THE NEED to challenge “silo thinking” among architects, planners, engineers and sociologists was highlighted yesterday at the opening of a summer school, “Making the Built Environment Work”, at NUI Maynooth.
Prof Mary Corcoran, of the college’s department of sociology, said the fast pace of development during the Celtic Tiger years had produced built landscapes across Ireland that were at odds with people’s desires and expectations.
Concerns included the “scarring” of rural areas by excessive holiday home building, the inappropriate scale of downtown developments and the prospects of a poorer quality of life for those living in unfinished housing estates.
“The abrupt halt to development with the onset of the recession,” she said, “has created a set of very problematic conditions in urgent need of solutions.”
Prof Corcoran said the summer school would provide a unique opportunity to “integrate the insights, processes and practices” of professionals involved in design as well as research. Experts from Europe, Australia and the US will be working with their Irish counterparts to generate solutions to specific problems associated with the property collapse, including ghost estates.
Frank McDonald
Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
Showing posts with label academic planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academic planning. Show all posts
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Monday, 16 March 2009
Patrick Shaffrey - Planning is 'vital national interest'
Madam, – I read with great pleasure – and indeed a renewed sense of hope – the report in your edition of March 12th of a Co Clare planning case which came before Mr Justice Hedigan in the High Court.
The judge’s remarks that the planning system is “a vital national interest”, and that today’s bad planning decisions “sentence generations to live with the consequences” will be a source of comfort to planners, architects and other concerned groups throughout the country.
They go to the heart of our current planning problems.
After the demise of the so-called “Celtic Tiger”, we have thousands of houses scattered across the country in inappropriate locations, many empty or half-built. They will present severe challenges for future generations.
For years I have been emphasising that a house is not a crop and once built it is there for ever. – Yours, etc,
PATRICK SHAFFREY
Irish Times Letter
www.buckplanning.ie
The judge’s remarks that the planning system is “a vital national interest”, and that today’s bad planning decisions “sentence generations to live with the consequences” will be a source of comfort to planners, architects and other concerned groups throughout the country.
They go to the heart of our current planning problems.
After the demise of the so-called “Celtic Tiger”, we have thousands of houses scattered across the country in inappropriate locations, many empty or half-built. They will present severe challenges for future generations.
For years I have been emphasising that a house is not a crop and once built it is there for ever. – Yours, etc,
PATRICK SHAFFREY
Irish Times Letter
www.buckplanning.ie
Saturday, 5 April 2008
Surprise over suggestion to 'preserve' west
WESTERN DEVELOPMENT: REGIONAL ENTERPRISE agencies and planners have reacted with surprise to a suggestion that attempts to foster urban development outside the east coast may be misplaced.
The suggestion that it might be more prudent to preserve the West as an ecologically pure amenity which might attract high net worth individuals to live, while facilitating the development of the Dublin-Belfast corridor into a major, urbanised area encompassing most of the east coast, was made in a series of articles in The Irish Times this week.
However the articles, written by Conor Skehan, head of the department of environment and planning and Dr Lorcan Sirr head of research, faculty of the built environment at Dublin Institute of Technology, have drawn criticism from Shannon Development, Liam Scollan, chief executive, Ireland West Airport Knock and Minister for the Environment John Gormley.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Brian Callanan of Shannon Development said the argument put forward in the articles seemed to ignore the already high level of enterprise in the west.
Mr Callanan said this included a major investment in the knowledge economy through the universities of Cork, Limerick and Galway alongside the institutes of technology, which were already paying off in terms of attracting foreign direct investment and fostering indigenous industry.
The articles appeared to ignore the Limerick-Shannon area in its entirety, while also not considering the development of the Atlantic road and rail corridor and Shannon Development's own fostering of next-generation broadband communications infrastructure, he said. Even if the articles were to be solely concerned with a post-foreign direct investment scenario, he said the west had considerable indigenous industry.
Mr Callanan remarked it was a surprise that leading academics would put forward such a view and he added "it reminds you, how solid the 'Dublin-centric' opinion can be".
Liam Scollan, a former director of the Western Development Commission, said his initial reaction was to consider the date of the final article, April 1st, might be a significant factor. Mr Scollan said he believed the vision presented was "class-ridden" because of its references to the midlands being a place where manual work would be carried out, with rich people enjoying an ecologically better environment in the west and middle-class workers in the East.
