Any inquiry must avoid witch-hunt and provide a rigorous and stable development plan, writes ROB KITCHIN.
AS WELL as a catastrophic failure in Ireland’s banking and financial regulatory system, there has been a disastrous failure of the planning system. The Government has two principal levers through which it can regulate property development. The first is through fiscal policy with respect to regulating access to credit and determining taxation rates. The second is through planning policy, the zoning of land and the granting of planning permission.
Explanations of the Irish property bubble have focused almost exclusively on the former while, to date, the role of the planning system in creating the property bubble has been little considered. And yet, the banks could have lent all the money they desired, but if zonings and planning permission were not forthcoming, then development could not have occurred in the way that it did.
In a housing boom, planning should act as a counter-balance to the pressures of development to maintain a stable housing market and try to prevent boom-and-bust cycles. Planning should provide checks and balances to the excesses of development and act for the common good, even if that means taking unpopular decisions. However, during the Celtic Tiger period a laissez-faire approach to planning predominated at all levels of governance.
Planning decisions were not sufficiently evidence-based, and in many cases did not take account of realistic long-term demographic demand, market conditions or issues of sustainability. Cautious voices were marginalised and ignored.
Both the fiscal and planning levers of development were overly pro-growth.
As a result, not only was there an unsustainable growth in property prices, but this was accompanied by a property building frenzy that led to a significant oversupply of housing (as well as of offices, retail units and hotels) in almost all parts of the country. Between January 1996 and December 2005 more than 550,000 housing units were built. In the same period, the number of households grew by just 346,000.
Yet from 2006 to 2009, 244,000 new units were built, despite a vacancy rate of 12.2 per cent, excluding holiday homes, in 2006.
While local authorities like Fingal, Kildare, Galway city, Meath, Wicklow and south Dublin did a reasonable job at keeping supply and demand aligned, others did not heed good planning guidelines and regional and national objectives; did not conduct rigorous demographic profiling of demand; and did not take into account the fact that much of the land zoned lacked essential services such as water and sewage treatment plants, energy supply, public transport or roads.
Instead, permission and zoning were facilitated by the abandonment of basic planning principles by elected representatives on the local and national stage and driven by the demands of local people, developers and speculators and ambitious, localised growth plans framed within a zero-sum game of potentially being left behind with respect to development.
Further, central government not only failed to adequately oversee, regulate and direct local planning, but actively encouraged its excesses through tax incentive schemes and the flaunting of its own principles as set out in the National Spatial Strategy through policies such as decentralisation.
The level of over-development that has occurred could take years to correct and seriously hamper the recovery of the housing market and the operation of Nama.
At the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, we are calling for an independent review of the operation of the planning system during the Celtic Tiger years to be undertaken to consider fully the role of planning in the creation of the property bubble, similar to the Honohan (2010) and the Regling and Watson (2010) reports on banking and financial regulation.
The review would examine planning policy formation and application and the organisation, operation and regulation of planning within and across different agencies and at all scales in Ireland. It would investigate all aspects of the planning system and its operation, including the extent to which there was: joined-up thinking between agencies and authorities; high-quality data and evidence-informed decision-making; strong levels of oversight, monitoring and control of clientelism and cronyism at play in the system.
The inquiry should not take the form of a witch-hunt or a blame game, but rather constitute a systemic review of how the planning system failed to counter and control the excesses of the boom and provide a more stable and sustainable pattern of development.
There are seven key issues that need to be addressed before consumers regain confidence, property prices bottom out and the housing market starts to function properly.
Supply and demand will need to be harmonised. There has to be a sustained growth in the economy with an associated fall in unemployment. House prices have to align more closely to average industrial earnings. Affordable credit has to be available for first-time buyers and those trading up. The uncertainties concerning Nama and its operation have to be dispelled, especially since it will be controlling a sizeable share of property and land. This necessitates full transparency of the agency’s workings and the assets it is managing.
Consumers have to be satisfied that the banking crisis is truly over and that financial institutions are properly regulated. And, finally, substantive changes need to occur in the planning system to ensure that it works for the common good and produces sustainable development.
In the short term, we need a clear plan of action to deal with ghost estates and to implement this plan speedily. This should include addressing the social and economic conditions of those living on such estates and a full assessment of alternative uses.
Our analysis suggests that there is little need for housing development in the State in the immediate future beyond selected social housing provision. This is not to say that there is no requirement for construction, however.
Where construction could be fruitfully undertaken is with respect to public facilities like schools and hospitals, public transport, roads, energy and broadband infrastructure.
