Dublin city development plan
The draft Dublin City Development Plan is currently under consideration but critics argue that it will fail to provide an economic stimulus for the city, writes Fearghal O’Connor.
In Milltown in south Dublin, a group of parents in a huge new housing development are rightfully demanding a local school. Ironically, the land on which their new homes stand used to house a school until it was sold to make way for the housing development.
If ever there was an argument for a city having a good strong development plan that predicted and helped meet future needs, then this is it.
The draft Dublin City Development Plan for the period 2011 to 2017 is currently under consideration by councillors. It is expected to come into force at the end of the year but already it is being heavily criticised.
Aebhric McGivney, director of policy with Dublin Chamber of Commerce, says it does not have enough of an economic focus and does not adequately reflect the difficult times that businesses and citizens are facing in Dublin.
“These documents are supposed to look at the longer term but I think businesses were looking to it to take account of some of the current realities and for some clarity on how it could translate into employment and investment,” he says.
“The economic and jobs focus should be number one in this plan and it is not. Anything that provides greater clarity from an investment point of view is useful because it provides a greater background of certainty for that investment decision. In that sense, we think that the plan is a little bit vague.”
He believes that a range of other themes, for example the importance of sustainability, quality of life etc, are also extremely important and should be central to the development plan. But given the reality of the unemployment problem, he feels that all of these issues should be viewed through the prism of job creation and a return to economic growth.
He also detects an air of fatalism among many councillors. “One of the views that has been expressed to me by some councillors is ‘what does it matter what we say about key issues such as building density or height, because nobody is going to be building anything anyway for the next few years’,” he says.
But he makes the point that just because there is now a much lower level of investment then there was at the height of the boom, that doesn’t mean that planning and investment decisions are not being made at the present that require clarity on a range of issues from the city authorities.
“There is no doubt that the city is going to recover,” he says. “Ireland will grow, Dublin will grow and plans still need to be made. There is a concern that this plan seems to rule out this need for clarity.”
Jerome Casey of the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) is even more damning of the proposed development plan and believes it is indicative of a mindset from a different era.
“There is a template for these things,” he says. “You do your work beforehand to see what the demand for housing, retail etc might be. You then try to come up with a plan that will allow development to meet that demand. This time, they are still following a template but we are in a completely different situation - we are in a depression.”
He points out that one of the biggest casualties from the downturn has been development and construction and he believes there is little in the new plan that acknowledges this or tries to remedy it.
“What I would have expected would have been some self reflection on the reality as we find it rather than simply repeating the template which up to this served them reasonably well. For example, it would have been good to hear them ask questions like ‘did we contribute to these problems?’”
But to many, the modus operandi of the developers represented by the CIF were the root cause of many of the problems and this new plan was a chance to rebalance the planning and development of the city back in favour of its citizens.
Labour Party city councillor Dermot Lacey jokes that the fact that residents associations and the CIF are giving out in equal measure suggests that the councillors have got the balance about right.
Nevertheless, he says that the entire process is far from ideal and not the best way to go about planning the future of a capital city. Perhaps the biggest problem is the fact that councillors can table as many amendments as they like to the plan but they have no means to force its implementation.
“We can put in all the transport corridors we like but we are not responsible for the provision of transport services,” he says. “We can put in all the economic corridors we like but Enterprise Ireland or the IDA aren’t responsible to Dublin City Council”.
The development plan is primarily a physical infrastructure plan and the inclusion of enterprise corridors in the city, for example, is effectively meaningless.
“We have put them in as a gesture towards getting the institutions along those corridors to work together in a way that might lead towards jobs. But we have no power to direct that this actually happens. We should be able to be proactive,” says Lacey.
The problems with the system are even more fundamental than that. Lacey points out that the plan is put together by 52
part-time councillors in the evening after their day jobs. They worked their way through 970 amendments and motions to get to the point they are now at.
“It is an absurd process,” says Lacey. “The only expert advice available to us is from the executive of the city council itself and it has a particular agenda. I am not criticising them but they do have a particular agenda and are not independent. It has to be reformed and it can’t continue like this.”
This is a problem that reaches far beyond Dublin and feeds directly into the perennial topic of local government reform. But the issues are particularly acute in Dublin where four separate local authorities - not to mention 43 different transport bodies - all set their own agendas.
Many argue that the city needs a single regional authority that can take a much more integrated approach to planning and other issues. For example, each local authority will always state that retail development is key to their particular area .