However, some of the strongest criticism came from Mr Gormley. While he said he "welcomed the input which highlighted the need for the planning system to be more pro-active and integrated", he would "strongly challenge the notion in the articles that the National Spatial Strategy is misplaced and undeliverable, and that it is futile to try to alter demographic trends on the island, unsustainable though they may be".
He said some people held a mistaken understanding that the strategy was about taking development from the east, and directing it to the gateways, towns and hubs.
"It's not about taking development away from Dublin and limiting the economic growth of the capital, which we all acknowledge is the main international gateway to this country and main driver of our economy," Mr Gormley said.
The Minister pointed to investment in critical infrastructure in Dublin such as the Luas and new governance arrangements through the establishment of the Dublin Transportation Authority and the commitment to a Dublin mayor with real decision-making powers, as evidence that the strategy was not to deprive Dublin.
"The National Spatial Strategy is aimed at tapping fully into the resources and opportunities available to 'Ireland Inc' as a whole, by activating the unique and specific potential of all the regions, while at the same time supporting the development of Dublin in a sustainable manner. This has to be our overriding objective and definitive goal," he added.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
The suggestion that it might be more prudent to preserve the West as an ecologically pure amenity which might attract high net worth individuals to live, while facilitating the development of the Dublin-Belfast corridor into a major, urbanised area encompassing most of the east coast, was made in a series of articles in The Irish Times this week.
However the articles, written by Conor Skehan, head of the department of environment and planning and Dr Lorcan Sirr head of research, faculty of the built environment at Dublin Institute of Technology, have drawn criticism from Shannon Development, Liam Scollan, chief executive, Ireland West Airport Knock and Minister for the Environment John Gormley.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Brian Callanan of Shannon Development said the argument put forward in the articles seemed to ignore the already high level of enterprise in the west.
Mr Callanan said this included a major investment in the knowledge economy through the universities of Cork, Limerick and Galway alongside the institutes of technology, which were already paying off in terms of attracting foreign direct investment and fostering indigenous industry.
The articles appeared to ignore the Limerick-Shannon area in its entirety, while also not considering the development of the Atlantic road and rail corridor and Shannon Development's own fostering of next-generation broadband communications infrastructure, he said. Even if the articles were to be solely concerned with a post-foreign direct investment scenario, he said the west had considerable indigenous industry.
Mr Callanan remarked it was a surprise that leading academics would put forward such a view and he added "it reminds you, how solid the 'Dublin-centric' opinion can be".
Liam Scollan, a former director of the Western Development Commission, said his initial reaction was to consider the date of the final article, April 1st, might be a significant factor. Mr Scollan said he believed the vision presented was "class-ridden" because of its references to the midlands being a place where manual work would be carried out, with rich people enjoying an ecologically better environment in the west and middle-class workers in the East.
However, some of the strongest criticism came from Mr Gormley. While he said he "welcomed the input which highlighted the need for the planning system to be more pro-active and integrated", he would "strongly challenge the notion in the articles that the National Spatial Strategy is misplaced and undeliverable, and that it is futile to try to alter demographic trends on the island, unsustainable though they may be".
He said some people held a mistaken understanding that the strategy was about taking development from the east, and directing it to the gateways, towns and hubs.
"It's not about taking development away from Dublin and limiting the economic growth of the capital, which we all acknowledge is the main international gateway to this country and main driver of our economy," Mr Gormley said.
The Minister pointed to investment in critical infrastructure in Dublin such as the Luas and new governance arrangements through the establishment of the Dublin Transportation Authority and the commitment to a Dublin mayor with real decision-making powers, as evidence that the strategy was not to deprive Dublin.
"The National Spatial Strategy is aimed at tapping fully into the resources and opportunities available to 'Ireland Inc' as a whole, by activating the unique and specific potential of all the regions, while at the same time supporting the development of Dublin in a sustainable manner. This has to be our overriding objective and definitive goal," he added.
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
Tuesday, 1 April 2008
Proactive planning will make most of regional differences
THROUGH WILFUL neglect of the naturally emerging bigger picture, current Irish strategic policy is trying to plan against the emergence of a naturally urbanising Ireland. Instead, we are trying to plan nationally for what is locally and politically expedient, but either way we are planning to fail, write Conor Skehan and Lorcan Sirr .
