The recent opinion piece by Richard Herriott of the Kolding Design School in Denmark makes a compelling case for a radical rethink of how we plan and build our cities. He argues that tower blocks are not the answer to our housing crisis and that comprehensive redevelopment of inner suburbs is required.
I add a third argument. We need a hands-on positive urban redevelopment agency instead of the present piecemeal, passive planning control approach.
Herriott makes the point that major inner-suburb redevelopment to a pattern of five- or six-storey urban streetscapes is preferable to permitting one-off high-rise developments to occur surrounded by two-storey suburbia.
If we truly aspire to creating, especially in Dublin, a 15-minute living urban model, we should look to European cities where such a pattern already exists. We need an agency with the vision of Baron Haussmann – who renovated Paris in the second half of the 19th century – to reconfigure our inner suburbs and to create the possibility of a wide variety of apartment types developed on an integrated vision for streetscapes and the community. The possibility of three- and four-bedroomed apartments sharing the same building as smaller apartments and ground-floor commercial activity is key to the creation of a civilised centre-city existence.
The recent realisation by Dublin City Council planners that streets can be reconfigured as pedestrianised open spaces largely ignores the deeper need to reimagine the actual buildings and dwellers in those streets. One is easy; the other is difficult
Failed social housing
Dublin City Council has spent half a century now pondering whether to knock down and redevelop much of its portfolio of social housing apartments. Ballymun is a case in point. It was the great white hope of the 1960s which turned into the nightmare of the 1990s. Right across the city, the council plans to demolish a good deal of its own portfolio of social housing from O’Devaney Gardens to St Theresa’s Gardens and further afield. The council has pioneered the redevelopment of Ballymun; the result is not a model of urban planning, sustainable existence or a happy community. By contrast, the council’s own-door housing, when it was constructed, was far more successful. Why?
At the heart of many failed social housing developments was the failure to understand that socially disadvantaged people are most vulnerable to anti-social behaviour when they live in large-scale, high-rise buildings with little capacity to control their shared spaces. It’s all very well for the wealthy to live in high-rise apartment blocks with concierge security services and high-spec common spaces. It’s another thing completely if the son in your neighbour’s apartment has to bring his motorbike up in the lift to keep it safe in a uncontrolled, neglected, shared corridor.
The controversial circumstances in which Irish Life eventually sold off its residential apartment complexes in the Mespil Estate and elsewhere in the early 1990s has made us forget that there once was a market for very long-term letting of unfurnished modern apartments which, by and large, was successful back in the late 1950s.
Duration of letting
We also need laws of landlord and tenant that really distinguish between, say, a short-term letting by an individual owner-investor of a fully furnished apartment or suburban dwelling-house at market rent, on the one hand, and a long-term letting for life of a purpose-built unfurnished apartment constructed by real-estate investors seeking a modest but predictable return on their capital. These cases are radically different. The owner-investor in the first case does not want to surrender long-term possession of his or her only asset to an individual tenant; the landlord in the latter case is usually happy to have minimal turnover in tenancies.
Needs of landlords letting out a single dwelling on a short-term lease and a major investor, such as Irish Life in the case of the Mespil Estate, are very, very different. In one case, fixity of tenure is neither necessary nor desired; in the other it is the acceptable norm.
Pointing to European legal systems which typically afford much greater right to long-term occupation of unfurnished purpose-built apartments is really of little help when devising legislation to cover the letting by an individual landlord investor of a single dwelling house for a year or two.
Long-term lettings of unfurnished, purpose-built apartments on the European model are closer in concept to a life-time mortgage.
The motive to own one’s home, as opposed to renting it, is largely to do with a desire to invest in an asset that gives people security, especially in old age.
Yes, we need more homes built as a matter of urgency. But we also need to do the heavy-lifting of thinking through radically new ways to build and live in our inner cities.