Such a targeted capital investment could, on the one hand, stimulate the economy in terms of employment and investment and provide multiplier effects across the private sector and, on the other, provide world-class infrastructure to facilitate and encourage indigenous growth and inward investment. Any such investment should align with the National Spatial Strategy and National Development Plan and be delivered through a rigorous, responsible and sustainable planning system.
Prof Rob Kitchin is director of the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at NUI Maynooth. He is one of the authors of yesterday’s working paper from the institute, A Haunted Landscape: Housing and Ghost Estates in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland along with Justin Gleeson and Dr Cian O’Callaghan of NIRSA at NUI Maynooth, and Dr Karen Keaveney of the school of spatial planning, architecture and civil engineering, Queen’s University, Belfast
Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
Showing posts with label planning and sustainable development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label planning and sustainable development. Show all posts
Monday, 2 August 2010
Monday, 5 May 2008
Constructing a leaner future
Innovation, sustainability and efficiency are key to the building sector, writes Haydn Shaughnessy
THE QUESTION of whether good times or bad are best for innovation is likely to be answered over the coming years in Ireland, particularly in the building trade.
Over the past decade, labour shortages in the building trade led, for example, to the adoption of off-site modules in construction at a faster rate than they might without that pressure point.
With the changing economic climate, however, it's less clear where the future pressure points for innovation in this sector will be, and what we might expect.
According to Keith Finglas, managing director of consultancy firm Innovation Delivery, a Gartner analyst report two years ago showed IT spend in construction stands at just 0.5 per cent. "In the banking centre it is around 3.5 per cent and the norm across industry is 2.5 per cent. The building industry is clearly lagging," says Finglas.
The application of IT to construction seems an obvious area in which to explore greater efficiencies. Another key area in vogue at present in the construction sector is environmental sustainability.
"We've seen a radical change in the propensity of investors to commit to sustainable energy and design," says Sustainable Energy Ireland's head of the built environment, Kevin O'Rourke.
If IT and environmental concerns clamour for our attention, the past years of economic boom has presented challenges that the authorities responsible for planning have arguably failed to meet.
Because of excesses over the past decade, in part led by developer enthusiasm, future innovation, according to some interested parties, will have to be directed at the public policy sphere. Not least is the issue of where building design stands as a profession.
"I think there are going to be impacts," says Sean Ó Laoire, current President of the Royal Institute of Irish Architects. "They're already evident with quite significant lay-offs, but then you might say, well, this is a cyclical business and lay-offs happen from time to time."
Ó Laoire claims the pressure points in building design are policy-related and urgent.
"For the first time there's international recognition of Irish architecture and design, a good creative culture with young architects excited about working in an Irish practice, new architects' schools in Cork and Waterford, and more. The question we need to ask is, are we simply prepared to dissipate a decade of creative endeavour?"
The RIAI's concern is that a critical mass exists for Irish design talent to blossom, but suddenly the work available for this burgeoning profession is drying up. If that sounds like a special pleading, it is against the background of design becoming more and more pervasive.
"Do you look for other ways to use these skills?" Ó Laoire asks. "For example, should we engage architects in local planning administration, which is bedevilled by lack of resources and poor governance?"
O'Rourke of Sustainable Energy Ireland agrees that innovation is needed in public planning and urban design.
"There needs to be a drive toward making it attractive for consumers and developers to take a more holistic approach, so that transport and sustainable energy supply are taken into account in the planning process," he says.
There's very little net gain from more energy-efficient houses if their occupants leave a carbon footprint on an hour and a half commute into a city.
"The only green shoots I see," says a despairing Ó Laoire, "is in urban design, and progressive local authorities and developers looking at master planning as a framework for dialogue and involving architects."
The pressure to innovate in this over-arching area of planning might be pressing, but as yet it is unclear what mechanisms might be put in place to direct change. The service design innovation is absent, according to Ó Laoire.
On the other hand, examples are beginning to arise of how new communications technologies can help create efficiencies in how we plan and build.
"The construction industry has largely used IT in the office rather than giving it to field staff," says Finglas, whose company specialises in designing innovation programmes and is active in the construction sector. "In the US there are already examples of firms using the web to create spot-markets in concrete, so if you have a load that is in danger of going off while you wait at a site you can trade it," he says by way of example.
He refers also to the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to tag and track supplies on building sites as a key cost innovation. RFID trials in Britain by BT Auto-ID, a division of the BT telecommunications firm, were positively received. However, more exotic applications of IT will have as important an impact.
