Read the full article @ The Times
Showing posts with label irish town planning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label irish town planning. Show all posts
Monday, 26 March 2018
Don’t blame the planners, blame the system
On Friday, I spoke at University College Cork Planning Society’s conference. If I were a planning student now, I would be concerned about the reputation and future role of my profession in Ireland. In line with other market-led development systems, over the past couple of decades, public planning has been demonised, albeit with little evidence to back up the criticisms. Far too often planning is vilified as something that mitigates against development rather than facilitates it — and in facilitating, it also makes some people very wealthy. This can be seen quite easily nowadays in the “book value” of land with planning permission, where the permission has created great value without anything necessarily having been built.
Read the full article @ The Times
Read the full article @ The Times
Wednesday, 2 January 2008
Planners look to better future
THERE is a joke that planners endure which goes as follows. A doctor, a civil engineer and a planner argue about which profession is the oldest.
The doctor says that God created Eve from Adam’s rib, a procedure requiring surgery which makes his profession the oldest.
The engineer counters that before making humans, God created order from chaos - certainly the most ambitious civil engineering project ever and proof his profession is oldest.
The planner leans back in his chair and smiles smugly. Ah yes, he says, but who do you think created the chaos?
Actually, there are many jokes of a similar ilk — that’s just one of the kinder ones. Planners, the system they work in and the decisions it produces make for endless fuel for outrage.
Whether you’re a motorist disappearing in a cloud of exhaust fumes in a tailback stretching further than the eye can see, and the patience can tolerate, an eco-warrior facing down a JCB while tethered to a tree or a farmer in a forgotten village bereft of new life and development, the planning system seems ripe for criticism.
Ten years of revelations from the Planning Tribunal have not helped, serving only to reinforce the suspicion that the system was never robust enough to withstand the self-interested interference of developers and the public representatives they lobbied.
If the revelations had come at a calmer time, lessons might have been learned. But the 10 years of Flood and Mahon also coincided with the biggest, fastest and most lucrative building boom in our history.
While one set of weaknesses and failures was being highlighted in Dublin Castle, a whole new set was being discovered in every local authority across the country.
The result? Urban sprawl from the cities, commuting times multiplied, lack of school places and public transport, damage to properties built on flood plains, low water pressure in estates added to already strained mains pipes, apartment blocks without soundproofing, estates without green spaces, villages turned into towns without amenities to match and main streets drained of commerce by middle-of-nowhere malls and retail parks.
Combine that with complaints of inconsistent application of planning guidelines, subjective decision-making, unreasonable delays and burdensome bureaucracy, and Irish planning sounds irredeemable.
But is it really all that bad? And should the blame for faults and flaws lie solely with the system and the planners who operate within it?
Andrew Hind, a senior planner with Cork County Council, is also president of the Planning Institute of Ireland and speaks here in that role.
“We think we have a good planning system at the moment although there may be aspects of it that maybe need to be adapted and strengthened to meet the burdens placed on it,” he says.
He does have criticisms, however, and they begin with the country’s overall blueprint for planning, the National Spatial Strategy. Published in 2002, the document set out the places, policies and procedures for development in a manner meant to address the imbalances created by the explosion in building.
The Spatial Strategy was to be implemented through regional planning guidelines which were to be implemented by the often forgotten regional authorities - super-councils set up to make neighbouring county councils co-operate for joined-up regional development. But regional authorities don’t have planning staff. They have to second planners from local authorities to draw up guidelines which local authorities are under no legal obligation to comply with.
“The National Spatial Strategy is quite a forward-thinking document,” Hind says, “but it falls on the regional authorities to make it happen and there is this missing link between them and the local authorities which actually make the decisions.”
Ian Lumley, heritage officer with An Taisce, the only organisation to enjoy a statutory consultative role in sensitive planning applications, sees another missing link - Government.
“The Government ignored their own National Spatial Strategy in their decentralisation plan so while it might have been a good piece of work, no-one in authority is taking it seriously.”
Without any real influence, the spatial strategy and regional guidelines give way to the county development plan, probably the most controversial document a county council will ever produce.
It was the melee over the drafting of the 1993 Dublin county plan and all the horse-trading and brown envelope swapping that went on over land rezoning then that ultimately led to the Planning Tribunal.
The brown envelopes may have disappeared but the appetite for rezoning hasn’t. As environment minister in 2006, Dick Roche overturned extensive rezonings in the Laois county development plan.
Enough land was already zoned to cater for 15 years growth yet the extra rezoning would have opened up 24 villages to massive residential development. Last summer, Monaghan’s development plan fell foul of Roche’s successor, John Gormley. Monaghan was attempting to rezone enough land to allow a doubling of the county’s population over the six-year life of the development plan, again without jobs, amenities and infrastructure to match.
So how could it happen that such an important document could wander so far off course in ignoring the governing principles of good planning? Andrew Hind lays a lot of the blame at the door of misguided councillors. “What’s wrong with our system is not the fact that elected members are involved because this is a democratic system, but there needs to be some mechanism for review at the end of the plan-making process where some independent body would automatically review the plan and intervene where there is an aspect that causes concern and amend that aspect.”
But are councillors simply misguided or should the accusation be more serious? An investigation by RTÉ’s Prime Time programme last November revealed some startling statistics about the involvement of elected representatives in the land, development and property business.
A total of 22% of councillors deal in or develop land through their day jobs as estate agents, landowners and builders. In Mayo, that figure rose as high as 45%, in Offaly it was 44% and in eight other counties it was 33% or more.
Such information should be held by the Standards in Public Office Commission which keeps records of politicians’ assets and business interests so that it can be seen where a conflict of interest might arise but it is up to the individual to make an annual declaration to the commission and the data is not independently verified.
Prime Time found that in Clare, if the declarations are to be believed, 97% of elected members have no beneficial interest even in their family home. In ten counties, two-thirds or more of the councillors have not declared an interest in the family home.
One contributor to the programme, planning consultant Paul McTernan, claimed some councillors who were auctioneers rezoned agricultural land then sold it at the newly inflated development land price.
With such incomplete declarations to SIPO, however, the question of who benefits from which transaction is often a matter of rumour and speculation rather than fact.
According to Ian Lumley, the SIPO files aren’t the only incomplete paperwork. “There are massive undocumented verbal representations made by councillors. In Denmark if a councillor intervened behind the scenes to influence a planning or rezoning decision it would be considered corruption - a criminal offence - but here it’s the norm.”
Lumley says An Taisce regularly receives calls from politicians trying to get the organisation to withdraw objections. Most calls are from councillors but even Government ministers have tried their luck.
“It’s very intimidating to have a politician on to you feeding you a sob story about an applicant and without any documentation to support what they say or to make their representation official.
“It’s a weekly occurrence for us [in head office] but at local level it’s daily. It’s not just us they call - councillors will be ringing the professional planning staff and council management too, again without any record of their interference.
“We find a lot of grievances out there about why did I get refused permission and so and so got it? Political interference is the answer - wholesale interference by telephone and verbally - pushing all the time to get a favourable result.”
Applicants often have other grievances, not least of which is the role of An Taisce itself. The organisation is unique in that it must be notified by local authorities of any planning application relating to an area of natural beauty, environmental sensitivity or historical value.
This notification gives the organisation a chance to raise objections to developments that might otherwise slip by unnoticed. But applicants who have come up against the group often complain of the seemingly arbitrary way that their case came to light, of the difficulties of finding out exactly who in the local An Taisce committee has a difficulty with their plan and of the organisation’s alleged preoccupation with past heritage over present humanity.
Lumley is unapologetic about the organisation’s privileged position but says he would be happy to share the role with other groups with specialist interests such as wildlife or architecture as is the case in Britain.
