Any new streets?

Didn’t HH produce a book on good housing practice/principles based partly on their work at Balgaddy? Might have some images. There was certainly one image from it – a drawing, though, not a photo – in the Irish Times around the time they published it.

Some developments since 1999 (date of Residential Density Guidelines) have claimed that their designs are a return to traditional urban forms, in the manner of the New Urbanists (ugh). One example I know of is Applewood Village near Swords, in which it was claimed in the agent’s brochure that the ‘village centre’ was modelled on a Spanish hilltop town. But I’m sure you don’t need to be told that there can be something of a gaping chasm between an agent’s guff and the truth.

Aside from these NU-inspired developments, which really aren’t what you’re asking about, I can think of none off the top of my head. A real shame, as I’m a great believer in good streets as the key element of any successful urban area.

And FTR, I don’t think that a linear strip of land framed by apartment buildings qualifies as a street- see, say, the new proposal for Sandyford recently submitted to DLRCoCo for an example of this. Boulevard my backside. A street is more than just a bit of flat ground that’s longer than it is wide… (As an aside, Georges Perec in ‘Species of Spaces’ writes well on streets- well worth checking out, as is the rest of that book for anyone interested in ‘space’ of the non-astronaut variety.)

This has been one of the greatest failures of planning in Ireland over the past ten years: the lack of logical extensions to existing village/town/city cores. Frank sums up the ‘insulating’ phenomenon of suburbia very well – particularly relevant to large villages and towns.

One type of situation you often see is the ending of the traditional Main Street or other major street, and it turning back into the main road again – a typical occurrence of course, only now this external road is gradually getting built up again, not with typical one-off ribbon development, but with housing estates, small-scale apartment developments, a petrol station, an isolated Spar with a couple of res units overhead etc etc. So instead of the main street being logically extended and then stopped, it is left stunted as is, resulting in an almost semi-industrial entrance to these places: the busy major road flanked by incoherent (rubbish) development, with new footpaths too hostile to encourage use, not a cycle lane to be seen, disparate retail units, and often acres of flat ‘prairie’ space behind railings flanking the road that buffers new housing estates from the passing traffic.

Of course it’s not easy to plan new streets, but pretty much no attempt has been made at doing it by any local authority, even in conjunction with major private development schemes. An opportunity was lost in this respect in the 1970s and 1980s, where in nearly every town in Ireland a 20-30 unit shopping centre and surface car park was built to the rear of traditional terraced streets on wasteland, on former industrial lands, on commandeered Georgian back gardens etc.

Surely there must be one example of a recently planned street somewhere on the island?!

It’s probably not quite what you are looking for but the O’Mahony Pike development at Mount St Anne’s in Milltown has a number of internal streets.

One in particular (Leading from Milltown Road to the LUAS line) is not bad – 4/5 storey apartments on one side with 2/3 storey houses on the other, and small side streets running off.

The side streets themselves are quite good and there is a coherent feel to the place.

@Graham Hickey wrote:

Surely there must be one example of a recently planned street somewhere on the island?!

Tram Street, running between Church Street and Smithfield, is a new street. (Though probably not what you had in mind).

@Frank Taylor wrote:

Is Mount St Annes a gated development?

I guess if a new street is added in the style of the rest of the town it might go unnoticed. Maybe DIngle is like this?

Do streets need to be planned? Surely the old streets in Irish towns were the result of organic development rather than centralised guidelines?

Mount St Annes is not a gated development. The estate is privately maintained with very extensive central parkland containing several mature trees – worth a visit .

@a boyle wrote:

It is gated where it matters : access to the luas line is for residents only . the rest of milltown has to walk around .

It is true that while the public can enter the privately owned and maintained estate and gardens they cannot use the privately installed gate, from the back of the development, to the LUAS line.

This is perfectly reasonable in my view.

If you care to measure the distance to the Milltown Station from the entrance to Mount St Anne’s you will find that the public route (by the public footpath) is shorter than going via the private grounds of Mount St Annes (although this fact is not particularly relevant).

@Graham Hickey wrote:

Surely there must be one example of a recently planned street somewhere on the island?!

Curved Street in Temple Bar. Barely qualifies, I suppose, but it hasn’t been mentioned yet.

jimg-
The ‘ugh’ for New Urbanism was because the movement really bothers me. New Urbanists see themselves as nothing less than the saviours of American community and society, when in truth all they really do is design prelapsarian suburbs replete with white picket fences and gingerbread bargeboards. Most of their rhetoric is nonsensical if you scratch the surface. One area in which they’ve had a positive effect is zoning ordinances, which in the US were almost entirely car-based, but their social aspirations aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. In short, New Urbanism isn’t the answer to our problems, and its growing influence in planning/urban design circles (John Prescott is a fan, for example) is cause for concern because the more rational voices on the margins of US suburban-alternative planning, not to mention the other voices this side of the pond, get drowned out by the seductive rhetoric.
I have a 4,000 word essay saved somewhere if you want to know more.

publicrealm-
Which route on public roads is the one to which you refer? Last year I worked on an appeal to ABP against a scheme in your vicinity (not the one recently in the courts over the access issue). The application used access to Luas through MSA as grounds for seeking higher density, whereas permission hadn’t even been sought from the management company, never mind given. They got a grant which ABP overturned.:)
In our appeal, we stated that it was something like 17 minutes walk on public roads to the Luas from the site in question, unlike the 10 minutes if MSA were to be used (so the density was too high according to the 1999 RDGs). I got the info from my client, who claimed to have timed it. Was she lying to me?

