Re: Re: DDDA / Docklands Miscellany

One upshot of the whole DDDA débacle is that we’ll probably never again attempt to hothouse the regeneration of a whole urban district in this way, and this would be a real shame.

Urban regeneration needs to be incubated, it needs to be tended to and fostered, if you try an let nature take it’s course, nine times out of ten, it withers and dies, but at the other extreme, if you just pump it full of commercial steroids, you create a monster.

We’re probably going to hear a lot in the coming days about how the DDDA was riddled with fundamental flaws and systemic failures [all the current jargon], but the real problem was probably the same old flaw that you find in every ultra pro-active agency; people getting carried away and making bad judgements.

To me, the first sure indication that sound judgement had left the DDDA building was the whole ‘Liffey Island’ saga. No agency with a real understanding of Dublin, let alone one charged with regenerating a significant chunk of the city, would have allowed a concept as daft as that out of the think-tank and into the Liffey [almost].

But again, that’s not a fundamental, systemic, flaw, it’s just someone high up not exercising sound judgement when it was called for and the consequences of that are not just that buckets of public money went down the tubes, it’s that no politician will now be brave enough to set up something like the DDDA again, when this is exactly the time when we need pro-active powerful agencies to drive and direct urban regeneration and stop the next wave of development falling into the hands of the headless chickens that ran the roost the last time.

That’s proably enough mixed metaphors for one post.