Residents, elected representatives and public officials must work together to regenerate disadvantaged areas, writes Brendan Kenny.
I am convinced we will look back on this decade as the golden age of regeneration opportunity. We need to ensure that opportunity becomes achievement.
Now that it's finally economically possible, I firmly believe that the duty and responsibility of the managers and planners of cities is to plan out disadvantage and to design in equality. I also believe that won't happen unless we do it shoulder-to-shoulder with residents and community leadership.
For me, quality regeneration is an act of civil responsibility, care and creativity. It's about building the best possible platform for people to live the fullest lives they possibly can in terms of their physical environment and their critical life choices. And the most disadvantaged areas will require us taking the most responsibility, care and creativity.
The task will also require significant resources. But I passionately believe that resources spent on quality regeneration are a "no lose for greatest gain" investment. Having worked for over 25 years on diverse projects to do with housing, regeneration and how areas of cities are planned and managed, and having worked side-by-side with communities in some of the most disadvantaged areas in Ireland, I know some amazing things are happening.
For instance, today, two low-key but hugely important events are happening. A group of 25 residents will travel from Southill in Limerick to visit and learn from the Fatima Mansions Regeneration in Dublin. Secondly, an important and inspirational document will be launched in Dublin and I believe it should be stuffed in the Christmas stocking of every local authority, public representative, civic official, developer and community leader.
This publication Regeneration: Learning and Insights is effectively a manual that captures a new but tried and trusted model for delivering world class regeneration projects.
It contains a clear and simple blueprint for best practice, sound structures and best outcomes in disadvantaged areas. Uniquely, it has been produced by a Dublin-based partnership company in Dublin 8 that is so enthusiastic about its own civic responsibility that it wants to share its learning with the rest of Ireland.
My own experience has left me with some passionately-felt beliefs that rhyme well with the learnings in this publication - beliefs I bring with me to my new challenging but exciting role in Limerick city.
First, to successfully move the policy aspirations of regeneration from rhetoric to reality, it means dealing with people as human beings not statistics. People with feelings, talents, histories, worries, ambitions for themselves and their families. People are not economic units. They're not serial numbers on a housing list. Secondly, communities must be encouraged and resourced to play a key role in shaping and delivering their own regeneration. They are experts in their own struggle. People who have survived severe disadvantage have coping skills and abilities that other sectors in society can only envy.
It's madness not to harness these skills and insights for common good. In the heat of regeneration when problems arise, it's often local people who know how best to negotiate, find creative solutions, ways around impasses and ensure speedy progress on-site.
My time working on high-profile regeneration in Dublin and now in north and south Limerick city teaches me that to be sustainable, successful and thriving, these projects must be of the highest quality in a physical and social sense. National and city leadership agrees. Therefore, it's crucial that sufficient resources must be found to realise that. After all, the existing cost of broken lives, lost opportunities, ill health, anti-social behaviour, social welfare costs and unfair futures for our children are already far too high.
People deserve nothing less than a chance to shape their own futures. And a real opportunity to play their crucial part in making now blighted areas of Dublin, Limerick and other centres, model neighbourhoods we can all applaud. And hopefully, to make this golden era of regeneration a proud reality.
Brendan Kenny is chief executive of Limerick Northside Regeneration Agency