Re: Re: DDDA / Docklands Miscellany

I didn’t like John McCullough’s failure to properly analyse the success, or lack of it, of the mixed use development concept that the Docklands masterplan adopted, all those years ago. So I scribbled these notes down.

Brian O’ Hanlon

Mixed Use Development:

I can testify to some of the mixed use projects I worked on in the Docklands area. Their ground floor retail is small and difficult to make work. We have Dublin City Councils requirement for so many staircores, it is hard to keep any retail frontage, or any frontage for service entrances etc. The ESB take massive swathes out of the ground floor area for meter rooms. Don’t get me started on services engineers, when the see all the space available to them on ground floor of mixed use projects. Some projects are lucky enough to have a project manager who stands up to them, some are not. If you try to accommodate plant on roofs, to release space at street level, then that becomes a problem also. I have seen some daft planning conditions, to do with accommodation of necessary plant for office accommodation on LUAS lines. Not to mention ground floor accommodation of bicycle sheds, within the volume of the ground floor. All told, when you are done, what started out as ‘mixed use’ is a joke. Because the meagre amount of commercial space you are left with is unusable. That wouldn’t be too bad though, if the DDDA managed to build a basic road to your doorstep. But often, that doesn’t even happen. Lets not forget the bills the water department put in. Each individual ground floor commercial properties needs and water connection, and gets hit with back rates for the last 60 years. So you are paying over a million Euro for water, before even going into business.

Generally the office portions of mixed use developments in the Docklands weren’t much better than Georgian terraces around Fitzwiliam square. The exact thing the Digital Hub is trying to move away from.