He doesn’t accept accusations of secrecy, however. “Cases are notified to head office and submissions are made through here because in many cases local An Taisce members have been threatened and abused.”
There have been no recorded cases of physical assault and no incidents have been reported to gardaí but Lumley says members must be protected. “We encourage them (applicants) to talk to us through our Dublin office. We will reply to any issues they raise.”
In practice, however, that’s a tall order. An Taisce is a trust that relies on fees from its membership of 5,000 for income and it receives around 14,000 notifications a year.
As for the allegation of putting historical legacy before current day needs, that’s a matter of opinion, Lumley says. Many of those who back An Taisce’s stand against the routing of the M3 motorway close to the Hill of Tara, for example, will argue that the organisation has its priorities just right.
Many ordinary planning applicants and objectors manage to avoid entanglement with An Taisce and the intricacies of planning policy papers, but that doesn’t always spare them frustration in dealing with the planning system.
The Ombudsman is asked to investigate over 250 complaints a year relating to planning applications but the office is strictly limited in what it can probe and many complaints must be turned away at the door.
“We are limited to enforcement and administration. We can not look at a decision to grant or refuse planning permission,” senior investigator Maureen Behan explains.
Neither have they any function in investigating grievances against An Bord Pleanála. Where they do have a role is in how a planning application is processed and in the way decisions are executed.
“Let’s say there is a decision to grant permission and there are conditions and a year or so later, some conditions are not complied with. A person can complain that a local authority is not enforcing those conditions.
“A very typical complaint that we would handle is where a person who objected to an application was not notified of a decision to grant permission and lost their right to appeal to an Bord Pleanála because they missed the four-week deadline. The Ombudsman takes that breach very seriously.”
In almost all cases, the Ombudsman rules in favour of the complainant, usually recommending the local authority pay a financial redress somewhere between €1,000 and €3,500.
With over 90,000 planning applications lodged annually in recent years, there are bound to bound to be complaints but Andrew Hind believes in most cases, planners get it right.
“The system has been under enormous stress because of the quantity of development and pressure for development but all of us who are inside the system see examples of people taking work home at weekends and doing site visits on Sundays.
“That’s because of their commitment to do their job properly. I think the quality of decisions made is very good. Everybody sees decisions they personally do not agree with but you can’t always allow what suits an individual person.”
Much was done over the past decade to try to address delays in the system — there were 250 local authority planners ten years ago and around 600 now. But the massive growth in building over the same period reduced much of the gains.
“Also the complexity and scale of planning applications has increased - with a big development you almost need an entire room to store the documents for the EIS (environmental impact statement),” Mr Hind says.
One criticism sometimes muttered about planners is that too many are from outside Ireland. “I think it’s grossly unfair but there have been unpleasant remarks,” says Mr Hind, who is himself British born.
“One of the things planners are trained in is being able to quickly assimilate and understand the culture and traditions of a particular area and the elements of that culture and tradition that are relevant to the planning of that area. That’s why we are professionals.”
He also points out that the appeals system here is more generous than in many other European countries as appeals can be made not only by the applicant and an objector directly affected by a proposed development but also by any other individual.
“Somebody who exercises their right to appeal ought to do so responsibly with reasonable grounds. If there were to be frivolous appeals — and I’m not saying that is a problem or trend — you could make some provision for the award of costs for wasting people’s time. There would be ways of controlling it without necessarily taking the right away.”
With the economy and the construction industry slowing, the planning system may get some breathing space this year but Mr Hind says the time could be put to good use.
“If the boom dies down there would be more time to focus on improvements such as the pre-application process.
“It’s something that gets sacrificed under pressure to meet deadlines but it could be used better to raise issues and to have problems addressed before an application goes in.
“If we are to achieve consensus, or at least greater consensus about planning, then more dialogue is needed. We’re all affected by planning so that’s ideally what we want - consensus not conflict.”
THE QUIRKS
PLANNING rules may seem uniformly comprehensive and dour but there are some exemptions and oddities. For example:
* You can you can only keep a boat, caravan or campervan in your garden for nine months of the year. Any longer than that and you need permission.
* Neither can you keep a for sale or let sign up for more than seven days after sale or letting without permission. You can however, build a house extension to a certain size without permission so long as it doesn’t reduce your garden or yard to less than 25 square metres.
* If you want to put a second satellite dish on your roof or attach it to the front of your house, you need permission. Keep it to one side and keep it out of sight and then you may be ok.
* You can build a wall no more than 1.2 metres high at the front of your house or two metres high at the side or rear without bothering a planning officer but a security fence needs permission.
* You can build a shed for domestic pets — which because of a loose definition could probably be stretched to mean a pet tiger — but not one for pigeons.
* There is no legal requirement to notify neighbours of an exempted development although displaying manners rather than copies of the planning acts is generally considered a better approach.
* You can build an extension to your home of up to 40 sq m without permission but if it is a barn for livestock or bloodstock, the exemption shoots up to 200 sq m.
* Even better, you can erect a 300 sq m barn, store or shed for agricultural purposes that don’t involve animals.
* There have been cases of individuals refused permission for houses who have simply built a barn and lived in it instead, although that’s not quite what planners have in mind when they think of barn conversions.
THE MYTHS
*Local authorities ignore the advice of planners:
Only 612 of 80,029 decisions made last year were contrary to the recommendation of the planner on the case — just one in 130 or 0.7% of all cases. A planner’s recommendation is most likely to be rejected in the case of houses, extensions or alterations, and industrial or commercial buildings rather than big infrastructure developments. At appeal level, however, the story is quite different. An Bord Pleanála last year rejected its own planning inspectors’ recommendations in 13.6% of cases.
* We’re a nation of NIMBYs:
Despite the unprecedented surge in development, the appeal rate has not changed. Around one in 14 or 7% of applications are appealed to An Bord Pleanála and that has remained static for years.
*Planning is a money-making racket:
More than €57 million was received in application fees last year but that was stretched across more than 90,000 applications. Development levies (imposed to cover the need for public lighting, footpaths, drainage etc) the development will create, are a more lucrative source of revenue. The take increased 100-fold over the past 20 years. In the past 10 years, total levies increased from €58m to €671m.
* No one is ever jailed for bad planning:
True, but you can get into trouble for unauthorised development which means a development that either has no permission or differs from the development granted permission in aspect or conditions. A total of 3,411 enforcement actions were taken in 2006, although there were only 213 convictions. Local authorities also applied to the courts for 132 injunctions but just 32 were granted.
* We’re overrun by planners:
There were 1,797 staff employed in planning in local authorities in 2006 but only 573 of them were actually planners. The rest were administrative, technical or legal staff or associated professionals. There are around 1,000 professional planners in Ireland but about 400 of them work in private practice and as consultants.
* There is a compo-culture in the planning system:
The perception that developers regularly get pay-outs for being refused permission for a development on land zoned for that kind of development isn’t borne out by the statistics. There was one claim for compensation in 2006 and the sum sought was €450,000. Nothing has been paid out so far. Nine claims totalling €42m were made in 2000 and nothing has been paid out there either. In 2002, €28.6m in claims was paid out and the same year €381,000 was paid out to one claimant.
PLANNING TENSION
WOOD QUAY
One of the first planning controversies to attract huge public interest was Dublin Corporation’s plan to build its headquarters at Wood Quay on the banks of the river Liffey.
A protracted battle raged in the 1970s when the site was discovered to be a Viking settlement, complete with medieval city walls and countless artefacts which members of the public helped themselves to when they were tossed in spoil heaps during haphazard excavations.
