DUBLIN WILL have 1.7 million people within 20 years and will need 300,000 more homes, a conference was told yesterday.
Dublin will then account for 30 per cent of the country’s population, and will have an elevated status in the rank of world cities.
The conference at Spencer Dock was organised by Treasury Holdings to focus on how people will be living and working in Ireland in 2020.
Treasury Holding’s Spencer Dock Development director Rob Davies said he was convinced there was enough land within the present city limits to cater for the swelling population without creating urban sprawl.
He singled out the docklands area, Ringsend, Poolbeg and the Heuston gateway as areas that could be ripe for residential development.
“There is enough brownfield land. We’ve got to get away from greenfield sites. You’ve got to build where the transport is,” he said.
Mr Davies said Treasury Holding’s, one of the biggest property companies in the State, was confident that the property market would recover in the next decade.
“The property world moves in cycles. It always has done; it always will. We have to look to the future and think about the long return.
“Dublin is oversupplied at the moment, but it is not crazily oversupplied. When the economy comes back, office space will go quickly.
“Our view is that Dublin will continue to grow as a city. It is very well placed on the world stage. It is within the euro, it is English-speaking and it has got connections with the USA.”
Trinity College Dublin economist Constantin Gurdgiev said Dublin could thrive in internationally-traded services in the future and these would account for two-thirds of all high-value jobs in Ireland and half the country’s GDP by 2020.
He said Dublin was currently regarded as an Alpha, or internationally important, city, but a low-ranking one.
It currently ranks with cities such as Zurich, Amsterdam, Chicago or Frankfurt, but could potentially be a world city on a level with Barcelona, Toronto and Sydney.
City marketing consultant John Harrison said Dublin was at a very interesting stage from an international point, but lagged behind the rest of Ireland in terms of quality of life.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years, Dublin has been perceived as a city which has ridden the Celtic Tiger brilliantly. There has been a ‘good on you’ approach,” he said.
“There is now an adjustment on a global level, but Dublin, and other cities around the world, are all going to emerge so we have to position Dublin as a city that is attractive and compelling, not only to the people of Ireland, but also to external potential investors.”
Mr Thompson said quality of life would be a critical factor in the coming decades.
As investment becomes more mobile, major companies would look to cities where its employees would want to live.
He said Dublin has been slipping down the ranks of international cities in terms of quality of life in recent years because residents in the Dublin commuter area were often forced into long commutes to work because they perceived that there was no alternative.
“People are saying that they are going to get a job in the city centre, but they are going to have to commute an hour and a half to get there when the alternative is to live in a pokey city centre apartment.”
He said the best cities of the future would be the ones who addressed those types of compromises best.
