what should we as a community be doing about it?
We lose water quality if we try to put too many septic tanks on soils that can't take them, or if they are not maintained. We lose beauty if landscapes are diminished and buildings of distinction are destroyed. And then we lose pride and we lose tourists, who rarely seek out ugliness.
We lose high-quality public transport, since we need a critical mass of business and housing along a route to make it viable. We lose good air quality and freedom of movement as congestion and pollution intensify. We lose social cohesion, especially our ability to support children and the elderly.
We lose our infrastructure, as scale is crucial to support everything from shops and post offices to electricity lines, broadband communication for digital technologies, proper sewage treatment plants, railways, roads and even the local pub, cinema or theatre.
These losses are inevitable unless we organise our living and working spaces at a scale and configuration that prevent them from being incurred.
So if the losses involved in not implementing plans are so huge, why don't we bother? Why do we afflict ourselves with bad or no spatial planning?
We used to live in a "steady state", a country where economic growth was modest and population growth even more so. We didn't really need to plan, because so little was happening. The ad-hoc, the "give it a lash", the nod-and-wink sufficed.
Despite the change in our economic circumstances, we remain ignorant. The careful, independent research that would give us focused and up-to-date information on the economic, social and environmental costs of planning choices has not been done.
One simple example: most of the west of Ireland depends on the tourism sector as its most fundamental economic underpinning. What do tourists think of one-off housing in the countryside? At what point will they say: "Enough, I'll never come back"?
Many of the poor planning costs are in the future. Boyle Roche observed, "Posterity be damned; what has posterity ever done for me?" We echo his sentiments today, as our "loadsamoney" culture builds up problems and passes them silently - and, for the most part, shamelessly - on to our children.
The capital gains for lucky landowners who are allowed to develop their lands are huge and growing. In our book After the Celtic Tiger (with Brendan Walsh), we estimated the gains from housing development alone at €800 million annually. These gains are large and pervasive - and they distort planning, even where there is no corruption involved.
Since only a few thousand hectares annually are developed for housing out of the several million hectares of land in the State, the odds of hitting the jackpot are low, unless someone - a politician or official - can be induced to put their finger on the wheel of fortune, and get it to stop at your number.
Meanwhile, many local authorities are too big to solve the small problems at local level and too small to solve the big ones; they lack the range of managerial, communication and technical skills needed to make planning work.
The incremental nature of development is part of the problem. For example, there are intimations that certain parts of Ireland will be "grey-listed" by independent tourist guides as "not worth a detour" because human ugliness has intruded one time too many on natural beauty.
Commuting distances, household spending on transport, car-based emissions and road rage have all increased, even as the European Commission intensifies its interest in the adequacy of our environmental protection efforts. So implementing plans does matter.
What to do?
The evidence from The Irish Times series provides several pointers. First, what to do about the decisions we've already made? Irish people are wonderfully resilient and coping well with the hand they've been dealt. They're embracing, and generally being embraced by, their new communities. "Blow-ins" can be a powerfully creative and positive force in any community if they are encouraged to contribute.
These capacities need to be harnessed in governing these rapidly expanding communities. We need new ways of governing ourselves so that, for example, villages that don't qualify for urban district status have some autonomy and real responsibility for their future.
We must radically improve the information available about what our choices really are, and their implications. And here we see a key role for the academic community. We need useful, relevant and timely information on the real costs and implications of planning choices for different configurations of land use.
This would include information on choices for the architectural and archaeological fabric; the minimum number of young people needed to provide a regular bus to college; the costs of providing water and sanitary services, telecommunications and broadband access, road maintenance and other infrastructure, including schools, services for the elderly, and transport.
We must also make it easy to retreat from bad planning, echoing the sentiment expressed by the Greek general Xenophon: "I should like the enemy to think that it is easy for him in all directions to retreat." This requires that we charge the full costs, as identified above, to development.
This will automatically channel development towards those sites and clusters where costs are minimal, and will ensure that a version of the "polluter pays" principle is applied. We have to address systematically the issue of "planning gain" - the distribution to the general of some of the benefits that accrue to the particular. One example is the US idea of transferable development rights, whereby the owners of land designated for conservation are assigned rights that they sell on to developers, say at the rate of one house per acre.
Under such a system, developers seeking to build houses on zoned land would have to buy development rights equivalent to the number of houses proposed, i.e., a developer of 200 houses would have to purchase 200 development right permits from those land-owners not allowed to build on their own land.
Finally, we must overcome our timidity about public land acquisition. Over a 60-year period, the former forestry division of the Land Commission did a thoroughly professional job of buying over half a million acres for the public, to create the forests and recreation areas we enjoy today.
We need a comparable sustained professionalism today, to buy - at full market price - the land needed for development, and then sell or lease it on to those who develop it either for housing, industry, transport infrastructure or whatever.
Above all, we need to lift the cloud of ignorance about environmental and financial costs that facilitates sundry modern-day rapparees to get their own land developed in ways that will cost the rest of us and our children for years to come.
Frank Convery is Heritage Trust professor of environmental studies at UCD, and Peter Clinch is senior lecturer and head of the department