At one stage 20,000 people marched in protest but eventually the Supreme Court ruled that building could proceed. The incident is still a source of anger among conservationists today, although its legacy was to ensure that all future planning decisions were to take archeology into account.
BALLYMUN
Hailed as a new era in modern living when the building of the Ballymun flats in Dublin began in the 1960s, the planners soon realised they had replaced the tenement slums of the city centre with tenement tower blocks in the suburbs.
Located without shops, buses, personal space, jobs and other amenities, they became riddled with social problems.
Now under complete redevelopment, most of the towers have been demolished and are being replaced with houses, duplexes and low-rise apartments with a street-based layout and amenities scattered throughout.
M3 MOTORWAY
The decision to build a much-needed new motorway between Dublin and the commuter town of Navan was warmly welcomed — until the route was shown to be skirting the Hill of Tara.
The ensuing row over the last couple of years has attracted international attention from academics, historians and environmentalists because of Tara’s reputation as the seat of Ireland’s High Kings and its links with St Patrick.
Costly court cases have been taken and the matter is before Europe but construction is to press ahead despite the wealth of archeological finds being turned up in excavations.
INCINERATORS
Opposed by huge numbers of the public wherever they are proposed, incinerators have nonetheless been given planning permission in Cork, Meath and Ringsend, Dublin.
Meath is expected to be the first one, operational by 2010 with Ringaskiddy, Cork to follow although opponents are still hopeful of intervention by the High Court.
The Ringsend incinerator, granted permission last month, is a particular awkward one for the Government given that it is in the constituency of Environment Minister and anti-incinerator advocate John Gormley.
APPLICATIONS
IN THE early 1990s before the construction boom, the number of planning applications hovered above the 40,000 mark but in the 10 years from 1997 to 2006 inclusive, the numbers increased rapidly.
There were 55,929 applications in 1997, a record in itself, but the records continued to be broken so that in 2006 — the last full year for which data is available, applicants made an all-time high of 92,651 applications. That’s a 10 year rise of 66%.
The most numerous class of application is categorised simply as “dwellings”. There were almost 47,000 such applications in 2006, covering single houses, estates, apartments and holiday homes. The number of dwellings built in recent years has been around 80,000 annually.
The next most common application was for extensions and alterations at 21,204.
REFUSALS
WHILE the rise in application numbers over the past decade is striking, even more so is the trend in refusal rates which almost doubled over the same period. One in 10 applications was refused in 1996 but that had risen steadily to almost one in five in 2006.
In Wexford, almost one in three applications were refused (31.5%) but in Sligo only one in 12 (8.5%) met the same fate. The lowest refusal rates were in Sligo, Tipperary North, Limerick and Mayo.
The highest were in Wexford, Galway, Meath, Donegal and Westmeath.
APPEALS
THE appeals rate has remained constant at about 7% every year since the early 1990s but again there are big variations from area to area. In Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, for example, 16.2% of all decisions were appealed compared with just 1.6% in Monaghan.
A clear trend emerged in 2006 with appeal rates highest in the five city councils of Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Waterford as well as the three Dublin county councils of South Dublin, Fingal and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, all at 12% or above.
Monaghan, Longford, Donegal, Cavan, Carlow Galway, Laois, Roscommon, Sligo and Wexford all had appeal rates of below 5%.
Once an appeal comes before An Bord Pleanála, the local authority decision is more likely to be upheld or varied than reversed. In 1997, 42.5% of local authority decisions were upheld and a further 34.5% were varied while just 23% were reversed.
Proportionately, the outcomes were similar 10 years later. Just over 34% of decisions were upheld last year while 33% were varied and 32.8% were overturned.
Irish Examiner
www.buckplanning.ie
The doctor says that God created Eve from Adam’s rib, a procedure requiring surgery which makes his profession the oldest.
The engineer counters that before making humans, God created order from chaos - certainly the most ambitious civil engineering project ever and proof his profession is oldest.
The planner leans back in his chair and smiles smugly. Ah yes, he says, but who do you think created the chaos?
Actually, there are many jokes of a similar ilk — that’s just one of the kinder ones. Planners, the system they work in and the decisions it produces make for endless fuel for outrage.
Whether you’re a motorist disappearing in a cloud of exhaust fumes in a tailback stretching further than the eye can see, and the patience can tolerate, an eco-warrior facing down a JCB while tethered to a tree or a farmer in a forgotten village bereft of new life and development, the planning system seems ripe for criticism.
Ten years of revelations from the Planning Tribunal have not helped, serving only to reinforce the suspicion that the system was never robust enough to withstand the self-interested interference of developers and the public representatives they lobbied.
If the revelations had come at a calmer time, lessons might have been learned. But the 10 years of Flood and Mahon also coincided with the biggest, fastest and most lucrative building boom in our history.
While one set of weaknesses and failures was being highlighted in Dublin Castle, a whole new set was being discovered in every local authority across the country.
The result? Urban sprawl from the cities, commuting times multiplied, lack of school places and public transport, damage to properties built on flood plains, low water pressure in estates added to already strained mains pipes, apartment blocks without soundproofing, estates without green spaces, villages turned into towns without amenities to match and main streets drained of commerce by middle-of-nowhere malls and retail parks.
Combine that with complaints of inconsistent application of planning guidelines, subjective decision-making, unreasonable delays and burdensome bureaucracy, and Irish planning sounds irredeemable.
But is it really all that bad? And should the blame for faults and flaws lie solely with the system and the planners who operate within it?
Andrew Hind, a senior planner with Cork County Council, is also president of the Planning Institute of Ireland and speaks here in that role.
“We think we have a good planning system at the moment although there may be aspects of it that maybe need to be adapted and strengthened to meet the burdens placed on it,” he says.
He does have criticisms, however, and they begin with the country’s overall blueprint for planning, the National Spatial Strategy. Published in 2002, the document set out the places, policies and procedures for development in a manner meant to address the imbalances created by the explosion in building.
The Spatial Strategy was to be implemented through regional planning guidelines which were to be implemented by the often forgotten regional authorities - super-councils set up to make neighbouring county councils co-operate for joined-up regional development. But regional authorities don’t have planning staff. They have to second planners from local authorities to draw up guidelines which local authorities are under no legal obligation to comply with.
“The National Spatial Strategy is quite a forward-thinking document,” Hind says, “but it falls on the regional authorities to make it happen and there is this missing link between them and the local authorities which actually make the decisions.”
Ian Lumley, heritage officer with An Taisce, the only organisation to enjoy a statutory consultative role in sensitive planning applications, sees another missing link - Government.
“The Government ignored their own National Spatial Strategy in their decentralisation plan so while it might have been a good piece of work, no-one in authority is taking it seriously.”
Without any real influence, the spatial strategy and regional guidelines give way to the county development plan, probably the most controversial document a county council will ever produce.
It was the melee over the drafting of the 1993 Dublin county plan and all the horse-trading and brown envelope swapping that went on over land rezoning then that ultimately led to the Planning Tribunal.
The brown envelopes may have disappeared but the appetite for rezoning hasn’t. As environment minister in 2006, Dick Roche overturned extensive rezonings in the Laois county development plan.
Enough land was already zoned to cater for 15 years growth yet the extra rezoning would have opened up 24 villages to massive residential development. Last summer, Monaghan’s development plan fell foul of Roche’s successor, John Gormley. Monaghan was attempting to rezone enough land to allow a doubling of the county’s population over the six-year life of the development plan, again without jobs, amenities and infrastructure to match.
So how could it happen that such an important document could wander so far off course in ignoring the governing principles of good planning? Andrew Hind lays a lot of the blame at the door of misguided councillors. “What’s wrong with our system is not the fact that elected members are involved because this is a democratic system, but there needs to be some mechanism for review at the end of the plan-making process where some independent body would automatically review the plan and intervene where there is an aspect that causes concern and amend that aspect.”
