DDDA / Docklands Miscellany

[ctesiphon]

None of the existing docklands-related threads seem ideal for this link, so I thought a general thread for our flagship urban regeneration area might be useful- links, rants, etc..

http://www.planetizen.com/node/30049

Originally Posted by opening and closing paragraphs

Dublin’s city center provides an affable and increasingly active street-oriented urbanism. Its medieval, organic roots underlie a more formal 18th century Georgian aesthetic, which gives the city an elegant and coherent irregularity. The city’s streets and passages are lined with a steady cadence of shopfronts, a messy mixture of uses integrated vertically and horizontally, and enough street activity to inspire a revised version of Jane Jacobs' Hudson Street ballet. Indeed, Dublin’s famous doors open to the street with a wonderful rhythm. People in, people out. It’s a beautiful thing to observe and an even better thing in which to to participate. That is exactly what my girlfriend and I did on a recent vacation.

A walk across Dublin’s historic center is a walk through a series of interconnected rooms. The city has a sense of controlled breadth and a larger sense of volume through linear quays, symmetrical squares and even a few “geometrically aware” streets. Its cranky streets, tight lanes, and sweeping curves provide character and a warm feeling of enclosure. The collision of the two, where one grand room meets a small enclosed room, creates a punctuated sense of arrival into each. The urban energy hums in harmony with a constant ebb and flow between the two. This draws the urbanist from one place to the next, always in pursuit of the city’s next move. The rhythm is intoxicating.


The City's emerging Docklands district sings a more sobering song.

[... ... ...]

All is not bad in the Docklands, and I do not want to be overly critical before the development has a chance to settle and grow into itself. Urbanism takes time. Nonetheless, I fear the leaders of this massive undertaking have, like so many before them, come down with a case of urban amnesia. Only time will tell. [my bold]

The bit in bold hits the nail on the head for me.

[gunter]

Apart from the nail on the head comment on the docklands, there's actually nothing you say about this. It's authentic urban gibberish. (to paraphrase Blazing Saddles)

[alonso]

"it is both a problem of architecture and urbanism -- not of style, but of substance. It's as if the new international style, seen on the edges of an increasing number of European cities, simply refuses to integrate the empirical evidence of successful urbanism"

I think this is a key point. We tend to plan out the randomness of cities in new urban quarters. We see the success of disorder all over the world and on our doorsteps yet when designing new places we aim for something else. The article highlights for me the most important element of our built urban environments - ground floors. The Pearse street / Macken St example is a great one as it's a shockingly ignorant treatment of the outside environment and the ocntrast between Docklands and the old city is plain for all to see, which is the point of the article

[jimg]

I loved Jonathan Meads' critique of the "regeneration" industry. I missed the start of the program and thought he was specifically talking about the Dublin docklands. I can't do justice to Meads' droll, intelligent and piercing criticism - maybe the program can be bittorrented or something. The DDDA are just apeing a blueprint that has been applied to cities all over Europe over the last 10 or 15 years so the mistakes are not peculiar to Dublin.

[paul h]

The problem i see with the docklands or any new large scale development, is the lack of steet life

legal disclaimer -bear in mind these are only my quick casual observances!!
and im sure im out of my depth here.....

the ground floor of any substantial building needs to integrate some forms of small ground floor commercial businesses

The main street of IFSC1 i think Mayor st? could have been so much better if every building had the ground floor chopped up into small retail units fronting onto the street.
Like small deli , restaurant , dentist , chipper, locksmith etc etc. (emphasis on promoting small business) Not huge entire ground floors given over to large corporate chain stores
When i was around there last there was a single spar for the entire area, nothing more to entice anyone to venture inside past the guards at the gate on Amiens street. Very dull

Also down at the new Point area i think has some form of shopping centre/mall being built, and a huge open plaza? i may be wrong.
Wide open spaces and enclosed shopping centres, as far as i can see, are no way to create a buzzing urban environment

[notjim]

Paul h: It actually gets better in this respect as you go down Mayor St; from Common Street on most ground level space has a shop front and there is the large plaza area outside the NCI. That isn't to say it isn't dull depressing and soulless, it is because of the drab architecture, the artificiality and the boring shops, but it isn't for the want of small shop units and it is definitely better here than in the first, suburban business park-like section, from Common St to Amien St.

