Reply To: Looks a bit different now?

A reoccurring point that is made on many of these treads is trying to develop Dublin more like other European cities (I presume the likes of Barcelona, Helsinki, Amsterdam etc).With the paving, new lights etc recently installed along O’Connell Street you could be in any city in Europe, (apart of course from the weather, shop signs etc..). This is a feature of the vast majority of new urban regeneration schemes both here and abroad. For the main street of our country, could our urban designers and planners not have done some thinking before jumping straight in? Maybe a more imaginative design where the culture, history and traditions of the State were taken into account would have been more appropriate and not just the mindless following of European planners in a place where these designs do actually work? What is on the ground, at the moment at least, is dull, lifeless and has little sense of place.