But are councillors simply misguided or should the accusation be more serious? An investigation by RTÉ’s Prime Time programme last November revealed some startling statistics about the involvement of elected representatives in the land, development and property business.
A total of 22% of councillors deal in or develop land through their day jobs as estate agents, landowners and builders. In Mayo, that figure rose as high as 45%, in Offaly it was 44% and in eight other counties it was 33% or more.
Such information should be held by the Standards in Public Office Commission which keeps records of politicians’ assets and business interests so that it can be seen where a conflict of interest might arise but it is up to the individual to make an annual declaration to the commission and the data is not independently verified.
Prime Time found that in Clare, if the declarations are to be believed, 97% of elected members have no beneficial interest even in their family home. In ten counties, two-thirds or more of the councillors have not declared an interest in the family home.
One contributor to the programme, planning consultant Paul McTernan, claimed some councillors who were auctioneers rezoned agricultural land then sold it at the newly inflated development land price.
With such incomplete declarations to SIPO, however, the question of who benefits from which transaction is often a matter of rumour and speculation rather than fact.
According to Ian Lumley, the SIPO files aren’t the only incomplete paperwork. “There are massive undocumented verbal representations made by councillors. In Denmark if a councillor intervened behind the scenes to influence a planning or rezoning decision it would be considered corruption - a criminal offence - but here it’s the norm.”
Lumley says An Taisce regularly receives calls from politicians trying to get the organisation to withdraw objections. Most calls are from councillors but even Government ministers have tried their luck.
“It’s very intimidating to have a politician on to you feeding you a sob story about an applicant and without any documentation to support what they say or to make their representation official.
“It’s a weekly occurrence for us [in head office] but at local level it’s daily. It’s not just us they call - councillors will be ringing the professional planning staff and council management too, again without any record of their interference.
“We find a lot of grievances out there about why did I get refused permission and so and so got it? Political interference is the answer - wholesale interference by telephone and verbally - pushing all the time to get a favourable result.”
Applicants often have other grievances, not least of which is the role of An Taisce itself. The organisation is unique in that it must be notified by local authorities of any planning application relating to an area of natural beauty, environmental sensitivity or historical value.
This notification gives the organisation a chance to raise objections to developments that might otherwise slip by unnoticed. But applicants who have come up against the group often complain of the seemingly arbitrary way that their case came to light, of the difficulties of finding out exactly who in the local An Taisce committee has a difficulty with their plan and of the organisation’s alleged preoccupation with past heritage over present humanity.
Lumley is unapologetic about the organisation’s privileged position but says he would be happy to share the role with other groups with specialist interests such as wildlife or architecture as is the case in Britain.
He doesn’t accept accusations of secrecy, however. “Cases are notified to head office and submissions are made through here because in many cases local An Taisce members have been threatened and abused.”
There have been no recorded cases of physical assault and no incidents have been reported to gardaí but Lumley says members must be protected. “We encourage them (applicants) to talk to us through our Dublin office. We will reply to any issues they raise.”
In practice, however, that’s a tall order. An Taisce is a trust that relies on fees from its membership of 5,000 for income and it receives around 14,000 notifications a year.
As for the allegation of putting historical legacy before current day needs, that’s a matter of opinion, Lumley says. Many of those who back An Taisce’s stand against the routing of the M3 motorway close to the Hill of Tara, for example, will argue that the organisation has its priorities just right.
Many ordinary planning applicants and objectors manage to avoid entanglement with An Taisce and the intricacies of planning policy papers, but that doesn’t always spare them frustration in dealing with the planning system.
The Ombudsman is asked to investigate over 250 complaints a year relating to planning applications but the office is strictly limited in what it can probe and many complaints must be turned away at the door.
“We are limited to enforcement and administration. We can not look at a decision to grant or refuse planning permission,” senior investigator Maureen Behan explains.
Neither have they any function in investigating grievances against An Bord Pleanála. Where they do have a role is in how a planning application is processed and in the way decisions are executed.
“Let’s say there is a decision to grant permission and there are conditions and a year or so later, some conditions are not complied with. A person can complain that a local authority is not enforcing those conditions.
“A very typical complaint that we would handle is where a person who objected to an application was not notified of a decision to grant permission and lost their right to appeal to an Bord Pleanála because they missed the four-week deadline. The Ombudsman takes that breach very seriously.”
In almost all cases, the Ombudsman rules in favour of the complainant, usually recommending the local authority pay a financial redress somewhere between €1,000 and €3,500.
With over 90,000 planning applications lodged annually in recent years, there are bound to bound to be complaints but Andrew Hind believes in most cases, planners get it right.
“The system has been under enormous stress because of the quantity of development and pressure for development but all of us who are inside the system see examples of people taking work home at weekends and doing site visits on Sundays.
“That’s because of their commitment to do their job properly. I think the quality of decisions made is very good. Everybody sees decisions they personally do not agree with but you can’t always allow what suits an individual person.”
Much was done over the past decade to try to address delays in the system — there were 250 local authority planners ten years ago and around 600 now. But the massive growth in building over the same period reduced much of the gains.
“Also the complexity and scale of planning applications has increased - with a big development you almost need an entire room to store the documents for the EIS (environmental impact statement),” Mr Hind says.
One criticism sometimes muttered about planners is that too many are from outside Ireland. “I think it’s grossly unfair but there have been unpleasant remarks,” says Mr Hind, who is himself British born.
“One of the things planners are trained in is being able to quickly assimilate and understand the culture and traditions of a particular area and the elements of that culture and tradition that are relevant to the planning of that area. That’s why we are professionals.”
He also points out that the appeals system here is more generous than in many other European countries as appeals can be made not only by the applicant and an objector directly affected by a proposed development but also by any other individual.
“Somebody who exercises their right to appeal ought to do so responsibly with reasonable grounds. If there were to be frivolous appeals — and I’m not saying that is a problem or trend — you could make some provision for the award of costs for wasting people’s time. There would be ways of controlling it without necessarily taking the right away.”
With the economy and the construction industry slowing, the planning system may get some breathing space this year but Mr Hind says the time could be put to good use.
“If the boom dies down there would be more time to focus on improvements such as the pre-application process.
“It’s something that gets sacrificed under pressure to meet deadlines but it could be used better to raise issues and to have problems addressed before an application goes in.
“If we are to achieve consensus, or at least greater consensus about planning, then more dialogue is needed. We’re all affected by planning so that’s ideally what we want - consensus not conflict.”
THE QUIRKS
PLANNING rules may seem uniformly comprehensive and dour but there are some exemptions and oddities. For example:
* You can you can only keep a boat, caravan or campervan in your garden for nine months of the year. Any longer than that and you need permission.
* Neither can you keep a for sale or let sign up for more than seven days after sale or letting without permission. You can however, build a house extension to a certain size without permission so long as it doesn’t reduce your garden or yard to less than 25 square metres.
* If you want to put a second satellite dish on your roof or attach it to the front of your house, you need permission. Keep it to one side and keep it out of sight and then you may be ok.
* You can build a wall no more than 1.2 metres high at the front of your house or two metres high at the side or rear without bothering a planning officer but a security fence needs permission.
* You can build a shed for domestic pets — which because of a loose definition could probably be stretched to mean a pet tiger — but not one for pigeons.
* There is no legal requirement to notify neighbours of an exempted development although displaying manners rather than copies of the planning acts is generally considered a better approach.
* You can build an extension to your home of up to 40 sq m without permission but if it is a barn for livestock or bloodstock, the exemption shoots up to 200 sq m.