[ctesiphon]

Originally Posted by gunter

Apart from the nail on the head comment on the docklands, there's actually nothing you say about this. It's authentic urban gibberish.

Well, it was posted more for information than anything else, and I didn't think it required annotation. (And my feelings on the subject are pretty well documented on other threads already.)

I do agree that it's a bit gibberishy (gibberishish?), but I find it interesting all the same that such opinions are finding their way into the wider (internet) world, rather than being the preserve of a handful of local critics on this forum.

Time for the DDDA to hire more staff in the Marketing Dept.?

[gunter]

I'd sooner let this one go by and wait for a less 'intoxicated' review to come along, but he has a clear take on the many failings of the docklands, so maybe it's worth looking again at his comments on the historic city.

'A walk across Dublin's historic center is a walk through a series of interconnected rooms'.

Surely Dublin is one of the few European cities where this isn't the case! I can't think of two urban spaces in Dublin that are contextually complementary. You can find them within institutions, Dublin Castle (upper Castle Yard to Lower Castle Yard), Trinity (the smaller squares to parliement Sq.), but in the actual urban fabric?

Even the relationship of Parliement Sq. in Trinity, to College Green is compromised by the fortress scale railings and the volume of traffic.

'The city has . . . a sense of volume through linear quays, symetrical squares and even a few geometrically aware streets'

We've got to stop trotting out this fiction that Dublin has great squares. Our Georgian Squares are not urban squares in the way that they appear on a small scale map. They are the enclosed parks of 18th century housing estates. The best of our spaces, 17th century Stephen's Green, is a wonderful urban park, but it's not an urban space in the sence of a legible enclosure, it's too big to read as an urban space.

The best urban spaces that Dublin had were Smithfield, Newmarket and Weavers Sq., and look at these today. They are either imitation docklands, or they're probably about to become imitation docklands.

I agree with his emphasis on the quays, but the quays disappoint as much as they excite.

Paul Keogh wrote a good article in the Irish Times at the start of the docklands redevelopment, when the Kevin Roche scheme was on the table. If I can find it I'll try to scan it onto this thread. I think he covered a lot of this ground, and it might be interesting to see how his analysis stands up now that so much has been developed.

[ctesiphon]

Might this be the one?

Originally Posted by Irish Times 18.iii.99

Docklands plan should look beyond profit

The debate so far about the proposed development of six million square feet at Spencer Dock has focused on its density, its height and its likely impact on vistas from O'Connell Bridge or the "Georgian Mile" of Fitzwilliam Street. But it could be argued that these are not the only issues of importance.

The critical issue, it seems to me, is whether the Docklands area of Dublin is going to be developed to meet the real needs of the city or simply exploited for short-term gain and commercial expediency.

It is timely now to reflect on the 1997 draft master plan for Docklands. This was an inspirational document, well-researched and optimistic, which projected a future for the Docklands as an area of real employment and lifestyle mix. Mr Lar Bradshaw, chairman of the Dublin Docklands Development Authority, said at the time - in December 1997 - that it would be "a living, breathing and self-sustaining community" developed in a focused, sustainable manner.

There was talk of a landmark project, such as an opera house or an Olympic-sized swimming pool and, at face value, the Spencer Dock consortium's proposal to build the long-delayed National Conference Centre at North Wall Quay. It seemed to be a project consistent with the concept of developing the Docklands as a new urban district.

Here was an opportunity to make a landmark building relating the Docklands to the wider city. As the first public building of the new century, it would have to be a first-rate architectural statement, a worthy successor to the other great public buildings on the River Liffey: the Custom House, the Four Courts and Heuston Station.

Examples of similar projects elsewhere include the Sydney Opera House, the Portuguese pavilion at last year's Lisbon Expo and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. If these were used as models, it would suggest that the National Conference Centre should have been treated as a major civic project.

Because of the Government's refusal to fund its construction (apart from earmarking it for a £25 million EU grant) and the question mark over some urban renewal tax incentives, it has now become reduced to an appendage of an over-scaled American-style speculative development rather than the centrepiece of a new urban neighbourhood in the city.

If the current plan is approved, it will inevitably set a precedent for the development of the overall Docklands area. Unless there is a radical rethink, this would result in the area being developed purely as a commercial real estate exercise rather than the sustainable urban community promised in the master plan.

