Irelands Ten Worst Roundabouts

Where is central park in Dublin?

So a sister DLR development to Sandyford? Except maybe not as in-line with a Charlemount, Ranelagh, Dundrum, axis to the city centre. Which makes the Sandyford thing, ‘sort of special’. 🙂

I guess when you get to Leopardstown, you are moving toward the end of Stillorglan dual carriageway and beginning of Bray Road. Which is a different kind of vibe.

The area, which gives me the creeps is around Nutgrove centre and that in-between part, before Templeouge and slightly west of Sandyford.

I agree about the nutgrove/grange rd area being a little eerie as once the gridlock clears between 10am and 4pm there is little but empty houses at 16 to the acre.

Yeah, I knew there was something out of place for Dublin city, yet also something freaky, familar about it – since I grew up in small town areas in rural west Limk – and somehow the developers in that area of Dublin must have used ‘small town somewhere in west limerick’ models to develop.

One answer is to find ways to fold new housing, even new neighborhoods, into existing suburbs

If we build praries are we surprised that cowboys will come? 🙂

Funnily enough, the M3 design is recent enough that the busy interchanges are properly designed.

The save Tara campaign has a pretty bad website here:

http://www.taraskryne.org/

Find the working links – it’s fun! Not only is the proposed scheme not described, neither are the campaigners’ suggested alternatives, if they have any.

The opposition is because the motorway will go through the valley (“destroy it”, of course), avoiding everything. Some protestors are concerned that the legendary five roads from Tara will be disturbed – come on, people! Will we never tunnel or bridge the Straits of Gibraltar for fear of disturbing Atlantis?

A stretch of the M6 in the lake district in Britain won National Trust awards for enhancing the landscape. A well built road meandering through a beautiful valley can be stunning in itself, but it also opens the beauty of the area up to hundreds of thousands of people who would otherwise never have seen it.

I think it’s more the principle that concerns them – if they can’t get this through or some bloody stupid fresh water mussel in N8 Durrow then the NIMBY types and auto-objectors will win in every case and set an extemely damaging precedent to our future prosperity. It is a FACT that objections to large scale projects like this are well known and noted abroad and have in the past caused Ireland to lose out on projects from certain multinationals. Talk to anyone who sit at OECD or IDA meetings. It reflects badly on us if we are unable to sacrifice to deliver projects. I’m not saying the NRA have designed well, or avoided where necessary. Nor am I suggesting that we have to demolish every trace of our past. But there is a necessary trade off, and no exceptions – progress does have a price. Also the views of the loudest does not necesarily mean the views of the many. In the case of Durrow – if this fresh water mussel is so precious and world reknowned – why is it not feted from the hills? Personally I would prefer Irelands two main cities to have one less boreen linking them.

Try a search on goggle fin:

Little Britain

30 minutes from London city centre – but like a different world – an area that just ‘happened’ around some old disused gravel pits. Land which ‘might’ some day become valuable for development – but at the moment, is just the space between factories, shopping centres and transport infrastructure.

Did anyone see the piece about ‘Little Britain’ and edgedom’s in the BBC last night? The opposite to the ‘planned environments’ in Britain like Milton Keynes.

I mean, here in Britain and Ireland we don’t have any policy to edgedoms, other than to ‘control them’ just because we like to control things. In Finland especially, i did notice a slightly different attitude to these marginal zones, where it is neither country nor city.

the point was made too – that building types and fauna can exist in ‘edgedom’ which couldn’t exist in typical rural farming subsidised environments – where the cows are ‘paid’ to chew everything to death.

Whereas, to take the urban slant, these places mostly get fenced off, or simply become pitch and putt courses – i.e. brought into the city in some kind of acceptable way.

I guess, that was the approach taken when Bolton Street done some Dublin Docklands projects a few years ago now. Pity no publication or online resource was ever made available from that – i.e. like Fluid Space thing in UCD.

I took me about six years to figure out basically what is meant by edgedoms, but the BBC feature last night did it some justice. Don’t worry if my description doesn’t do it justice.

I wouldn’t try to force concepts like this one, on younger heads, as was done to me often in Bolton Street – but some day, you may come up against it again.