PS I once got moved along in Mount St Anne’s for playing frisbee, and I was with a resident. Maybe not gated, but a long way from being public.

@ctesiphon wrote:

publicrealm-
Which route on public roads is the one to which you refer? Last year I worked on an appeal to ABP against a scheme in your vicinity (not the one recently in the courts over the access issue). The application used access to Luas through MSA as grounds for seeking higher density, whereas permission hadn’t even been sought from the management company, never mind given. They got a grant which ABP overturned.:)
In our appeal, we stated that it was something like 17 minutes walk on public roads to the Luas from the site in question, unlike the 10 minutes if MSA were to be used (so the density was too high according to the 1999 RDGs). I got the info from my client, who claimed to have timed it. Was she lying to me?

PS I once got moved along in Mount St Anne’s for playing frisbee, and I was with a resident. Maybe not gated, but a long way from being public.

The public route to the LUAS (from the entrance to MSA) is along the Milltown Road (footpath), under the 9 arch bridge and right up the hill to the Milltown stop. Intuitively you would think it longer than the more ‘direct’ route through MSA but in fact it is shorter (I think by the order of about 100m – I cannot remember the exact detail – it was measured as pert of the case against the Board’s decision to make the MSA residents fund a public park and access to the LUAS). The reason for this is that the access gate within MSA provides a very indirect route – instead of a straight line it involves two long sides of a triangle. Anyway this is not the issue in the MSA Court case – the land is privately owned and simply cannot be appropriated for the public in the way attempted by the Board

Incidentally the Board folded their case on Wednesday – agreed to drop the two conditions and pay all the costs of the residents of MSA (will certainly be in the 100’s of thousands. How’s that for value for the public – the Board knew what it was doing was illegal and went all the way to the wire! Sure it only taxpayer’s money).
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You are correct about it not being a public place. However generally there is no problem for strollers or people using the parkland to sun themselves, etc. Playing of sport is discouraged – otherwise the parkland would likely become a football/scateboard fixture) although being moved on for frisbee playing is a bit extreme.

I know that people instinctively feel that this is somehow wrong – but if you want a public park then it should be funded by the public – not by the annual management levy of the owners who own it and maintain it. And – if your frisbee/skateboard injures someone – who is liable for the cost of compensation?

New Urbanists see themselves as nothing less than the saviours of American community and society, when in truth all they really do is design prelapsarian suburbs replete with white picket fences and gingerbread bargeboards.

Bear in mind that I have no background in architecture or planning – nor have I any real understanding of New Urbanism besides what I’ve picked up in the popular media. But I’ve noticed that even in those sources, it is considered “naff” or unfashionable. However I’ve struggled to discover why this is the case.

When the the social and environmental failures of the other forms of 20th century development patterns are so obvious and easy to enumerate, I find it hard to understand why new urbanism is so despised and yet none of the criticisms I’ve read of it list its failings in terms of economics, sociology or the environment. It seems that it’s objectionable on some sort of intellectual level or that it’s considered completely naive. Also I’m wondering whether the fact that the likes of Prince Charles are fans would automatically make people hostile. And admittedly, the unbearable tweeness of Poundbury (which I presume is considered New Urbanist?) is offensive. But if it (Poundbury) was built in Holland, say, and featured a more modern style of buildings and with a less “repressed middle English” social approach, I could easily imagine it being held up as a model.

As for it being prelapsarian, I don’t think that there is anything wrong with recognising the revolutionary affect of the motor car on development patterns since Henry started churning them out about 100 years ago. For example, there would be little or no once-offs in Ireland without the explosion in car ownership. Even the less dispersed patterns – suburban housing estates with the odd shopping centre – largely depend on car ownership to function. Even if it’s considered sentimental or falsely nostalgic, there is a basic appeal for me in a planning ideology which demotes the car and promotes being able to go about your daily business by walking or cycling.

Still like I said, I haven’t read anything on the movement outside of the sunday supplements and the like so I would be interested in reading your essay or if you had any pointers to analysis/criticism of New Urbanism. Ok, this is completely off topic, but it strikes me that (extreme) modernism in architecture and Marxism in politics are similar in the way that despite the fact that their basic premises have been discredited and that nearly all implementations of them have been almost unmitigated failures, they are still viewed as being more intellectually “pure” than their rivals and still consume far more academic effort.