It is no coincidence that the predominant architectural influence behind the pressure for this type of high-rise development in Dublin is American - Skidmore Owings and Merrill at George's Quay and Roche Dinkeloo at Spencer Dock; they both come from the milieu of US corporate architecture, which is singularly inappropriate as a model for urban renewal in historic European cities.

To understand this argument, it is necessary to reflect on the difference between European and American cities. The classic idea of the European city - what Richard Rogers calls the "Compact City" - is dense and diverse, a city where economic and social activities mix and where urban communities are focused around neighbourhooods.

BY contrast, few American cities resemble this model; in response to profit imperatives, rather than social or cultural objectives, they are zoned in concentric circles, with a central business district surrounded by ghettos and then by a band of suburban, car-based residential compounds, all within an outer ring of office parks and shopping malls.

Kevin Roche - undoubtedly the pre-eminent Irish architect of his generation - left Dublin in 1948 to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology with Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hillersiemer, both figures reputed for their pathological opposition to the European urban model, even though they were European emigres to the US.

In Architecture, A Crash Course, Hilary French rates Roche's Ford Foundation in New York as one of the greatest buildings of all time. But despite such unsurpassed achievements, he has never built in Ireland and has no experience of working in a European city of Dublin's scale. After 50 years largely spent in the US corporate culture, he may well be culturally disconnected.

By comparison, many among the generation that graduated from the schools of architecture in Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s gained direct experience of the European urban renaissance of the last 20 years by going to work for the likes of Stirling and Rogers in London or Klieheus in Berlin. They were also influenced by the urban theories of Colin Rowe, the Krier brothers and Aldo Rossi.

When these architects came back to practise in Ireland in the 1980s, they got involved in projects such as the Quays Project and Making a Modern Street, which challenged the dominant planning policies of the time, based on zoning, road plans and suburban expansion, and proposed instead the idea of consolidating the city with new buildings and mixed uses and urban spaces.

The great success of the Temple Bar project, ironically in an area once targeted for a bus station designed by SOM, was achieved through further elaboration of these ideas. The HARP project on the northside, which is an equally exciting project about restoring the grain of the historic centre, and the project for O'Connell Street are further examples.

The achievements of the new Irish architecture have been noted abroad, most recently by Yves Lion, a leading French architect, who wrote in his introduction to this year's AAI awards that he could sense the "vigour" of contemporary Irish architecture, as exemplified by the work he had seen. It was "modern architecture as it ought to be", rooted in tradition yet looking confidently to the future.

One would have hoped, therefore, that we had left behind the era of redevelopment projects in the city based on the anti-urban ideology of American planning - the ideology that produced Hawkins House, the Central Bank, the Civic Offices and SOM's plan for the bus station in Temple Bar. It would be a cruel irony if development projects based on this model again became the norm.

The 51-acre Spencer Dock site is the right size for creating a sustainable urban community with between 5,000 and 10,000 people, including families, with associated work, social and educational facilities. What is now proposed, however, has no connection to the wider Docklands area, the structure of the city or the scale and grain of Gergian Dublin.

Not only does the present plan represent the squandering of a unique opportunity, it would also be a reversal of the aspirations of Dublin as a European city and would set a precedent for further such schemes. If the Docklands development is given over to the culture of corporate capitalism, it would be an unfortunate aberration in what has been a very positive tendency in Irish architecture and urban design.

The five or six-storey urban street is still a perfectly valid model, even for the 21st century. What has been proposed for Spencer Dock raises issues of scale, use, typology, architectural character and, not least, the quality of its open spaces in their high-rise setting.

If the cost of the conference centre in urban terms is that we lose what might have been the opportunity of the Millennium to construct a whole city quarter for the first time since the 18th century, it is highly questionable whether we should proceed with the project at all.

To paraphrase Ms Giovanna Melandri, the Italian Minister for Culture, the urban environment is one of our greatest assets - "our equivalent of mines and oilfields". It is much too precious to be sacrificed for short-term commercial expedience.

Paul Keogh is an architect in private practice, a Fellow of the RIAI and from 1991 to 1998 a member of Group 91, the team of architects who developed the Temple Bar Framework Plan.

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/pro...031800184.html

[gunter]

The focus of the Keogh article (the whole Kevin Roche, Spencer Dock Plan) may be history, but there's still a lot of relevance in that statement, in amongst all the shameless self promotion and the hostages to fortune, (5 - 6 storeys! this is the man with the 32 storey Heuston tower in his cv).

