Why does planning always fail? This is a question that has preoccupied academics for decades, but rarely reflected upon by practitioners. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, we all knew that planning had failed, and spectacularly so. When the bubble burst, Ireland was littered with every manner of idiotic development. The failure was plain for all to see. Yet, unreflective, planners carried on regardless, seemingly determined not to acknowledge what they had been part of.
The usual way planners justify this perennial failure is to claim that it is always someone else’s fault. If only there was more political commitment, more support, better legislation etcetera, things would have been different. Planning must always be good as everyone is generally for it. So, if we just try harder it cannot be anything other, sanctifying the process, regardless of its continuously bad outcomes. This is why planning fails. It simply refuses to learn lessons from experience.
Deregulation Redux
So why does this matter now? It matters because it leaves us blind to what is actually happening in the context of the so called reforms proposed in the Planning & Development Bill 2022. Recall what happened in 2010 after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. There was a widespread backlash against the deregulatory groupthink that had overrun society. The notion of ‘bad planning’ entered public discourse and there was a determination that the chaotic, developer-led market frenzy must never be allowed happen again.
But they never went away. Slowly over the subsequent years, in tandem with the fire sale of bailed-out development land assets to international capital, the deregulationists stealthily got to work, one by one unpicking measures designed to prevent the mistakes of the past. First to go in 2014 was the 80% windfall tax on profits from the sale of rezoned land, briefly introduced as an anti-speculation measure. Next was the publication of the ill-fated ‘Rebuilding Ireland’ policy with its promise of a ‘root and branch’ review of the planning system. This gave us the disastrous fast-track Strategic Housing Development process written ‘lock, stock and barrel‘ by property industry lobbyists.
The coup de grâce, however, was the introduction in 2018 of Specific Planning Policy Requirements allowing An Bord Pleanála to centrally overrule locally agreed development policies. There had already been a provision in planning law to allow the Minister to do this. But Section 29 of the Planning Act requires the approval of both houses of the Oireachtas. Obviously, such democratic oversight would simply not do, so the law was rewritten to effectively allow the Minister to govern by fiat.
The consequences of this heady deregulatory cocktail need little rehearsal here. As I have written before, it metastasized through the planning system like a cancer resulting in a surge of litigation and ultimately to the near total implosion of An Bord Pleanála itself, the resignation of its chairperson and the unprecedented criminal conviction of its deputy chairperson. Planning inspectors spoke of their “anguish” that their professional integrity had been dragged through the mud by “a small number of select individuals”.
And it did not stop there. The malignancy spread through the Irish Planning Institute, the representative body for Irish planners, resulting in a bitter internecine civil war for the very soul of the profession.
Failing Forward
I think it is fair to say that the Irish planning profession has never faced a crisis like this. But fear more! Ever calculating, deregulationists always fail forward, never wasting the opportunity of a crisis (that they themselves created) to continue their ideological crusade.
Ireland does not have a strong tradition of right-leaning think tanks, such as in the UK, but we do have our own coterie of obstreperous anti-planning pseudo-pundits whom, radicalised by market-centric ‘YIMBY’ discourses emanating from pro-investor lobbyists, such as the Centre for Cities, remorselessly push the rhetoric that the root cause of our housing supply crisis must always be planning regulation.
The latest wheeze amongst deregulationists, for example, is that it is Ireland’s ‘UK style discretionary planning system’ that is the problem, pushing instead for ‘by right’ zoning where effectively no development consent would be required at all. Needless to say, the fact that such harebrained proposals stand absolutely no chance of being implemented is beside the point. In true Friedmanian fashion, the objective is not actually to succeed, but to continuously beat the drum that planning regulation must always be to blame. And the best way to keep that idea lying around in the public consciousness is through advancing ever more extreme ultra-libertarian proposals, actually positing them as rational reforms that are both logical and appropriate, and even that they have widespread support.
The primary objective of this relentless campaign is to overwhelm political debates such that anyone who challenges this marketised, supply-side vision can simply be dismissed as a ‘NIMBY’ ‘blocking’ new homes and driving up prices. This, of course, is habitually buttressed by all the usual tired caricatures of planning as a failed top-down socialist, Stalinist or Soviet-style command and control bureaucracy which stifles supply, accompanied by an alarmist invective of an archaic, unreformed ‘regime’ responsible for a whole range of negative social and economic consequences.