To succeed we will need to change and re-invent how we plan - and what we are planning for.
The biggest change we will need to make is to develop new structures through which political and administrative control will match city-based functional areas. This will involve harnessing existing county and regional structures - on an all-island basis - to form new territories united by common opportunities and challenges. This restructuring will require a significant devolution of authority from central to regional and local government; Ireland, despite it small size, has one of the most centralised systems of governance in Europe.
To reflect the large range of differing cultural and environmental conditions, the Atlantic territories of western Ireland will continue to need to be administered at the smaller scale of counties, though the west will be planned and co-ordinated as the largest region on the island.
The east and midlands on the other hand will be organised into large city-based 'regional areas.
The other big change will be the use of planning as a proactive instrument for development. If we are to successfully manage the transition of the Irish economy away from current, eroding foreign direct investment (FDI) models we will need to use every instrument at our disposal to remain globally competitive.
The potent factor needed for success is a joined-up planning system - where land use, financial instruments, infrastructure, settlements and natural factors are harnessed to create the conditions necessary for development. More fundamentally, planning will need to place enterprise and economic development as a first priority with housing following and not the opposite, as we have been practising for the last 40 years.
Our current national strategy to sustain global competitiveness is based on attempting to compete internationally in the knowledge economy. In Ireland, however, we generate 77.3 patents per million population, well below an EU average of 128, with Scandinavian countries averaging 200-plus.
Perhaps instead we should seek to secure our future by playing to our strengths, using our proven skills and aptitudes in such lucrative growth areas as music and culture where worldwide entertainment and media industries are predicted to grow to US$1.8 trillion by 2010, for example.
Policy-makers and politicians will find it hard to admit that one-size-fits-all strategies can no longer apply to policy in Ireland, but a successful plan for, say, 2030 will acknowledge the need to plan creatively for the different futures of Ireland's east, west and midlands. We will need the flexibility to evolve and pursue divergent strategies to allow all areas to achieve their full potential. Critically, we need to provide for a European city-region in the east. It is happening anyway, but we should take away the haphazard nature of its evolution and plan strategically for it.
The challenge, therefore, for the east will be to co-ordinate large-scale urban settlement and associated infrastructure - to densify in planning jargon - while the west will need to diversify by sustaining, and profiting from, its cultural and natural distinctiveness.
New plans for space and place mean that the next generation of infrastructure in Ireland will be answering different needs, especially in an all-Ireland context. Major new infrastructure will need to be developed to service the eastern region, and will need to be located well away from the congestion of the east coast. Ideally, this infrastructure will consist of a unifying north-south spine to serve the emerging pattern of urbanisation.
The Atlantic territories will play a leading role in the diversification and expansion of Ireland's post-FDI economy. Diversity, distinctiveness and designations will be key words for this, but the capacity of these areas to sustain higher numbers will be limited by designations and regulations to protect water, habitats and the landscape. This can be regarded as a burden or an opportunity.
With foresight and focus it can become the latter. Devolved governance and funding, coupled with economic development strategies that play to unique strengths of the area, will be the key to the future of Atlantic Ireland. These strengths include culture, education, the natural environment and tourism, while building on the established pattern of loose high-tech clusters of medical and pharmaceutical products. The Atlantic areas also offer unique opportunities to sustain the type of quality of life indicators that will increasingly attract mobile, discerning and high-earning individuals. These types of individuals offer the realistic opportunity to develop these areas as a Switzerland of the Atlantic.
Such strategies will need clear, focused and co-ordinated interventions to succeed. These will include the establishment of Government-funded intervention services to allow individuals, projects and communities to be developed within the strictures of increasingly complex and demanding designations. The Atlantic Territories will also need specialist technical and fiscal support to manage a transition from subsidised to specialist "boutique agriculture" - high value, high quality food products with strong localised identity - like French cheese and wine regions.
Meanwhile, the midlands will service and sustain the eastern and western corridors with infrastructure, materials, water, power, timber and aggregates. Furthermore, its central location will make it ideal as the home to major logistics, storage and transportation operations - especially if new rail, road and airport infrastructure can be properly co-ordinated. The midlands will also be home to many people who are unable to tolerate the quality of life and prices of the east, but will want to enjoy the proximity of major urban centres. Less regulated than the west and less pressurised than the east, the midlands will offer choices and opportunities for many.