I imagine this was all minutely dissected by archiseek at the time, but it worth a second look.

[notjim]

Originally Posted by gunter

Even the relationship of Parliement Sq. in Trinity, to College Green is compromised by the fortress scale railings and the volume of traffic.

I hope you are not criticizing the front railings: I always think that along with their obvious grace, they succeed in forming a satisfying ante-chamber to the college, a semi-public space convenient for rendez--vous.

[alonso]

Originally Posted by gunter

'A walk across Dublin's historic center is a walk through a series of interconnected rooms'.

Surely Dublin is one of the few European cities where this isn't the case! I can't think of two urban spaces in Dublin that are contextually complementary. You can find them within institutions, Dublin Castle (upper Castle Yard to Lower Castle Yard), Trinity (the smaller squares to parliement Sq.), but in the actual urban fabric?

I may have done this badly but I interpreted the "rooms" not as urban squares or spaces specifically. I interpreted it as collections of streets and micro-districts (almost corresponding to the DCC Environmental Traffic Cells). I'll name a few to try and illustrate my point:

Grafton St and surrouding streets
The Clarendon/Exchequer/George;s/King St Block
Camden - Wexford street
The traditional Georgian Area / Office quarter in D2
O'Connell Bridge
College Green
plus Temple Bar and Docklands itself

It;s a very legible old City where distinct character areas cling together but remain different

[gunter]

Originally Posted by notjim

I hope you are not criticizing the front railings: I always think that along with their obvious grace, they succeed in forming a satisfying ante-chamber to the college, a semi-public space convenient for rendez--vous.

The front railings of Trinity are a sacred cow, they're great railings, but imagine a College Green without them and without the unusable manicured lawns, what a space that would be.



Tudor's print of College Green from front of Trinity. (McCullough's book).

alonso, Maybe I misunderstood the 'rooms' terminology. Dublin still doesn't feel cohesive to me in the way that it does to that urban reviewer. I don't know how his urban sensibilities are calibrated, but If that's how impressed he is with Dublin, surely if he landed in Venice, his head would explode.

[notjim]

You think; I think that without the railings it would be a nothing space, just another part of college green mess.

[johnglas]

Not if the whole function of College Green was better thought out; I thought that was the whole point.

[missarchi]

All of these new rail developments are exciting and take place alongside a bus service that is, and will remain the work–horse of the public transport system in the Dublin area. That is why we have funded the purchase of additional and replacement buses by Dublin Bus to the tune of €45 million in 2006 and 2007 and why Transport 21 will continue to underpin major investment in bus services up to 2015.

I welcome in particular the fact that the project has been delivered three months ahead of schedule and is expected to be completed significantly under budget, at approximately €20 million. I congratulate Iarnród Éireann and its contractors and advisors on this achievement, which maintains Iarnród Éireann’s good record of delivering major projects on time and within budget.

April the 14th is coming : )

does this picture make any sense to you at all...
reminds me of tara station except alot nicer at 20 million and the context is nice and plain
was tara always meant to be a temporary station it sure looks like it???

[ctesiphon]

A few bits of interest:

The Analog Concert series has just been announced- http://www.analogconcerts.ie

From that site, I discovered that the DDDA has a Flickr account- some nice shots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10258928@N04/

In particular, some good ones of CHQ / Stack A: http://www.flickr.com/photos/1025892...7602958327839/

Also, this article was in last Saturday's Irish Times. I meant to post it earlier.

Docks loaded with history Saturday, April 5, 2008

YOU MIGHT find it in a Caneletto oil of London, or a 15th century woodcut of Germany's Hanseatic Lübeck. The late 18th-century artist James Malton evoked it in one of his many images of Gandon's Dublin, writes Lorna Siggins.

A resolutely romantic relationship between port city and its waterfront is captured in Malton's The Marine School, which hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland.

It's an image we cling to and we reproduce in thousands of prints and posters and postcards, in spite of rapidly changing commercial realities. Nothing unusual in this, according to Dr Cindy McCreery, who noted, in a study of paintings with the British National Maritime Museum, that our interpretations of ports have long reflected the "ideal".

In fact, engravings or prints of original works could be perceived as a form of public relations by the very nature of the wider audience they reached, she suggested. This representation varied - from busy commercial hub to military target, from centre of civilisation to lonely outpost in a troubled colony. In providing both access to, but also protection from, the marine environment, ports symbolised "man's desire for exploration, trade, war and contemplation" and provided fruits for "investigating the complex history of man's relationship with the sea".