These incessant anti-planning barrages ensure that the public gaze is forever averted from the fact that, as has been discussed above, the planning system has already been captured wholesale by these self-same, self-serving deregulatory interests, actually causing the current crisis. The supreme irony here is that, while the government proudly pronounces that the new Planning Bill represents ‘the largest overhaul of the planning system in decades’, the reality is that in recent years it has been subject to a near constant state of restless market-driven radical reforms.
Indeed, it is this perpetual legislative meddling, resulting in increasing complexity, confusion, uncertainty, delays and a constant atmosphere of criticism and crisis, that creates the very conditions that deregulationists thrive upon, fuelling a vicious circle of anti-planning rhetoric and fomenting increasing demands for further liberalised supply-side reforms.
Of course, none of these reforms have ever actually boosted housing supply nor addressed the problem of house price inflation. This is because that is not their purpose. Rather the aim is to turn planning into an accessory of global property market speculation, or what Bradley calls ‘the supply-side of land financialisation’, where capitalising on the land value uplifts achieved through the planning process is a structural imperative.
When these reforms inevitably fail to deliver, rather than questioning their underlying premise, new deregulatory denouncements are made of a planning system ‘not fit for purpose’ which has become deeply ensconced in the national mood. Unfortunately nobody ever asks–whose purpose? And if the system is not fit for purpose–who made it so?
Standing Up
Against the backdrop of this sustained, demoralising scapegoating of planning’s utility, validity and legitimacy, it is little wonder that many planners have become pessimistically resigned to internalising the basic premise that they are in fact the problem. It’s now almost impossible to get a positive message of the value of planning covered in the media. Instead planners must forever be engaged in a desperate rearguard attempt to explain away their failures. And unfortunately there is no shortage of acquisitive accomplices from within the planning profession itself, often employing lofty academic titles to tout their authority, to happily administer the perfidious onslaught.
The problem is that planners have typically not been educated to understand how the urban political economy really works and how the planning system has essentially been co-opted as an instrument of property market growth, displacing it from its long-term public interest goals at the cost of the delivery of affordable new homes. Speaking out is professionally dangerous and those who do often face reprisal (believe me, I know!). As a result, planning has become largely a silenced profession with most practitioners seeing no other option but to obediently toe the line rather than to give voice to their own professional, moral or ethical judgments.
But there are some tentative grounds for hope. A growing coalition of professional, environmental and civil society actors have now mobilised to warn against the government’s proposed Planning Bill. Prior to the former Attorney General going into secret conclave with a select elite advisory group to personally recast the entire planning code, there had been no clamour within the profession for such a radical overhaul. The legislation is not included in the current Programme for Government and no explanatory memorandum has ever been published to explain why the changes are actually needed. As expected, the Planning Advisory Forum, established to provide broad-based consultative input into the legislation, offered a mere legitimating fig leaf and never saw sight nor sound of the draft Bill before it was published.
Naturally, after years of bungled reforms and counter-reforms, some sensible recodification, simplification and consolidation of the legislation is now in order. However, this is not the real intent of the Bill. Nothing in the draft legislation will change the basic fundaments of how the planning system works. Rather, its true purpose is to provide a Trojan Horse for the time-honoured deregulatory obsession with speeding-up consenting timelines and dramatically curtailing public participation, particularly in respect of the bane of the real estate industry–judicial review.
Lest there be any doubt; if this legislation is enacted as currently drafted, it is a recipe for complete chaos. There are simply not enough planning resources to manage such abridged timelines, nor is there likely to be. We need to draw the lessons from the Strategic Housing Development fiasco. Mandatory timelines are a disaster. Despite its perceived complexity, the current legislation is familiar to those operating it and for the most part it works perfectly well. Ripping it up now and starting from scratch will destroy this accumulated institutional knowledge.