In a vision of a successful Ireland in 2030, the east will have recovered from being the unloved, but prodigious, child and will be acknowledged and supported as the central engine of the Irish economy. Here a mixture of indigenous industrial and service sectors, successfully serving international markets, will co-exist with a resurgent agri-business sector which will include some of the largest and most successful companies of their type in the world.
Within these newly organised and planned areas, the greatest transformation will be of our cities. We urgently need a vision for our sprawling, low-rise conglomerations of suburban housing, dog-eared old villages, tatty industrial estates and dreary edge-city retail warehouses that pass for the cities of modern Ireland. Despair-inducing areas have previously been used as the raw material for urban transformation. Temple Bar and the IFSC in Dublin, for example, have shown what more joined-up Irish planning can achieve. We can, and have, successfully used the challenge of re-planning urban areas as a way of creating a rich network of pedestrian friendly centres where urban vitality and creativity can flourish.
Irish planning has the potential for integrating considered economic and social strategies to have different objectives in different places. Strategic spatial planning has a vital contribution to make to a managed transition away from an economy based on agricultural subsidies, FDI and property development.
It doesn't have to be the conveniently disjointed and blinkered way it is now. It doesn't even have to be the way that we've imagined here, but we should have the debate about our future, and an emergent plan - a plan for the future that accepts realities, limitations and strengths, not a plan to stop or limit things that are new and unfamiliar. The question is whether we have the political and social courage to have the debate and create a plan for future success.
• Conor Skehan is head of the Department of Environment and Planning; Dr Lorcan Sirr is head of research, Faculty of the Built Environment at Dublin Institute of Technology
Many of the issues raised by Conor Skehan and Lorcan Sirr in this article and their piece in yesterday's Opinion and Analysis page will be discussed at the Irish Planning Institute's national planning conference 2008, being held in Westport, Co Mayo, on Thursday and Friday. Skehan will address the conference on Thursday on the question of the Water Framework Directive - a framework for spatial planning?
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
To succeed we will need to change and re-invent how we plan - and what we are planning for.
The biggest change we will need to make is to develop new structures through which political and administrative control will match city-based functional areas. This will involve harnessing existing county and regional structures - on an all-island basis - to form new territories united by common opportunities and challenges. This restructuring will require a significant devolution of authority from central to regional and local government; Ireland, despite it small size, has one of the most centralised systems of governance in Europe.
To reflect the large range of differing cultural and environmental conditions, the Atlantic territories of western Ireland will continue to need to be administered at the smaller scale of counties, though the west will be planned and co-ordinated as the largest region on the island.
The east and midlands on the other hand will be organised into large city-based 'regional areas.
The other big change will be the use of planning as a proactive instrument for development. If we are to successfully manage the transition of the Irish economy away from current, eroding foreign direct investment (FDI) models we will need to use every instrument at our disposal to remain globally competitive.
The potent factor needed for success is a joined-up planning system - where land use, financial instruments, infrastructure, settlements and natural factors are harnessed to create the conditions necessary for development. More fundamentally, planning will need to place enterprise and economic development as a first priority with housing following and not the opposite, as we have been practising for the last 40 years.
Our current national strategy to sustain global competitiveness is based on attempting to compete internationally in the knowledge economy. In Ireland, however, we generate 77.3 patents per million population, well below an EU average of 128, with Scandinavian countries averaging 200-plus.
Perhaps instead we should seek to secure our future by playing to our strengths, using our proven skills and aptitudes in such lucrative growth areas as music and culture where worldwide entertainment and media industries are predicted to grow to US$1.8 trillion by 2010, for example.
Policy-makers and politicians will find it hard to admit that one-size-fits-all strategies can no longer apply to policy in Ireland, but a successful plan for, say, 2030 will acknowledge the need to plan creatively for the different futures of Ireland's east, west and midlands. We will need the flexibility to evolve and pursue divergent strategies to allow all areas to achieve their full potential. Critically, we need to provide for a European city-region in the east. It is happening anyway, but we should take away the haphazard nature of its evolution and plan strategically for it.