Niamh Moore hasn't dared to undertake such a bold challenge, but she does touch on several aspects of this complex relationship in an Irish context as part of her research on recent changes in Dublin's docklands. The emphasis is on "recent", for she makes clear at the outset that this is not a comprehensive history. Significantly, it is the fourth in a series of geographic perspectives on the making of Dublin city, edited by Dr Joseph Brady and Prof Anngret Simms of University College Dublin.

IT'S AN opportune time, given the lobbying by the Progressive Democrats before the last general election for relocation of Dublin port to Bremore, north of Balbriggan. It seems like heresy, for those who believe the capital owes its very existence to the harbour but, as its advocates point out, it reflects international trends.

Commercial interests are already eyeing up the potential of 263 hectares or 650 acres of "real estate" - a term used by DTZ Sherry FitzGerald's Mairead Furey in a recent article for this newspaper. Dublin port may reach operational capacity this year, she noted. This left the Government with two options - reclamation of some 21 hectares (52 acres) of Dublin Bay, which is already a controversial issue on the north side, or relocation.

In her study, Moore notes that the port has moved several times before. The refuge which the Vikings sailed into - a voyage recreated by the replica longship, Sea Stallion, last summer - was not a natural harbour. Tidal, rocky, and with a tendency to frequent siltation, it became graveyard for many ships over centuries, as documented by maritime historians such as the late Dr John de Courcy Ireland.

"Managing and taming the Liffey" has been an enterprise as old as the city itself, and an examination of early maps indicates extensive land reclamation on both sides of the river channel. Quays were built along the northern edge of what was then a town wall to improve navigation and berthage.

The port's migration allowed for the city's expansion, and the Grand Canal docks to facilitate bigger ships. The early 19th century survey of Dublin Bay by Capt John Bligh - he of Bounty mutiny fame - influenced construction some 20 years later of the North Bull Wall, to complement the South Wall and to improve the natural scouring effect of the channel.

However, changing shipping demands influenced a move farther east to deeper water. As industrialisation took hold in the late 19th century, large tracts of land became available for gas and coke works, chemical works and slaughterhouses - reinforcing a separation of the city. Parts of land abandoned in the easterly transit were recolonised by the State, Moore notes - such as construction of Busáras by Coras Iompar Éireann from 1941, and the development, by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, of a new postal sorting office at Sherriff Street in 1950.

Such stakeholder involvement represented a significant challenge in a far more difficult economic environment. Not surprisingly, the docklands have been synonymous with a very different kind of energy over the past two decades, reflecting an international trend in ports like Boston, Tokyo, Cape Town and St Petersburg. Movement away from manufacturing and heavy industry to service sectors, and the growing popularity of cheap airline flights over passenger ferries, has resulted in abandonment of industrial areas which had been developed close to port zones.

Perhaps the greatest impact on dockland activity has been the widespread adoption of containerised shipping, Moore notes. In the 1960s, loading and offloading in Dublin port, mainly by manual labour, could take four to 10 days. This has been reduced to six to eight hours, with minimal manual input - and consequent disengagement from communities which had been associated with and dependent on employment generated there.

Projects undertaken by organisations such as the St Andrew's Heritage Group recorded the dramatic nature of these changes: "It was a fantastic sight to see so many men in the darkness of the morning going down to a little wooden boat to go across the river to get work on the Dublin docks," a 1992 study by the group recalled. However, the little wooden boats began to return with ever larger numbers who hadn't been called that day. "It went into hundreds, getting turned away for work . . . very depressing it was." And so Dublin's docklands, synonymous with poverty in the 19th century, became destitute again in the 20th century among residents in local authority housing and flats constructed between the 1930s and 1950s in the Ringsend, Pearse Street and Sheriff Street areas. Curiously, it was during one of the most economically and politically unstable periods of the latters years of the last century that a deal brokered by former taoiseach Charles J Haughey with a newly elected inner-city independent TD, Tony Gregory, marked a new and significant stage in Dublin docklands' future.

Moore records the fascinating detail of the so-called "Gregory deal" of 1982, in which Haughey pledged £91 million for housing and related developments in the inner city in return for Tony Gregory's support for a minority government. It wasn't to last, as the government fell nine months later, but Gregory has since argued that it provided the impetus for urban renewal.