Even with the best will in the world, contradictions and omissions will inevitably emerge in the practical operation of the legislation causing ever more conflict, dysfunction and delay. This will be no more so than in relation to the centrepiece of the Bill – the swingeing restrictions to access to justice. At the Oireachtas Pre-Legislative Scrutiny hearings, witness after witness, including seasoned legal experts, implored that upending settled judicial review rules now will result in endless litigation and constitutional challenges. This will invariably involve lengthy references to the European Court of Justice, severely impeding many critical development projects via satellite litigation. Predictably the government will lose, necessitating ever more legislative upheaval.
It is hard to imagine a more gratuitous act of self-harm to achieving our pressing housing, climate and public infrastructure needs than what is being proposed. Secondary regulations will also be required alongside a whole new national planning policy architecture. It could take the best part of a decade to get back on an even keel. Even the property industry, after years of lobbying for the legislation, have now belatedly recognised the danger and called for it to be paused. But this is a battle the government feels ideologically compelled to fight, regardless the consequences. Of course, when it all goes horribly wrong, the planning system will be blamed once more, and the failures used as an excuse to push for even more regressive deregulatory changes.
Somebody needs to shout stop. Our planning system does not require ‘reform’. What we need to do is to stop deforming it! This must begin with a new national conversation that explicitly recognises that the market absolutely cannot deliver the future we need. Instead, we require more planning, more participation, not less, and a paradigmatic shift from a system based on ‘planning for capital’, beholden to developers, to one based on ‘planning for society’ and the people that it is meant to serve.
It’s almost hard to believe it now but, at one time, An Bord Pleanála was perhaps the only stand-up institution in the Irish planning system. Throughout the Celtic Tiger, it regularly sent packing some of the most egregious developments permitted by local planning authorities. Its reach was far from perfect, of course. Nationally, An Bord Pleanála reviews fewer than 10% of all planning applications on appeal, leaving its then outgoing chairman in 2011, John O’Connor, bitterly regretting that it could not have done more to take a stronger stand against the worst excesses of the property bubble and its calamitous consequences.
Nevertheless, its rulings did have a significant disciplining effect in setting precedents as a bulwark against the ‘all development is good development’ madness that gripped the Celtic Tiger. An Taisce, for example, previously noted that of the approximately 2,000 appeals it lodged over the ten-year period to 2008, 80% were upheld. And while An Bord Pleanála’s decisions regularly raised the hackles of local politicians, it was one of the few bodies that emerged from the Celtic Tiger with its reputation and good name largely intact and proof positive that, when removed from the malign influence of political clientelism and short-term local development concerns, planners and the planning system could make enlightened, impartial decisions, without fear or favour, for the common good and in the long-term public interest.
Unfortunately, those days are now long gone. The gamekeeper has turned poacher. Today, An Bord Pleanála has become a byword for ineptitude, and its reputation for probity, integrity and neutrality lies in tatters, at least in the minds of many in the public. It gives me no satisfaction to write that and I wish it were otherwise. But for any planner, to watch the fall from grace of this unique institution from its former position of authority at the apex of the planning system should be a matter of deep regret, profound concern and, yes, even anger.
It is not An Bord Pleanála’s fault, needless to say, but the consequence of a decade where Fine Gael has single-mindedly pursued an ideological obsession with centralising planning governance at the behest of property developers and to speed-up the consenting process by bypassing local planning authorities, turning it from a largely appellate body to a national planning authority of the first instance, a role which it is uniquely unsuited or resourced for.
Back in 2016, when Fine Gael launched the now-defunct Rebuilding Ireland, I apprehensively blogged on the likely adverse implications for the planning system, and particularly the centrepiece of the reforms, the now soon to be abandoned fast-track Strategic Housing Development (SHD) system, whereby planning applications for largescale residential developments of one-hundred units or more would be made direct to An Bord Pleanála and where decisions were required to be made in just sixteen weeks. I wrote:
“The idea that adequate consideration could be given to such proposals, while fulfilling all requirements pursuant to EU and national law, within these compressed timeframes and without recourse to seeking further environmental or technical information or giving adequate consideration to local concerns or right of appeal, is a recipe for yet another great planning disaster.”