The challenge, therefore, for the east will be to co-ordinate large-scale urban settlement and associated infrastructure - to densify in planning jargon - while the west will need to diversify by sustaining, and profiting from, its cultural and natural distinctiveness.
New plans for space and place mean that the next generation of infrastructure in Ireland will be answering different needs, especially in an all-Ireland context. Major new infrastructure will need to be developed to service the eastern region, and will need to be located well away from the congestion of the east coast. Ideally, this infrastructure will consist of a unifying north-south spine to serve the emerging pattern of urbanisation.
The Atlantic territories will play a leading role in the diversification and expansion of Ireland's post-FDI economy. Diversity, distinctiveness and designations will be key words for this, but the capacity of these areas to sustain higher numbers will be limited by designations and regulations to protect water, habitats and the landscape. This can be regarded as a burden or an opportunity.
With foresight and focus it can become the latter. Devolved governance and funding, coupled with economic development strategies that play to unique strengths of the area, will be the key to the future of Atlantic Ireland. These strengths include culture, education, the natural environment and tourism, while building on the established pattern of loose high-tech clusters of medical and pharmaceutical products. The Atlantic areas also offer unique opportunities to sustain the type of quality of life indicators that will increasingly attract mobile, discerning and high-earning individuals. These types of individuals offer the realistic opportunity to develop these areas as a Switzerland of the Atlantic.
Such strategies will need clear, focused and co-ordinated interventions to succeed. These will include the establishment of Government-funded intervention services to allow individuals, projects and communities to be developed within the strictures of increasingly complex and demanding designations. The Atlantic Territories will also need specialist technical and fiscal support to manage a transition from subsidised to specialist "boutique agriculture" - high value, high quality food products with strong localised identity - like French cheese and wine regions.
Meanwhile, the midlands will service and sustain the eastern and western corridors with infrastructure, materials, water, power, timber and aggregates. Furthermore, its central location will make it ideal as the home to major logistics, storage and transportation operations - especially if new rail, road and airport infrastructure can be properly co-ordinated. The midlands will also be home to many people who are unable to tolerate the quality of life and prices of the east, but will want to enjoy the proximity of major urban centres. Less regulated than the west and less pressurised than the east, the midlands will offer choices and opportunities for many.
In a vision of a successful Ireland in 2030, the east will have recovered from being the unloved, but prodigious, child and will be acknowledged and supported as the central engine of the Irish economy. Here a mixture of indigenous industrial and service sectors, successfully serving international markets, will co-exist with a resurgent agri-business sector which will include some of the largest and most successful companies of their type in the world.
Within these newly organised and planned areas, the greatest transformation will be of our cities. We urgently need a vision for our sprawling, low-rise conglomerations of suburban housing, dog-eared old villages, tatty industrial estates and dreary edge-city retail warehouses that pass for the cities of modern Ireland. Despair-inducing areas have previously been used as the raw material for urban transformation. Temple Bar and the IFSC in Dublin, for example, have shown what more joined-up Irish planning can achieve. We can, and have, successfully used the challenge of re-planning urban areas as a way of creating a rich network of pedestrian friendly centres where urban vitality and creativity can flourish.
Irish planning has the potential for integrating considered economic and social strategies to have different objectives in different places. Strategic spatial planning has a vital contribution to make to a managed transition away from an economy based on agricultural subsidies, FDI and property development.
It doesn't have to be the conveniently disjointed and blinkered way it is now. It doesn't even have to be the way that we've imagined here, but we should have the debate about our future, and an emergent plan - a plan for the future that accepts realities, limitations and strengths, not a plan to stop or limit things that are new and unfamiliar. The question is whether we have the political and social courage to have the debate and create a plan for future success.
• Conor Skehan is head of the Department of Environment and Planning; Dr Lorcan Sirr is head of research, Faculty of the Built Environment at Dublin Institute of Technology
Many of the issues raised by Conor Skehan and Lorcan Sirr in this article and their piece in yesterday's Opinion and Analysis page will be discussed at the Irish Planning Institute's national planning conference 2008, being held in Westport, Co Mayo, on Thursday and Friday. Skehan will address the conference on Thursday on the question of the Water Framework Directive - a framework for spatial planning?
The Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
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