* Even better, you can erect a 300 sq m barn, store or shed for agricultural purposes that don’t involve animals.
* There have been cases of individuals refused permission for houses who have simply built a barn and lived in it instead, although that’s not quite what planners have in mind when they think of barn conversions.
THE MYTHS
*Local authorities ignore the advice of planners:
Only 612 of 80,029 decisions made last year were contrary to the recommendation of the planner on the case — just one in 130 or 0.7% of all cases. A planner’s recommendation is most likely to be rejected in the case of houses, extensions or alterations, and industrial or commercial buildings rather than big infrastructure developments. At appeal level, however, the story is quite different. An Bord Pleanála last year rejected its own planning inspectors’ recommendations in 13.6% of cases.
* We’re a nation of NIMBYs:
Despite the unprecedented surge in development, the appeal rate has not changed. Around one in 14 or 7% of applications are appealed to An Bord Pleanála and that has remained static for years.
*Planning is a money-making racket:
More than €57 million was received in application fees last year but that was stretched across more than 90,000 applications. Development levies (imposed to cover the need for public lighting, footpaths, drainage etc) the development will create, are a more lucrative source of revenue. The take increased 100-fold over the past 20 years. In the past 10 years, total levies increased from €58m to €671m.
* No one is ever jailed for bad planning:
True, but you can get into trouble for unauthorised development which means a development that either has no permission or differs from the development granted permission in aspect or conditions. A total of 3,411 enforcement actions were taken in 2006, although there were only 213 convictions. Local authorities also applied to the courts for 132 injunctions but just 32 were granted.
* We’re overrun by planners:
There were 1,797 staff employed in planning in local authorities in 2006 but only 573 of them were actually planners. The rest were administrative, technical or legal staff or associated professionals. There are around 1,000 professional planners in Ireland but about 400 of them work in private practice and as consultants.
* There is a compo-culture in the planning system:
The perception that developers regularly get pay-outs for being refused permission for a development on land zoned for that kind of development isn’t borne out by the statistics. There was one claim for compensation in 2006 and the sum sought was €450,000. Nothing has been paid out so far. Nine claims totalling €42m were made in 2000 and nothing has been paid out there either. In 2002, €28.6m in claims was paid out and the same year €381,000 was paid out to one claimant.
PLANNING TENSION
WOOD QUAY
One of the first planning controversies to attract huge public interest was Dublin Corporation’s plan to build its headquarters at Wood Quay on the banks of the river Liffey.
A protracted battle raged in the 1970s when the site was discovered to be a Viking settlement, complete with medieval city walls and countless artefacts which members of the public helped themselves to when they were tossed in spoil heaps during haphazard excavations.
At one stage 20,000 people marched in protest but eventually the Supreme Court ruled that building could proceed. The incident is still a source of anger among conservationists today, although its legacy was to ensure that all future planning decisions were to take archeology into account.
BALLYMUN
Hailed as a new era in modern living when the building of the Ballymun flats in Dublin began in the 1960s, the planners soon realised they had replaced the tenement slums of the city centre with tenement tower blocks in the suburbs.
Located without shops, buses, personal space, jobs and other amenities, they became riddled with social problems.
Now under complete redevelopment, most of the towers have been demolished and are being replaced with houses, duplexes and low-rise apartments with a street-based layout and amenities scattered throughout.
M3 MOTORWAY
The decision to build a much-needed new motorway between Dublin and the commuter town of Navan was warmly welcomed — until the route was shown to be skirting the Hill of Tara.
The ensuing row over the last couple of years has attracted international attention from academics, historians and environmentalists because of Tara’s reputation as the seat of Ireland’s High Kings and its links with St Patrick.
Costly court cases have been taken and the matter is before Europe but construction is to press ahead despite the wealth of archeological finds being turned up in excavations.
INCINERATORS
Opposed by huge numbers of the public wherever they are proposed, incinerators have nonetheless been given planning permission in Cork, Meath and Ringsend, Dublin.
Meath is expected to be the first one, operational by 2010 with Ringaskiddy, Cork to follow although opponents are still hopeful of intervention by the High Court.
The Ringsend incinerator, granted permission last month, is a particular awkward one for the Government given that it is in the constituency of Environment Minister and anti-incinerator advocate John Gormley.
APPLICATIONS
IN THE early 1990s before the construction boom, the number of planning applications hovered above the 40,000 mark but in the 10 years from 1997 to 2006 inclusive, the numbers increased rapidly.
There were 55,929 applications in 1997, a record in itself, but the records continued to be broken so that in 2006 — the last full year for which data is available, applicants made an all-time high of 92,651 applications. That’s a 10 year rise of 66%.
The most numerous class of application is categorised simply as “dwellings”. There were almost 47,000 such applications in 2006, covering single houses, estates, apartments and holiday homes. The number of dwellings built in recent years has been around 80,000 annually.
The next most common application was for extensions and alterations at 21,204.
REFUSALS
WHILE the rise in application numbers over the past decade is striking, even more so is the trend in refusal rates which almost doubled over the same period. One in 10 applications was refused in 1996 but that had risen steadily to almost one in five in 2006.
In Wexford, almost one in three applications were refused (31.5%) but in Sligo only one in 12 (8.5%) met the same fate. The lowest refusal rates were in Sligo, Tipperary North, Limerick and Mayo.
The highest were in Wexford, Galway, Meath, Donegal and Westmeath.
APPEALS
THE appeals rate has remained constant at about 7% every year since the early 1990s but again there are big variations from area to area. In Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown, for example, 16.2% of all decisions were appealed compared with just 1.6% in Monaghan.
A clear trend emerged in 2006 with appeal rates highest in the five city councils of Cork, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Waterford as well as the three Dublin county councils of South Dublin, Fingal and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, all at 12% or above.
Monaghan, Longford, Donegal, Cavan, Carlow Galway, Laois, Roscommon, Sligo and Wexford all had appeal rates of below 5%.
Once an appeal comes before An Bord Pleanála, the local authority decision is more likely to be upheld or varied than reversed. In 1997, 42.5% of local authority decisions were upheld and a further 34.5% were varied while just 23% were reversed.
Proportionately, the outcomes were similar 10 years later. Just over 34% of decisions were upheld last year while 33% were varied and 32.8% were overturned.
Irish Examiner
www.buckplanning.ie
Thursday, 5 July 2007
Tribunal can't probe payment
THE Supreme Court has blocked the Mahon Tribunal from investigating a £30,000 payment to Fianna Fail via former minister Ray Burke.
Described by legal experts as a "fundamental blow" to the operation of the 10-year planning and payments inquiry, it is the first time that the Supreme Court has stopped a tribunal module from going ahead.
Although the ruling will not affect the tribunal's current workload, including the Quarryvale II module now at public hearing, the inquiry is debarred from holding future modules.
Yesterday's ruling means that the tribunal, which wanted to inquire into a £30,000 payment given to Fianna Fail via Ray Burke in 1989, cannot probe 46 additional matters which it had identified as being eligible for investigation.
However, the Irish Independent has learned that the proposed Fitzwilton Module, one of 47 matters identified by the tribunal on a list known as "J2", has never been furnished to the Government.
The tribunal will now be restricted to completing six modules, including Quarryvale II and Carrickmines.
Irish Independent
Described by legal experts as a "fundamental blow" to the operation of the 10-year planning and payments inquiry, it is the first time that the Supreme Court has stopped a tribunal module from going ahead.
Although the ruling will not affect the tribunal's current workload, including the Quarryvale II module now at public hearing, the inquiry is debarred from holding future modules.