The subsequent Urban Renewal Act 1986 singled out the nationalised Customs House Docks for rejuvenation, through the Customs House Docks Development Authority (CHDDA). Haughey, through his association with financier Dermot Desmond, committed the government to the development of an international financial services centre.

OVER THE past 10 years of economic boom, vacant piers and empty warehouses have become the focus of capital reinvestment and property speculation - and controversy. The financial services centre has proved to be an international success, but at a social cost. Promised public space has come with a blandness, an anonymous identity and a level of surveillance and control - a criticism levelled at many cities reconstructing themselves in the face of global competition, says Moore.

The CHDDA's replacement by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA) has resulted in a "high-level, interventionist approach to social need", Moore believes, including the contribution of the local community to solving its own issues. However, she acknowledges that there is no consensus among a number of community groups on the DDDA's democratic credentials.

The DDDA is due to expire in 2012, and Moore believes the real test will come when management of this part of the city returns to the local authority - or perhaps to a new body established to manage both land and sea environments.

The docklands are still evolving. There are plans for major projects such as the new performing arts centre at Grand Canal Docks, a national conference centre at Spencer Dock and the relocation of the Abbey Theatre to George's Dock. These may provide a new cultural regeneration, but will do little for informal interaction, Moore believes. In any case, the "reinvention" is very far from over.

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/wee...320880666.html

[gunter]

Originally Posted by ctesiphon

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/wee...320880666.html

If Dublin port (except the passenger ferry element) up stakes and moves to Bremore, there is little doubt that this will contribute to a creeping conurbation of the east coast, as predicted by Conor Skehan (see The Skehan/Sirr Plan thread).

As I understand it, Bremore is the child of a property development company, not a transportation company. You don't have to be a twisted cynic to figure out that the motivation behind Bremore could be as much to do with creating a property developers paradise out of an featureless headland (Prof. George Eogan's mounds aside) as it is about catering for the nation's expanding business in freight trade.

Then there is the property developers paradise painstakingly created on all that reclaimed land that the port authority will be vacating. You don't have to be a twisted cynic to figure out that maybe half this reclaimed land may have been reclaimed for exactly this purpose in the first place, under the guise of 'urgently needed additional space to serve an exponential increase in container traffic', or words to that effect.

Remember a few years ago when some naive parties suggested shifting some of the port's vast container parks and bulk storage facilities inland a bit to take the pressure off the demands for more land reclamation at the port, and then they were never heard of again, and their seemingly logical idea got buried so deep it will take an archaeologist to dig it up.

If a modern port is just a giant machine taking containers off one mode of transport and sticking them on another, why can't it be made like a machine?, several oil rigs welded together, and stuck out in the bay like some intriguing distant aircraft carrier joined to the nation's road and rail network by some cheap sunken tube tunnels and forget about creating another sprawling industrial mega-compound with limitless development potential all over Prof. Eogan's burial mounds.

Dublin and it's port would stay connected, the drive to east coast conurbation would hit a small bump in the road, and the existing port lands can still become a great new Post Port Urban Coastal Quarter, or whatever the terminology will be in 2050.

Sorry about the low grade graphics.

I notice from the Admiralty chart of Dublin Bay, that the boundary of the Dublin Port Authority extends out beyond the line of Howth / Killiney to the 'Burford Bank', which means that they would have the authority to do this if they wanted to. Though with their track record they'd probably try to turn it into a sprawling reclaimed island that would eventually join up with Dublin's two premier property hot spots, Howth and Dalkey.

[Rory W]

The Bremore plan is the child of the Drogheda Port Company who have brought in Treasury as a development partner. The development at Bremore is to handle the moving of port traffic from Drogheda port as the existing facilities at Tom Roes point are at (or beyond) capacity. The plan to move Dublin port to a shared facility at Bremore will involve the expansion of the proposed facility there.

[gunter]

That sounds like it has 'half assed' written all over it.

[Rusty Cogs]

The draft 2008 master plan is available for viewing on the ddda website.

http://www.dublindocklands.ie/index....pID=97&nID=123

[GP]

I can’t understand the anti private sector anti Treasury nonsense but in any event they have Shanghai and other experience and a look at Yangshan Port will show the possibilities of building out, naturally the scale of such an endeavourer in Ireland would be less but it would be worth considering. Treasury seems to me to have some ideas. The current port authority is not exactly creative. Move the cargo port out to sea, somewhere off Balbriggan or wherever, but connected to the Newbridge/M1 outer motorway and the Dublin / Belfast rail line.