In conjunction with computer service firm IBM, Swiss building giant Implenia has recently developed a virtual control room, prototyped in the online virtual world Second Life.
This virtual control room means Implenia can design buildings without the need for actual control rooms and can reduce overheads by controlling facilities such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) within a 3D virtual room. They estimate that the system has the potential to create a 25 per cent saving in building management costs.
Using virtual facilities in the design process is an area that is only beginning to find its feet. Studio Wikitecture (www.studiowikitecture.com) is an initiative designed to bring the benefits of Wikis, online collaborative knowledge environments, to building design.
Wikitecture combines a wiki with a virtual presence. Designers suggest modules and options for a building which they prototype. Meanwhile, participants (a building's potential users, developers, planners) can vote on the suitability or desirability of those options. The idea is that buildings become better suited to use through extensive but real time consultation at the design stage.
Meanwhile, US networking giant CISCO has collaborated with Palomar Pomerado Health in Florida to create a virtual hospital. The real life hospital launches in 2011. The virtual equivalent launched last February.
Its purpose is to allow the design team to gather feedback on the layout and facilities but also, later, to familiarise patients with the processes and environment, a potential area for service innovations and cost saving.
On the more prosaic level of what houses might be like to live in, SEI's Kevin O'Rourke sees a number of areas where innovations will be necessary. Now that we live in increasingly well insulated houses, the indoor atmosphere needs to be better ventilated. But there's no point wasting energy saved by insulation on dragging air into the house.
"The real issue is going to be the quality of the indoor environment, in terms of air quality, in highly insulated environments," O'Rourke says. He suggests heating systems so small they would currently be too small to regulate, mechanical ventilation systems, solar heat, and services like air-leakage testing are going to be the hot innovation areas.
SEI is about to launch a new series of initiatives that direct innovation at non-heat power usage in home and offices and with ever rising fuel prices, SEI's success in stimulating change looks reasonably assured.
Half of a house's CO2 emissions now come from non-heat sources. "We need to make inroads into electricity usage," O'Rourke says, calling the issue "a serious challenge for the coming five years".
As he also points out, these innovations can count for little if they don't have the right planning context. It might well turn out that a pivotal innovation for Ireland lies within public policy and the ability of politicians and administrators to harness the positives that have come out of the past decade, while managing the negatives of economic decline.
"We need an alliance between Government and industry," says Ó Laoire, referring to the apparently inevitable loss of design jobs. "We need to see what can be done to protect these skills, but as yet we haven't asked how these new skill sets can be used."
The consequences of losing our new design talent could prove costly unless mechanisms are found to redeploy architects into different areas of the economy.
That might be a testing proposition, but as design becomes more integral to every facet of commerce, manufacture and service, there is the distinct possibility that the building industry's loss could be the country's gain.
Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
THE QUESTION of whether good times or bad are best for innovation is likely to be answered over the coming years in Ireland, particularly in the building trade.
Over the past decade, labour shortages in the building trade led, for example, to the adoption of off-site modules in construction at a faster rate than they might without that pressure point.
With the changing economic climate, however, it's less clear where the future pressure points for innovation in this sector will be, and what we might expect.
According to Keith Finglas, managing director of consultancy firm Innovation Delivery, a Gartner analyst report two years ago showed IT spend in construction stands at just 0.5 per cent. "In the banking centre it is around 3.5 per cent and the norm across industry is 2.5 per cent. The building industry is clearly lagging," says Finglas.
The application of IT to construction seems an obvious area in which to explore greater efficiencies. Another key area in vogue at present in the construction sector is environmental sustainability.
"We've seen a radical change in the propensity of investors to commit to sustainable energy and design," says Sustainable Energy Ireland's head of the built environment, Kevin O'Rourke.
If IT and environmental concerns clamour for our attention, the past years of economic boom has presented challenges that the authorities responsible for planning have arguably failed to meet.
Because of excesses over the past decade, in part led by developer enthusiasm, future innovation, according to some interested parties, will have to be directed at the public policy sphere. Not least is the issue of where building design stands as a profession.
"I think there are going to be impacts," says Sean Ó Laoire, current President of the Royal Institute of Irish Architects. "They're already evident with quite significant lay-offs, but then you might say, well, this is a cyclical business and lay-offs happen from time to time."
Ó Laoire claims the pressure points in building design are policy-related and urgent.
"For the first time there's international recognition of Irish architecture and design, a good creative culture with young architects excited about working in an Irish practice, new architects' schools in Cork and Waterford, and more. The question we need to ask is, are we simply prepared to dissipate a decade of creative endeavour?"