Yesterday's ruling means that the tribunal, which wanted to inquire into a £30,000 payment given to Fianna Fail via Ray Burke in 1989, cannot probe 46 additional matters which it had identified as being eligible for investigation.
However, the Irish Independent has learned that the proposed Fitzwilton Module, one of 47 matters identified by the tribunal on a list known as "J2", has never been furnished to the Government.
The tribunal will now be restricted to completing six modules, including Quarryvale II and Carrickmines.
Irish Independent
Friday, 12 January 2007
This week Simon Carswell spoke to Dick Gleeson Dublin City Planner
The Sunday Business Post had this story at the weekend. I only read it today, finally. It was in my pile ...
As the city's planner, he would like to see Dublin's becoming one of the best city centres in Europe by 2016. To that end, Gleeson has a long wish-list. He'd like to see uninterrupted walkways and cycle paths linking Sutton to Sandycove - taking advantage of Dublin Bay - and from Sandycove to Chapelizod.
He'd like to see the banks of the Liffey improved along the quays, with redeveloped areas of the city - such as Smithfield, O'Connell Street and the new square being built as part of the Spencer Dock project in the docklands - being linked by a continuous pedestrian route.
He wants Henry Street and Grafton Street and the large shopping area between the two to remain the number one shopping centre in the country. He believes there is enough space between the two streets to build the equivalent of three Dundrum Shopping Centres.
As an example, he cites the areas behind the old Habitat building on St Stephen's Green and areas of Dawson Street and Molesworth Street that could be developed into shopping streets.
Gleeson says Dublin City Council is probably going to meet its target of building 40,000 new homes in the city centre by 2010, but he recognises that there will be relatively little land left after that.
''If we are going to significantly address the challenge of the sprawl of Dublin, we are going to have to look at the consolidation of the city in a sustainable and well-designed way," he said.
Gleeson has warmed to the recent suggestion of moving the port out of Dublin - perhaps to Balbriggan in north Co Dublin - and developing the eastern side of the city as a residential centre, rather than an exclusively commercial and industrial hub.
''The port represents a major opportunity to think in a very adventurous way about what type of urban form might constitute an extension of central Dublin into that area," he said. ''I don't think it should be just a model copied from Manhattan. We can achieve very sustainable densities at six and seven storeys."
To the west of the city, Gleeson is enthusiastic about plans for the area around Heuston Station where a mostly residential 32-storey building is being built. He said the area could accommodate 5.5 million square feet of space and about 3,000 new homes.
At the other end of the west-east city axis, at Poolbeg, another six million square feet and about 3,000 new homes will be built. Gleeson doesn't see the city just expanding to the port, but westwards as well.
''The inner city now extends from Heuston to the Point Depot," he said.
''But that is not the end of the story. We still miss out on a strategic relationship of Dublin to the bay on one side and to the Phoenix Park on the other.
''It is absolutely amazing that a park of 1,700 acres is so physically and psychologically separate from the city. People say it is the largest urban park in Europe. It is - I have seen the city maps of Europe. We need the park and we need to integrate the park into the city."
Gleeson would like to see a French-style brown grit boulevard lined with trees running down the side of the park from Parkgate Street to Chapelizod along the Liffey so something can be made out of ''an old road out of the city'' that he acknowledges is not really used to a great extent anymore.
He would also like to see more made of the west end of the city centre and to use the river more, even for swimming. He uses Copenhagen – a city he admires - as an example.
He said the Danes have cordoned off part of the harbour in Copenhagen for swimming.
Gleeson said the council was undertaking a feasibility study to examine whether traffic could be banned from the area in front of Heuston Station.
This would involve redirecting traffic coming into the city from the west over a new bridge northwards across the Liffey to Conyngham Road along Parkgate Street and Benburb Street at the back of the Croppies Acre. This would open up the area in front of Heuston Station and along the river to pedestrians.
''The central concept is to link the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) through the rear of the CIE building on a raised new urban space and link it across to the Phoenix Park," said Gleeson.
Gleeson said the city would open up to the west with a new public park, linking IMMA in Kilmainham, south of the river, to the Nat ional Museum at Collins Barracks, north of the river, via Heuston Station.
He envisages a new entrance for the National Museum modelled on the Louvre in Paris. Gleeson's high ambitions for Dublin do not necessarily involve high buildings.
''There isn't an automatic case for high rise in Dublin. Most of those cities that I have mentioned - Copenhagen, Vienna, Barcelona and Paris - have not embraced high rise as the answer to everything," he said.
''A lot of debate goes into high rise because it is the easy way out, grabbing attention on a site or a flagship project. Relatively few of those buildings actually translate into flagship character and quality.
"Some architects can handle it, most can't.
''I would restate our commitment - Dublin will remain largely low rise and we will protect the area between the canals."
However, Gleeson acknowledged that there might be a place for high rise in the docklands.
''What we are stating is that we won't consider high buildings without a plan, which has got to look at all things on the ground – its context, its relationship with the historic legacy of Dublin," he said.
Planning and building well-designed skyscrapers in Dublin would be a challenge, said Gleeson. Office buildings need such a large ''floor plate'' that, when they rise into the sky, they tend to be ''inelegant and fat'', he said, whereas residential buildings tend to be ''more elegant''.
''The problem is that residential buildings are so expensive to build because the floor plates are so restrictive," he said.
Gleeson is not just focusing on the city centre. Ringsend, Ballsbridge, Rathmines and Grangegorman are also in his sights for a revamp.
He said the Irish Glass Bottle site - which was bought by a consortium led by property developer Bernard McNamara and including the Dublin Docklands Development Authority and wealth manager Derek Quinlan -offered the potential for an intriguing new suburb.
''It has to maximise the relationship between two very different characters - the character of the bay and the river. It presents one of the most interesting living environments anywhere in Dublin," he said.
Ballsbridge presented an opportunity to bring ''design energy'' to the suburbs, where it had been lacking, said Gleeson.
''It is probably the most famous suburb in Ireland in terms of its icon status," he said. ''Major institutions have been locating there for the last 100 years. It went through radical change at different times in its history and is probably going to go through radical change again."
The big question is whether or not the council will allow high rise in Ballsbridge, as envisaged by property developer Sean Dunne, who bought some of the most expensive land in the country when he purchased the Jurys Doyle site in 2005.
Dunne wants to develop the area in a radical plan. ''We are looking at more than just the lands owned by Sean Dunne and Ray Grehan [who owns land in Ballsbridge next to Dunne's]," said Gleeson.
''We are looking at the whole of Ballsbridge. It needs an additional number of facilities. It has very poor local shopping. It is dominated by traffic.
''For an area of the city that is so well known and so famous and has such amazing institutions as Lansdowne Road, it sometimes falls down at its heart."
The council is preparing a local area plan that will be put on public display later this month.
Gleeson said this would involve ''creating an urban form that answers the questions of creating a character and identity for Ballsbridge - one that marries well with the wonderful legacy of Victorian Dublin''.
As for traffic problems in the city centre, Gleeson believes that more Luas lines around the city will provide a solution, citing the fact that Luas carries 27 million passengers a year (compared to Dart's 24 million) and transports more people at night.
''We are so close to saturation with the traffic that, when a small incident happens, it can cause serious problems," he said.
He believes the Port Tunnel will ease traffic in the city centre and give the city's planners an opportunity to develop public spaces along the river.
''If you ask me how we are going to pull together the newly-developed areas along the north city centre," he said, ''the answer is the river."
As the city's planner, he would like to see Dublin's becoming one of the best city centres in Europe by 2016. To that end, Gleeson has a long wish-list. He'd like to see uninterrupted walkways and cycle paths linking Sutton to Sandycove - taking advantage of Dublin Bay - and from Sandycove to Chapelizod.
