Re: Re: high rises in Dublin

I’ve always been in favour of building higher, but how high can Dublin sustain before it becomes uneconomic for the developer?

Also, if high rise was allowed overnight at any location, there would be little incentive to densify (from houses wth gardens!) to modest 3/4/5 storey apartment blocks, providing a city-wide critical mass for mass transit.

The developers would just build everything to c. 30 storeys and the city would continue to have difficulty creating a widespread critical mass for transit.

I’d like to see Dublin densify (especially areas like Drumcondra, Rathmines etc.) in a widespread manner so that houses with gardens are limited to the very outside suburbs where they belong.

I found a wonderful image of Cologne (pop c. 1m but much denser than Dublin with almost the entire population residing inside an area roughly the same size as that encompassed by our canal rings) and it shows how disciplined the germans have been wrt density as their cities have grown (you couldn’t call it sprawl). This image is from the furthest north westerly extent of the city taken in 1886 and you can see them building a new street from this point. None f these buildings exist today, well, none that I can recognse from Friesenplatz today;

Today, Cologne can easily support a comprehensive mass transit system, though I rarely use it because the city centre is rarely beyond walking distance!