The RIAI's concern is that a critical mass exists for Irish design talent to blossom, but suddenly the work available for this burgeoning profession is drying up. If that sounds like a special pleading, it is against the background of design becoming more and more pervasive.
"Do you look for other ways to use these skills?" Ó Laoire asks. "For example, should we engage architects in local planning administration, which is bedevilled by lack of resources and poor governance?"
O'Rourke of Sustainable Energy Ireland agrees that innovation is needed in public planning and urban design.
"There needs to be a drive toward making it attractive for consumers and developers to take a more holistic approach, so that transport and sustainable energy supply are taken into account in the planning process," he says.
There's very little net gain from more energy-efficient houses if their occupants leave a carbon footprint on an hour and a half commute into a city.
"The only green shoots I see," says a despairing Ó Laoire, "is in urban design, and progressive local authorities and developers looking at master planning as a framework for dialogue and involving architects."
The pressure to innovate in this over-arching area of planning might be pressing, but as yet it is unclear what mechanisms might be put in place to direct change. The service design innovation is absent, according to Ó Laoire.
On the other hand, examples are beginning to arise of how new communications technologies can help create efficiencies in how we plan and build.
"The construction industry has largely used IT in the office rather than giving it to field staff," says Finglas, whose company specialises in designing innovation programmes and is active in the construction sector. "In the US there are already examples of firms using the web to create spot-markets in concrete, so if you have a load that is in danger of going off while you wait at a site you can trade it," he says by way of example.
He refers also to the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to tag and track supplies on building sites as a key cost innovation. RFID trials in Britain by BT Auto-ID, a division of the BT telecommunications firm, were positively received. However, more exotic applications of IT will have as important an impact.
In conjunction with computer service firm IBM, Swiss building giant Implenia has recently developed a virtual control room, prototyped in the online virtual world Second Life.
This virtual control room means Implenia can design buildings without the need for actual control rooms and can reduce overheads by controlling facilities such as heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) within a 3D virtual room. They estimate that the system has the potential to create a 25 per cent saving in building management costs.
Using virtual facilities in the design process is an area that is only beginning to find its feet. Studio Wikitecture (www.studiowikitecture.com) is an initiative designed to bring the benefits of Wikis, online collaborative knowledge environments, to building design.
Wikitecture combines a wiki with a virtual presence. Designers suggest modules and options for a building which they prototype. Meanwhile, participants (a building's potential users, developers, planners) can vote on the suitability or desirability of those options. The idea is that buildings become better suited to use through extensive but real time consultation at the design stage.
Meanwhile, US networking giant CISCO has collaborated with Palomar Pomerado Health in Florida to create a virtual hospital. The real life hospital launches in 2011. The virtual equivalent launched last February.
Its purpose is to allow the design team to gather feedback on the layout and facilities but also, later, to familiarise patients with the processes and environment, a potential area for service innovations and cost saving.
On the more prosaic level of what houses might be like to live in, SEI's Kevin O'Rourke sees a number of areas where innovations will be necessary. Now that we live in increasingly well insulated houses, the indoor atmosphere needs to be better ventilated. But there's no point wasting energy saved by insulation on dragging air into the house.
"The real issue is going to be the quality of the indoor environment, in terms of air quality, in highly insulated environments," O'Rourke says. He suggests heating systems so small they would currently be too small to regulate, mechanical ventilation systems, solar heat, and services like air-leakage testing are going to be the hot innovation areas.
SEI is about to launch a new series of initiatives that direct innovation at non-heat power usage in home and offices and with ever rising fuel prices, SEI's success in stimulating change looks reasonably assured.
Half of a house's CO2 emissions now come from non-heat sources. "We need to make inroads into electricity usage," O'Rourke says, calling the issue "a serious challenge for the coming five years".
As he also points out, these innovations can count for little if they don't have the right planning context. It might well turn out that a pivotal innovation for Ireland lies within public policy and the ability of politicians and administrators to harness the positives that have come out of the past decade, while managing the negatives of economic decline.
"We need an alliance between Government and industry," says Ó Laoire, referring to the apparently inevitable loss of design jobs. "We need to see what can be done to protect these skills, but as yet we haven't asked how these new skill sets can be used."
The consequences of losing our new design talent could prove costly unless mechanisms are found to redeploy architects into different areas of the economy.
That might be a testing proposition, but as design becomes more integral to every facet of commerce, manufacture and service, there is the distinct possibility that the building industry's loss could be the country's gain.
Irish Times
www.buckplanning.ie
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