He'd like to see the banks of the Liffey improved along the quays, with redeveloped areas of the city - such as Smithfield, O'Connell Street and the new square being built as part of the Spencer Dock project in the docklands - being linked by a continuous pedestrian route.
He wants Henry Street and Grafton Street and the large shopping area between the two to remain the number one shopping centre in the country. He believes there is enough space between the two streets to build the equivalent of three Dundrum Shopping Centres.
As an example, he cites the areas behind the old Habitat building on St Stephen's Green and areas of Dawson Street and Molesworth Street that could be developed into shopping streets.
Gleeson says Dublin City Council is probably going to meet its target of building 40,000 new homes in the city centre by 2010, but he recognises that there will be relatively little land left after that.
''If we are going to significantly address the challenge of the sprawl of Dublin, we are going to have to look at the consolidation of the city in a sustainable and well-designed way," he said.
Gleeson has warmed to the recent suggestion of moving the port out of Dublin - perhaps to Balbriggan in north Co Dublin - and developing the eastern side of the city as a residential centre, rather than an exclusively commercial and industrial hub.
''The port represents a major opportunity to think in a very adventurous way about what type of urban form might constitute an extension of central Dublin into that area," he said. ''I don't think it should be just a model copied from Manhattan. We can achieve very sustainable densities at six and seven storeys."
To the west of the city, Gleeson is enthusiastic about plans for the area around Heuston Station where a mostly residential 32-storey building is being built. He said the area could accommodate 5.5 million square feet of space and about 3,000 new homes.
At the other end of the west-east city axis, at Poolbeg, another six million square feet and about 3,000 new homes will be built. Gleeson doesn't see the city just expanding to the port, but westwards as well.
''The inner city now extends from Heuston to the Point Depot," he said.
''But that is not the end of the story. We still miss out on a strategic relationship of Dublin to the bay on one side and to the Phoenix Park on the other.
''It is absolutely amazing that a park of 1,700 acres is so physically and psychologically separate from the city. People say it is the largest urban park in Europe. It is - I have seen the city maps of Europe. We need the park and we need to integrate the park into the city."
Gleeson would like to see a French-style brown grit boulevard lined with trees running down the side of the park from Parkgate Street to Chapelizod along the Liffey so something can be made out of ''an old road out of the city'' that he acknowledges is not really used to a great extent anymore.
He would also like to see more made of the west end of the city centre and to use the river more, even for swimming. He uses Copenhagen – a city he admires - as an example.
He said the Danes have cordoned off part of the harbour in Copenhagen for swimming.
Gleeson said the council was undertaking a feasibility study to examine whether traffic could be banned from the area in front of Heuston Station.
This would involve redirecting traffic coming into the city from the west over a new bridge northwards across the Liffey to Conyngham Road along Parkgate Street and Benburb Street at the back of the Croppies Acre. This would open up the area in front of Heuston Station and along the river to pedestrians.
''The central concept is to link the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) through the rear of the CIE building on a raised new urban space and link it across to the Phoenix Park," said Gleeson.
Gleeson said the city would open up to the west with a new public park, linking IMMA in Kilmainham, south of the river, to the Nat ional Museum at Collins Barracks, north of the river, via Heuston Station.
He envisages a new entrance for the National Museum modelled on the Louvre in Paris. Gleeson's high ambitions for Dublin do not necessarily involve high buildings.
''There isn't an automatic case for high rise in Dublin. Most of those cities that I have mentioned - Copenhagen, Vienna, Barcelona and Paris - have not embraced high rise as the answer to everything," he said.
''A lot of debate goes into high rise because it is the easy way out, grabbing attention on a site or a flagship project. Relatively few of those buildings actually translate into flagship character and quality.
"Some architects can handle it, most can't.
''I would restate our commitment - Dublin will remain largely low rise and we will protect the area between the canals."
However, Gleeson acknowledged that there might be a place for high rise in the docklands.
''What we are stating is that we won't consider high buildings without a plan, which has got to look at all things on the ground – its context, its relationship with the historic legacy of Dublin," he said.
Planning and building well-designed skyscrapers in Dublin would be a challenge, said Gleeson. Office buildings need such a large ''floor plate'' that, when they rise into the sky, they tend to be ''inelegant and fat'', he said, whereas residential buildings tend to be ''more elegant''.
''The problem is that residential buildings are so expensive to build because the floor plates are so restrictive," he said.
Gleeson is not just focusing on the city centre. Ringsend, Ballsbridge, Rathmines and Grangegorman are also in his sights for a revamp.
He said the Irish Glass Bottle site - which was bought by a consortium led by property developer Bernard McNamara and including the Dublin Docklands Development Authority and wealth manager Derek Quinlan -offered the potential for an intriguing new suburb.
''It has to maximise the relationship between two very different characters - the character of the bay and the river. It presents one of the most interesting living environments anywhere in Dublin," he said.
Ballsbridge presented an opportunity to bring ''design energy'' to the suburbs, where it had been lacking, said Gleeson.
''It is probably the most famous suburb in Ireland in terms of its icon status," he said. ''Major institutions have been locating there for the last 100 years. It went through radical change at different times in its history and is probably going to go through radical change again."
The big question is whether or not the council will allow high rise in Ballsbridge, as envisaged by property developer Sean Dunne, who bought some of the most expensive land in the country when he purchased the Jurys Doyle site in 2005.
Dunne wants to develop the area in a radical plan. ''We are looking at more than just the lands owned by Sean Dunne and Ray Grehan [who owns land in Ballsbridge next to Dunne's]," said Gleeson.
''We are looking at the whole of Ballsbridge. It needs an additional number of facilities. It has very poor local shopping. It is dominated by traffic.
''For an area of the city that is so well known and so famous and has such amazing institutions as Lansdowne Road, it sometimes falls down at its heart."
The council is preparing a local area plan that will be put on public display later this month.
Gleeson said this would involve ''creating an urban form that answers the questions of creating a character and identity for Ballsbridge - one that marries well with the wonderful legacy of Victorian Dublin''.
As for traffic problems in the city centre, Gleeson believes that more Luas lines around the city will provide a solution, citing the fact that Luas carries 27 million passengers a year (compared to Dart's 24 million) and transports more people at night.
''We are so close to saturation with the traffic that, when a small incident happens, it can cause serious problems," he said.
He believes the Port Tunnel will ease traffic in the city centre and give the city's planners an opportunity to develop public spaces along the river.
''If you ask me how we are going to pull together the newly-developed areas along the north city centre," he said, ''the answer is the river."
Thursday, 4 January 2007
Criticism of planners and An Taisce - same old, same old ...
The Southern Star has this story:
Growing bitterness about the way planning applications are allowed and disallowed in Beara has become a major topic in the area, with much criticism of the county planners and An Taisce. At a meeting of the Cork County Council planners were attacked for not granting more permissions. for houses in rural areas to compensate for the restrictions imposed in the controversial three-mile limit in the 1996 County Development Plan. Councillors want to see more preference given to local people who apply to put up houses in areas where building it as present severely restricted to preserve scenes of natural beauty. Locals believe that tight regulations are preventing people who want to stay in the area from building the houses they need and they think local people should be able to share the benefits of rising land values. They are also keen to see more building going on to create jobs in of high unemployment.
Councillors of all parties, particularly those representing Beara want planning rules relaxed to benefit local people rather than outsiders, including outsiders who are building holiday homes on sites which have been granted planning permission for dwellings. Resentment often arises because outsiders have the money to buy sites where there is planning permission which local people cannot afford.