Warning: There is an amazing load of poetic rubbish surrounding this very subject at the moment, so just beware – a lot of it by the architects themselves.

Which makes it so strange, that the BCC news crew, in a kind of Duncan Stewart broadcasting way, managed to pull the idea together pretty well, in just a five minute feature.

I think, it would be great if these ‘features’ were downloadable from the web, like those new BMW car ads, which said “people change channels when the ads come on, and there are too many restrictions in what you can ‘broadcast’ in a car TV ad, so why not make a few feature length movies and offer them through the web”.

They got guys like Guy Ritchie, of Lock, stock and two smoking barrels and other big directors to do good car ads for web distribution.

Edgedoms are quiet, tranquil little ‘Hobbit places’ around global super cities like London for instance. Places where the environmentalists have been attracted by the unique natural habitats, which can no longer be entirely classified as being rural or urban.

The Dutch are purposely putting sheep grazing into the centre of urban developments now – not because they make any money – they are ‘the most subsidized sheep in Europe’ – but because they reckon that people just ‘need’ to see a sheep or two grazing.

The edgedoms normally happen, where land not used for rural purposes anymore, and is ‘waiting to be used’ for development purposes just get left their – these places are normally littered with the detriteus of modern urban living – corrigated iron, old fridges, and numerous other examples of human waste mingled in with nature.

Rather than approaching these environments as ‘bad lands’ per se, as the more ‘control-oriented’ amongst our society would like – some environmentalists argue, that these areas should be treated as a new kind of habitat in themselves.

THey are very cool places to have walking routes etc, for people in the cities – but not in the strictly organised sense on a closely cropped huge green area with a few planted saplings – a la Capability Brown – but allowed to before a bit natural – cleaned up a little bit – but allowing some rubbish and ram-shackle architecture to co-exist with the nature.

While some people decree, that these places shouldn’t exist at all – there should be a ‘defined edge’ between what we know as urban and rural.

I my opinion, it is always inevitable that ‘edgedoms’ will exist as large developers and pension funds buy up these territories from previous agricultural owners on the edges of major urban centres – (the organisations with the ability to anonimously just ‘sit’ on these areas for generations) the question is, what do you do with these disused places in the meantime.

A lot of the time, these areas change ownership hands many times while planning submissions are made, and grand master plans are suggested over a period of generations – in the meantime they just become eye-sores – but properly managed, could become real resources to the urban fabric.

There was a site at the top of Broadstone, between western way and the Broadstone park, which sat there totally unused for years and years – with several planning applications etc. MOLA have now been sucessful in getting a student residence planning application through for that site. But I guess, there are still several sites still remaining around Constitution hill – making it a kind of edgedom, with the Grange Gorman site and CIE lands etc, etc, etc.

It also falls ‘outside’ HARP and O’Connell St and area etc. It is potentially strategic from the point of view of Metro too I think. If you want to drive home a point, much of Parnell Square could be thought of as an edgedom too. It certainly has enough litter. 🙂

Temple Bar pre-1991, is a typical example of an inner city edgedom I think. Smithfield in its horse trading and car dealership days etc, etc, etc. The Docklands in its container phase. I guess modern Temple Bar is an example of what shouldn’t happen to edgedoms at all.

The debate is currently raging as to what should happen to downtown Los Angeles – investment could destroy what is already a working, viable area for small businesses to ‘start off’. The saying goes, that the downtown LA’s purpose isn’t to service the middle classes, it is to create them through cheap rental office and minor industrial space.

Over-doing the ‘art and culture’ treatment will just push up the rents and drive out the best bits of downtown LA at the moment.

I enjoyed the recent AAI lecture – where in Holland, they leave all activities happen in these ‘edgedoms’ for a 5 year period, and then whatever use is most common in that area after 5 years – it becomes law – that is what the area will become. 🙂

What is a real problem though, is where things like Hotels in Portmarnock are just bought up, and overnight a place which was a public place for years suddenly becomes a privately owned golf course – that is normally what happens to edgedoms in Britain. The debate is going on, over whether Britain should introduce new legislation to sucessfully manage and cultivate good ‘edgedoms’.