Dublin is a grubby mid sized European city that misses out on the vision thing. The port area is over 600 acres in old money and if we did a Dubai or Barcelona with it would be perfect. Even if we went up 8 floors and built on 30% of the land we would have over 5 million square metres of net useable space, but this would be a crying shame. Personally I think the last boom and people buying abroad meant they tried high rised living and discovered it could be a quality lifestyle. I think it’s now time there was an international competition to design a living city quarter for between 50,000 and 100,000 people, it would raise the profile of the city and maybe we would even build it. Let us picture what we would do if we were contemplating an Olympic bid and just do it for ourselves, I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather do it for.

[gunter]

Originally Posted by GP

I can’t understand the anti private sector anti Treasury nonsense but in any event they have Shanghai and other experience and a look at Yangshan Port will show the possibilities of building out,

I presume you're aiming your 'anti treasury nonsence' comment at me.

I'm not anti Treasury Holdings or any other development company, Development is good, it's crucial even and most of the time it's delivered by development companies.

I'm suggesting that we question the appropriateness of a development company leading the feasibility study that may advise on the relocation a very significant piece of national infrastructure, not to mention an intrinsic Dublin institution.

Building a new port at Bremore may well be a good idea, but nothing I've heard to date about it would give me confidence that the right level of national, or even regional, planning is going into it. If there are people in positions of influence in this city plotting this thing surreptitiously and plotting how to make it inevitable by stealth, I think it would be wise to be concerned about it and maybe ask a few questions.

Will it start out as some ancilliary facility serving Drogheda Port that then has to quadruple in capacity to take some re-located Dublin Port traffic?

Will a new port facility at Bremore be ring fenced as strictly a 'port', or will it become a de-facto urban centre, with a port, another bead on the neklace of east coast con-urbation?

If Bremore inevitably becomes an urban centre, will it start off with a 'planning cap' that will, with each successive review of the Development Plan, get raised, then lifted and finally flung in the air, Liffey Valley style?

I share your view that the present expanse of Dublin Port, with it's container yards and vast tracts of storage tanks, is a huge wasted opportunity. Like you, I would like to see DCC develop a vision for Dublin that re-imagines this whole area, not just the 'Poolbeg peninsula', and demonstrates that moving the port won't be just another wasted opportunity.

The city's 'interface' with the Bay is the single greatest opportunity we will ever have to turn Dublin from the the 'grubby mid-sized European city' of your description into the world class city it has the potential to be, but all the players will have to be at the top of their game for this to happen and clear thinking, imagination, backbone and, above all, judgement, are going to be required to make it happen, to wade through the inertia and to face down all the diverse interest groups, from property owners to bird watchers.

Master Plans can be dangerous things, but allowing critical steps to be taken without a master plan is even more dangerous. There wasn't exactly a flood of responces to my little off-shore port notion, but I think it should be one of the ideas in the mix when the master-planners get down to work, assuming this step ever happens.

[Rory W]

Originally Posted by gunter

Will it start out as some ancilliary facility serving Drogheda Port that then has to quadruple in capacity to take some re-located Dublin Port traffic?

Will a new port facility at Bremore be ring fenced as strictly a 'port', or will it become a de-facto urban centre, with a port, another bead on the neklace of east coast con-urbation?

If Bremore inevitably becomes an urban centre, will it start off with a 'planning cap' that will, with each successive review of the Development Plan, get raised, then lifted and finally flung in the air, Liffey Valley style?

In response:
Bremore is intended as a large scale deep water port to replace current facilities at Drogheda - it is built to take a largely expanded amount of traffic compared to what Drogheda currently takes (no point aiming small) - it is designed with upscaling in mind

I dont think anyone will want to live at this port facilty - there is nothing zoned residential in the area as the town of Balbriggan is quite close anyway

See above but doubtful, who wants to live boxed-in in a suburb between a motorway, a major port and a rail line (with freight capability)

[Rory W]

Oh and the move to Bremore was the idea of Drogheda Port Company (indeed it's been a long held plan) and Treasury only came on board as a development partner after a tendering process