Re: Re: The Building Boom Is Over!

Devin, I think Venice is one of those cities that’s lost out! ‘These cities are trapped by their past’

OT: The economy is like a children’s story. We had a few pages of celtic Tigger and now it’s Eeore’s turn, later on it’ll be Piglet and then Pooh.

Back OT again, but only slightly, that Opinion piece by Kieran Rose in the IT is a hoot. I mean, on one level it’s fantastic that our planning officials are out there probing the deeper recesses, philosophically, but stitching together a patchwork of ideas into a blanket theory is one thing if your going to use it as a wall hanging, but it’s another thing entirely if you’re going to use it to judge planning applications.

We’ve seen Rose’s ‘creative test’ philosophy in action before. Didn’t his planner’s report on the Ballsbridge development include the pivitol observation, that ‘your view of the merits of the development hinge on whether you have an inherently creative, or a conservative outlook’. I can’t remember the exact quote, but it was something like that.

I remember the first reply I got when I posted that quote on the One Berkley Court -132m tower thread was something like ‘fair enough, that seems about right’, which it does until you realize that it just puts a veneer of objectivity on what remains a subjective choice.

Worse than that, it’s a mindset that equates big and shiny with ‘creative’. He may deny this, but that’s what comes across as one of the planks of his theory. If you don’t go along with this, it follows that, in Kieran Rose’s eyes, you are part of ‘resistances’ which ‘are at work in Dublin today’

I don’t know who Bonnie Kahn is, but Rose quotes Richard Florida, who quotes her?: ”A great city has two hallmarks: tolerance for strangers and intolerance for mediocrity”. If that’s not, itself, an example of a ‘limited mindset’ I don’t know what is! Surely there may be a few more ‘hallmarks’ to a great city than that.

Rose decries people who have a ‘rigid ideological position’, while coming dangerously close to expounding one himself.

I think Rose’s theory of ‘city making’ has some merit, but it needs a lot more work. I, for one, would like to see him put a few more planks in his theory before I’d go jump up an down on it.