“So the city council’s development plan says that the city centre area is to be the core retail area in the entire Dublin region,” says Aebhric McGivney. “But south Dublin will paint a very different picture in its plan.
“Competition is all well and good and it is good that Dundrum competes with Clerys, Arnotts and Brown Thomas in the city centre, for example. But in the end, you could just end up scattering retail development across the city without any clear focus on future developments.”
Chris McGarry of consultant engineers RPS is very familiar with the whole process and is not overly critical of the development plan itself.
He believes it strikes a good balance between the various competing needs that co-exist at close quarters in the city. But he agrees that the entire system needs to be reformed. In the end, it comes down to money, he says.
“If you want to progress our planning system, you need proper local government financing so that local authorities have much greater autonomy and an ability to control money streams,” he says.
Like others, one of the problems he sees with any development plan is that while it lays out objectives, the council will often not have the means to turn them into reality.
“It might have an objective to do something, perhaps put a park in somewhere,” he says. “But if they can’t control the money, it just sits there until the council loses face and people get frustrated waiting for the park.
“In the period of the boom, because so much of the funding for local authorities was through development levies, there was a sense that it was a self fulfilling exercise and the more development that you got, the more money would come through. A decoupling of that would be no harm and the funding issue is at the heart of that.”
He has experience with planning regimes in other countries such as Germany and Denmark where he says the idea of linking the performance of local authorities and their functions to funding streams works very well.
“The minute you do that, you give them a responsibility and I think they tend to rise to that well,” he says. “If the local authorities in Dublin were to be merged and there was a clearer pattern as to how funding was secured, it gets them away from this dependence on the development process.”
Unfortunately, this overdependence on the development process has done little to enamour the citizens of the city to the entire regime. A huge amount of mistrust and cynicism exists and this is something that must be considered by those who criticise councillors for focusing on a range of issues apart from just the crucial economic ones, believes Dermot Lacey. He hopes that the new plan will help to strike a better balance.
“There was a real need on this occasion, particularly at a time when there is a lull in planning applications, to restore people’s fate in the planning process. If you talk to the average citizen, they don’t believe that planning is fair or honest. I believe by and large that it is, but I think it is misunderstood and unnecessarily cumbersome.
“But people out there don’t believe that and they feel it worked for developers and against the interest of ordinary citizens. The creation of the new mayoral post would make a difference even if it is to have someone who can speak out on Dublin issues. That would be a start,” he says.
How high should a city go?
Are height restrictions stunting our economic growth?
Density and height is one of the key - and most controversial - issues dealt with by the new development plan. While little is being built in the current climate, community groups argue that increasing height and density in the city lessens people’s quality of life.
Other interests argue that this need not be the case and that increased height and density in certain area are key to a sustainable city. They argue that greater densities are needed to ensure the success of huge transport projects such as Metro North and Dart Underground.
From an investment point of view, there are not many buildings in the city centre that can hold more than 250 people. So a company planning to create 300 jobs faces the option of having two separate locations in the city or going somewhere else where they can get what they require.
Marie Hunt, head of research at CBRE, says the only issue she has with the draft development plan is building height.
“We have a report just out that looks at competitiveness and the comparative cost of setting up an operation in Dublin versus other cities,” she says. “One of the things that we suggest in the report is that by limiting the height of buildings in the city going forward, we could actually be putting off some foreign direct investment. If you actually want a high building, you have to go through the process of doing a local area plan and that is going to take a lot of time and expense. In many other European cities, height is allowed in certain designated areas but we have put in a stumbling block in the way of that.”
The development plan limits height to seven stories in the central area, although a few key areas such as the docklands and Heuston station have been designated for taller buildings.
“But one of the flaws of this approach by the city planners is that in focusing so much on these special areas where extra height might be gleaned, they have areas like Baggot St and Mount St etc fall between two stools and there is not enough flexibility in these areas to get modern employment in,” says Chris McGarry of RPS.
He believes that a height of eight stories should be allowed in the city centre and that a distinction needs to be made between the volume of a building and the architecture that is done to it.
“You could have an eight-storey building that, depending on the materials, could look a very light and translucent building,” he says. “There is a series of safety mechanisms that will define the quality of the building as much as the sheer volume of it. If the public debate starts and stops at the notion that volume must be reduced because it is always bad then I think we really do threaten the economic vitality of the city centre.”
