Just in case you may have overlooked it, today marks the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the planning system in Ireland! On the 1st of October 1964 the first planning act came into being. Since that time planning has soldiered valiantly, and despite the general apathy of the public and no little hostility from the political class, somehow remains standing, even if battered and bruised.
If truth be told it is only in the past ten years that planning has actually existed in any meaningful form. Prior to that we had mostly men with t-squares largely concerned with pipe diameters, soak pits and sight-lines. Today’s planners toil through an unnerving jumble of complexity and tortuous process spoken in a strange-tongued language of technical jargon that nobody really understands. They have become handy targets, mudguards, used and abused and persistently caught in the crossfire of short-term expediency, long-term strategising and the conflicting expectations of the public, politicians and business. I doubt I am alone in hoping the question of ‘what do you do for a living?’ doesn’t come up in the pub!
As Irish planning muddles through middle age maybe it’s time to ask some uncomfortable mid-life crisis questions – the elephants in the room – what are we doing, where are we going, whose needs do we serve and does what we do actually work? If we take the simple measure of being able to control the future by current acts, which is what planning essentially is, then it must be concluded from the evidence that it doesn’t work at all, or at least not very well.
I mean, while the counterfactual can never be fully known, would Ireland look any different today if we hadn’t mobilised great effort to produce spatial strategies and visions? Maybe at the margins, but not much, I suspect. While we wax lyrical about communities and sustainability, who has benefited most from planning – landowners? developers? banks?
The influx of more ‘evidence’ into the process does not seem to be producing better results, although it is probably too early to tell. What we are very good at are attempts to plan, we produce nice glossy plans like the National Spatial Strategy. But just as a desire to be wise is not wisdom, planning can only be evaluated on whether or not the desired goals have been achieved.
As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. On pretty much every measure, it must be conceded that we haven’t achieved much. Even our glittering flagship planning visions, such as the Dublin Docklands or Adamstown, remain undelivered and hardly do much to justify our existence.
To be fair, planning is a messy business beholden to private capital and it has failed pretty much everywhere it has been tried. Achieving a desired end state is also not necessarily a good yardstick to measure success as the world is always in flux. Things change. But as I have argued before neither should the profession lapse into banal process and incrementalism, as it is as present.
We planners always tend to think of ourselves as victims, put-upon and marginalised by an unholy alliance of developers, politicians and county managers. If people had only listened to our recommendations and followed the plan, things would have been so different. I don’t buy this. Things wouldn’t have been much different. This is because our plans persistently seek legitimisation by appealing to consensus, superficially offering something to everyone and no one.
The net result is that the short-term competitiveness and growth agenda wins out. As a profession, these are now our de facto values. I think most planner’s would think the ‘Common Good’ should mean more than that.
A recent paper on this subject revealed that most planners have no idea what the ‘Common Good’ actually is (Murphy & Fox-Rogers 2014) . Planning education has a lot to answer for here. The intellectual horizons of the profession has shrunk so much that we are incapable offering any alternatives or critical perspectives to puncture the status quo.
We must drop the instinctive notion that we are pursuing a progressive agenda. The opposite is often the reality. There was a call a few years ago by the then Irish Planning Institute president for a ‘Planner’s Charter’ setting out the broad values of the profession. That idea never saw the light of day. I suspect because of lack of consensus. But on the occasion of our 50th birthday, this should be the time for at least a debate.
Gavin Daly
Ireland after NAMA 
October 1, 2014 at 10:42 am
Planning has always been a victim of zealous, unnecessary and unclear over-regulation beyond just the Planning Acts and Regulations. Look at non-statutory plans or development briefs for example. We also suffer from our reactionary approach to new Government/EU ideas instead of leading them. Also, although acknowledging recent efforts to gain some ground, look at the status of the Irish Planning Institute compared to Engineers Ireland or the RIAI. However, nothing matches the sense of achievement when good planning happens, and while it may be uncommon, it does nevertheless justify the profession’s existence. Good planning is achieved with the simplest of plans and a detailed and mature discussion of the planning issues involved at the earliest juncture.
October 1, 2014 at 9:08 pm
Prior to 2008 there were many individuals in DCC including the now current CEO of Irish water John Tierney pushing a totally unsustainable model of High Rise in order to finance themselves through development contributions. Even now they are waiting for a NAMA pay day on these development levies as the developers levied are mostly bankrupt and broke. Believe me, all planning in Dublin is a few concerned citizens versus the system.
Who gave planning permission for all the methadone clinics, emergency accommodation, in Dublin city centre that has led to the capital being a haven for several thousand junkies every day?
They could not even implement a strategy that would ensure that signage would meet a common commercial and architectural standard, still make it up as you go along time, anything goes. As for planning in DCC An Board Pleanala became the de facto decision maker in planning applications for Dublin as Dublin City Council constantly tried to punch holes through their own development plans. An incinerator is being build despite numerous objections by the vast majority of councillors. These decisions negate democracy on this Island. Sean Dunne’s legal team argued that his development in Ballsbridge was a piece of national infrastructure and therefore not subject to the normal planning adjudication procedures. Now the latest and “only game in town is NAMA” it dictates what happens in planning land. It has the power the money bags and the inside track in government. No ordinary developer will be able to compete with the state monopoly.