Locals are also concerned about the apparent ease which people from outside the area have been receiving planning permission while local people are refused. A recent case is one near Castletownbere where a young local fisherman who applied for planning permission to build a house on his own land, was refused four times. The reason given by the local engineer was that the exit would be on to the main Castletownbere/Allihies Road, while a short distance away outsiders were granted planning permission to build second and holiday homes only a few yards from the same road.
Locals are also highly critical of An Taisce and say that they are faceless people acting against local interests.
Growing bitterness about the way planning applications are allowed and disallowed in Beara has become a major topic in the area, with much criticism of the county planners and An Taisce. At a meeting of the Cork County Council planners were attacked for not granting more permissions. for houses in rural areas to compensate for the restrictions imposed in the controversial three-mile limit in the 1996 County Development Plan. Councillors want to see more preference given to local people who apply to put up houses in areas where building it as present severely restricted to preserve scenes of natural beauty. Locals believe that tight regulations are preventing people who want to stay in the area from building the houses they need and they think local people should be able to share the benefits of rising land values. They are also keen to see more building going on to create jobs in of high unemployment.
Councillors of all parties, particularly those representing Beara want planning rules relaxed to benefit local people rather than outsiders, including outsiders who are building holiday homes on sites which have been granted planning permission for dwellings. Resentment often arises because outsiders have the money to buy sites where there is planning permission which local people cannot afford.
Locals are also concerned about the apparent ease which people from outside the area have been receiving planning permission while local people are refused. A recent case is one near Castletownbere where a young local fisherman who applied for planning permission to build a house on his own land, was refused four times. The reason given by the local engineer was that the exit would be on to the main Castletownbere/Allihies Road, while a short distance away outsiders were granted planning permission to build second and holiday homes only a few yards from the same road.
Locals are also highly critical of An Taisce and say that they are faceless people acting against local interests.
Wednesday, 27 December 2006
PUBLIC ART & TOWN PLANNING CD-ROM
The CD-ROM is a multimedia essay which presents an environmental analysis of an Irish provincial town from the perspective of an artist and a town planner.
The project focuses on 12 specific locations in Longford town. Issues such as architecture, history, function, and future potential are discussed.
The CD-ROM incorporates text, photographs, and audio to present the viewpoints of both the artist and the planner in an interesting, entertaining, and informative manner.
Produced for the Arts Office of Longford County Council, with funding by the Arts Council of Ireland, the goal of the project is to increase awareness of Irish people in their surroundings, the potential in their areas, public art, and town planning issues.
The CD-ROM was distributed to planners, architects, schools, colleges, environmental groups etc around Ireland.
It is available at http://www.createinteractive.com/portfolio/planning.php
The project focuses on 12 specific locations in Longford town. Issues such as architecture, history, function, and future potential are discussed.
The CD-ROM incorporates text, photographs, and audio to present the viewpoints of both the artist and the planner in an interesting, entertaining, and informative manner.
Produced for the Arts Office of Longford County Council, with funding by the Arts Council of Ireland, the goal of the project is to increase awareness of Irish people in their surroundings, the potential in their areas, public art, and town planning issues.
The CD-ROM was distributed to planners, architects, schools, colleges, environmental groups etc around Ireland.
It is available at http://www.createinteractive.com/portfolio/planning.php
Town Planning
I might also have said (see previous post):
Educational and Other Requirements
Town planning for many years was different from many third level courses in that it is only available as a fourth level course! In other words, town planning courses were only available at postgraduate level. But DIT has changed this as it now also runs a full time undergradate course, a BSc in Planning and Environmental Management.
These courses are regulated by the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), founded in 1975. The Institute, and the equivalent UK institute, the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) recognise only one professional school, the Department of Regional and Urban Planning in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at UCD.
The key course run for professional planners is the Masters of Regional and Urban Planning, a full time postgraduate programme extending over two years, with a dissertation in year two. This Masters is normally open to graduates of Architecture and Civil Engineering, though other disciplines are considered. So anyone considering this as a career would be wise to undertake an undergraduate degree in either of these disciplines.
Examples of Courses
As noted above, UCD's Faculty of Engineering and Architecture offers a fourth level course in town planning: http://www.ucd.ie/~regurbpl/
One can also take the professional exams of two relevant institutes (graduates in the Master of Regional and Urban Planning are exempt): the Irish Planning Institute and the Royal Town Planning Institute (the web addresses are http://www.irishplanninginstitute.ie and http://www.rtpi.org.uk)
There are also two full-time postgraduate courses in the DIT's Faculty of The Built Environment: A Masters in Sustainable Development (FT118) and a Masters in Regional and Local Development (FT119).
DIT offers two part time courses, B707, MSc in Planning and Development, and B714, MSc in Spatial Planning. The first of these courses has been recognised by the Society of Chartered Surveyors/Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors as fulfilling the academic requirements for membership of the planning and development division of Society and Institution. The second course, in Spatial Planning, is seeking accreditation from the Irish Planning Institute, the Royal Town Planning Institute as well as the Planning and Development Division of The Society of Chartered Surveyors.
Educational and Other Requirements
Town planning for many years was different from many third level courses in that it is only available as a fourth level course! In other words, town planning courses were only available at postgraduate level. But DIT has changed this as it now also runs a full time undergradate course, a BSc in Planning and Environmental Management.
These courses are regulated by the Irish Planning Institute (IPI), founded in 1975. The Institute, and the equivalent UK institute, the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) recognise only one professional school, the Department of Regional and Urban Planning in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at UCD.
The key course run for professional planners is the Masters of Regional and Urban Planning, a full time postgraduate programme extending over two years, with a dissertation in year two. This Masters is normally open to graduates of Architecture and Civil Engineering, though other disciplines are considered. So anyone considering this as a career would be wise to undertake an undergraduate degree in either of these disciplines.
Examples of Courses
As noted above, UCD's Faculty of Engineering and Architecture offers a fourth level course in town planning: http://www.ucd.ie/~regurbpl/
One can also take the professional exams of two relevant institutes (graduates in the Master of Regional and Urban Planning are exempt): the Irish Planning Institute and the Royal Town Planning Institute (the web addresses are http://www.irishplanninginstitute.ie and http://www.rtpi.org.uk)
There are also two full-time postgraduate courses in the DIT's Faculty of The Built Environment: A Masters in Sustainable Development (FT118) and a Masters in Regional and Local Development (FT119).
DIT offers two part time courses, B707, MSc in Planning and Development, and B714, MSc in Spatial Planning. The first of these courses has been recognised by the Society of Chartered Surveyors/Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors as fulfilling the academic requirements for membership of the planning and development division of Society and Institution. The second course, in Spatial Planning, is seeking accreditation from the Irish Planning Institute, the Royal Town Planning Institute as well as the Planning and Development Division of The Society of Chartered Surveyors.
Careers in Planning
I was asked on Christmas Eve while out and about why it is more people are doing planning now. Well ... a little lesss inebriated I may have answered: Town Planning is a broad and rewarding career and allows for specialisation in the fields of urban design, environmental sciences, social issues, management, developments and a host of allied fields. Planners have a broad training in the arts, sciences and humanities. This training aims to make planners the co-ordinators of development projects, socially aware, environmentally responsible - problem solvers.
Planning has to do with the management and development of both urban and rural areas in order to protect and best serve the present and future generations. All planning issues deal with conflicting demands; it is the role of the planner to analyse and understand these demands and to advise on the best options. Many planning decisions are taken by elected officials based on professional advice.
Planning has to do with the management and development of both urban and rural areas in order to protect and best serve the present and future generations. All planning issues deal with conflicting demands; it is the role of the planner to analyse and understand these demands and to advise on the best options. Many planning decisions are taken by elected officials based on professional advice.
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