Dublin height focus of planning debate

The nominal city core – the business district – will continue to move Eastwards, towards the bay, filing in and re-using land where it needs to as it has with the CHDDA lands and Grand Canal Square.

Without take up in the now devalued older office stock between booms, an opportunity will arise to reclaim some of our Georgian Heritage for restoration and residential use, that should be seized, replacing single use offices with vibrant communities again.

The city will spread North where it is less constrained, but poorly drained and West where it is relatively unrestricted – there will be alternative radial feeders to cater for distribution and an outer M50 ring to cater for volume, define traffic movement and delimit growth into sectors.

Apart from that, new reasons to decentralise need to be developed if that strategy is to be pursued, since the allocation is so haphazard and the take up has been so poor. This will have a slowing down effect on the growth of the city if successful.

If the decentralization idea with its endless points of growth is abandoned, with growth allowed to occur in five or six main centres of urbanization, then denser urban forms could be considered.

I see no reason to espouse over tall, flag waving building in place of carefully considered strategies of higher densities and lower scale scale intended to re-knit the fabric of the city like the Timberyard, to point at one possible, workable solution.

Massive towers looming over existing local communities are not the way to go, and high rise building still does not suit the Irish relationship to land and property, even for the very rich – they prefer landed estates to towering infernos, leaving the penthouses to the pretentious nouveau riche, of which there seem to be precious few around at the moment.

ONQ.

I agree on an outer M50 being a very bad idea; however you can’t see it being on the agenda as a serious runner for a very very long time. What has led to a lot of the sprawl is local authorities granting inapropriate permissions for vastly over-scaled schemes on the borders of their functional areas knowing that they get to retain the rating income whilst not having to provide much of the infrastructure; i.e. loading the costs of servicing and maintaining specific developments onto neighbouring local authorities through which the transportation links etc are routed.

It is felt that only by letting national government collect commercial rates will local authorities begin to behave in a sustainable fashion. Only a block by block approach can truely answer what is sustainable and what would constitute an appropriate intervention to the existing amenity of the city.