Urban Sprawl

Dublin City Council and the Institute of Public Administration hosted a conference in Croke Park Conference Centre on Successful Apartment Living - Combating Urban Sprawl.

The speakers were:
Tom Collins, Maynooth University (chair)
Paddy Bourke, Lord Mayor of Dublin
John Gormley, Green Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage & Local Government
Frank McDonald, Irish Times
Dr. Jane Gray, Social Sciences, Maynooth University
Henk van der Kamp, School of Spatial Planning, Dublin Institute of Technology
John Tierney, City Manager, Dublin City Council
John Bowman, RTÉ (chair)
Lars Fränne, Stockholm City Council, Sweden
Alex Ely, mæ architects
Hubert Fitzpatrick, Irish Homebuilders Association
Daithí Doolan, Sinn Féin councillor, chair of Strategic Policy Committee (SPC) dealing with planning
Mary Murphy, Labour councillor, chair of Housing, Social & Community Affairs SPC

There were about 220 people present and there were contributions from the floor from other Dublin City Councillors and the RIAI president, James Pike, amongst others.

I was extremely impressed with John Tierney and Alex Ely. I think John has great vision and ideas for leading the city of Dublin. Unfortunately, Alex spoke architecture-speak and I think it may have gone over the heads of a lot of the audience. He showed drawings of a scheme which displayed "permeability" and a variety of public-private spaces. A councillor in the audience commented that he was "in favour of gated housing schemes"! I think architects sometimes need to really explain drawings to clients/audiences. Point out the stairs on the street frontage where the resident enters their home and then can go out the back to the shared garden in contrast to a resident driving through a remote-controlled gate, to park their car in a shared space and scuttle in their own door. People without experience can't read all this from a drawing. There was also misunderstanding about high density=high rise. Alex argued it didn't, in fact density could drop with high-rise (I didn't take in the detail of this argument) but people weren't able to take this on board. I arrived home, to my one-and-half-storey on-street terraced city-centre house and it dawned on me that I am living in quite a high-density residential area myself. Look out my bedroom window at a tiny yard with bedroom extensions hanging off neighbouring houses. And there are 3 of us living in this 2-bed house so we're making good use of space. I should figure out the density in terms of floor area/footprint etc. I was also walking around the Peppercanister church area of the city and was amazed by the amount of mews houses and use that is made of laneways.

Departmental (D/EHLG) draft guidelines regarding minimum room sizes/ storage space etc were discussed a lot. And how they compared with the council's guidelines. Architects I spoke to afterwards claimed that the social housing they are designing is of a better standard, in terms of dimensions and thought, than those available on the market. Van der Kamp's talk was of the hierarchy of development plans (and guidelines). The order should be: national, regional, county, local; they lower ones adhere to those of a higher standing and are more specific.

Jane Gray has done research on people living in Ratoath, Leixlip, Mullingar and Lucan/Esker. She concluded they all like where they are living. And the commuter travelling from Mullingar-city centre Dublin isn't that extremely common.

Lars Fränne mentioned vacuuming-rubbish collection and how Sweden have abolished guidelines for minimum room dimensions etc.

Hubert Fitzpatrick gave the expected industry response regarding the financial loss homebuilders will make with the introduction of these new guidelines; apartments now have to be bigger. He also referred to the heating recommendations in the Building Regulations as if they were optimum and not absolute minimum. Worrying.

Frank McDonald related a nice story about growing up in the city centre and living there now. Pleasant.

As is proably usual with such conferences, there was very little conclusion.