Local authorities are not “in any position to drive positive planning for big cities”, a conference on sustainable urban regeneration in Dublin has been told.
The current planning system may be sufficient for rural Ireland but cities required a “radically different approach”, Senator Michael McDowell told the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) and Academy of Urbanism conference.
“Beautiful cities, worthy of conservation, don’t happen by accident, we cannot have a system which governs their development that is fundamentally accidental in the way it works,” he said.
There was a “myth” that the Constitution was standing in the way of the proper development of cities, he said, noting that in his time as attorney general he found the public service “extremely wary” of its property provisions.
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However, it had been confirmed in the courts there was no constitutional barrier to a local authority exercising its compulsory purchase powers for urban regeneration. Yet, he said, these authorities lacked the funding and the central government backing to do so.
“I don’t really believe local authorities are in any position to drive positive planning for big cities, they don’t have the energy to do it. Look at Dublin City Council, it spends an awful lot of its time rebuilding its own social housing, which it failed to maintain over the years,” he said.
It was not sustainable to tolerate a system that facilitated dereliction and “allows people to make choices to underdevelop their land – that is inconsistent with the proper development of this city,” he said.
Former director of the Economic and Social Research Institute Frances Ruane said there was an “urgent need to better link spatial and economic planning” and for central regional and local government to talk to each other.
“We have indulged silos to an incredible degree,” she said. “We absolutely need to deal with the systemic infrastructure delays. One way of doing that is to spell out the social and economic costs of the consistent failure to plan.
“You have to ask the question ‘what is causing the delays?‘ And a huge number of people in the system have to be asked that.”
RIAI president Sean Mahon said greater emphasis on “forward planning rather than development control and management” was essential. The current system “does not encourage or reward strategic thinking and had become unnecessarily complex, adversarial and inherently uncertain”.
There was a need to identify where an additional 750,000 homes should be, “and then we need to align spatial planning with balanced capital investment and put the public infrastructure in place to support these new homes,” he said.
Mr Mahon said the while there was a housing and public infrastructure crisis, it is not insurmountable. “But we do need to act now to enable our cities and towns survive and prosper in the coming decades.”
Planning regulator Niall Cussen said dereliction and vacancy needed to be urgently tackled. “We have a huge stock of empty buildings in our cities and towns, it is one of our top planning scourges at the moment.”