Regrettably, all my fears came to pass, and then some. It wasn’t difficult to predict. The SHD system can only be described as an utter omnishambles, severely eroding public confidence in the planning system and resulting in an upsurge in judicial reviews as the only means to challenge decisions. Tracking data compiled by solicitor, Fred Logue, shows that of the forty SHD judicial reviews decided so far, An Bord Pleanála has successfully defended just three (eight were withdrawn). Forty-five others are pending. According to its most recent annual report, An Bord Pleanála has shelled out over €8 million in legal fees, out of a total operating expenditure of €31 million. That’s right, a quarter of its annual budget! In fact, given the scale of its reversals, almost half of its legal expenditure was to pay the legal costs of those who took proceedings against it.
To make matters worse, in a very serious recent development, its deputy chairperson and head of the SHD division, Paul Hyde, whom, it is reported, once co-owned a yacht (called ‘Dark Angel’) with Minister Simon Coveney and subsequently appointed by former Minister Phil Hogan, is now under investigation over multiple allegations of conflict of interest, including charges that he granted planning permission for a development owned by his brother and sister-in-law which he did not declare. In the meantime, An Bord Pleanála has been forced to undertake an audit of hundreds of decisions made by Mr. Hyde to ensure there are no further possible improprieties. If the current investigation launched by Minister O’Brien bears out these accusations, GUBU doesn’t adequately cover it.
I do not think it is any exaggeration to say that the legacy of this period in An Bord Pleanála’s history will be looked back upon with similar disdain to that of Robert Moses infamous, hubristic attempts to reconstruct New York in the early 20th Century. No longer able to simply ride roughshod over planning regulation, as had been the case throughout the Celtic Tiger, the solution for development capital in the post-Celtic Tiger period was simple—regulatory capture. Particularly in Dublin, and spurred on by Fine Gael’s unctuous kowtowing to the property industry—such as the swingeing retrenchment of apartment size and building height regulations alongside NAMA’s fire sale of development land—has seen the rubber-stamping by An Bord Pleanála of tens of thousands of Build-to-Rent (BTR) units across the city to the extent that they comprised over 80% of all residential schemes applied for or granted in 2020 — a situation which even Dublin City Council supremo, Eoin Keegan, recently described as totally “unsustainable” and with the potential to have, “significant long-term adverse impacts on the housing needs of the city”.
Perhaps the supply-at-all-costs zeal of An Bord Pleanála would be justified if it had any effect on… well, supply. But as of February 2022, figures compiled by the Dublin Democratic Planning Alliance show that, of the approximately 70,000 SHD units permitted to date, commencement notices had been submitted for just 13,000. What is most alarming, however, is not just the regulatory capture, but the level of ideological capture and the extent to which An Bord Pleanála has unthinkingly imbibed the kool-aid and the ‘obvious truth’ of the mainstream neoclassical economics dogma that flooding the city with hundreds of permissions for overpriced, elite shoebox tenements will somehow miraculously result in more housing supply at lower, more affordable costs. Contrary to the economist media doyens of the development industry, it won’t.
As described by Professor Manuel Aalbers: “The empirical evidence invalidates the economic truism that oversupply must lead to declining prices and that rising prices are a result of undersupply”. The reason is quite simple and not really very difficult to comprehend—real estate developers and the financial and political system, more generally, have no interest in falling property prices and will only increase supply to the extent that it will not depress market prices. Unwittingly, all An Bord Pleanála has achieved in its craven abandonment of progressive planning values is to become a useful appendage to the development industry in the speculative, rentier assetization of property values or what Architect Alan Mee coins the ‘planning-industrial complex’, or in old money, an ‘urban growth machine’. I do not believe any self-respecting planner signed up for that.
At last year’s Housing Agency’s Annual Conference, An Bord Pleanála’s Director of Planning, Rachel Kenny, predictably defended An Bord Pleanála’s administration of the SHD system and, while on the one hand acknowledging that judicial reviews affected less than 10% of SHD housing units and that public opposition to new housing developments had not changed much in the past 15-20 years, on the other lamented that planning applications had become more adversarial with high levels of opposition, a situation which she described as unusual in Europe, justifying further legal and planning reform, and even parroting the development industry line that the only reason for increasing numbers of judicial reviews is because ‘objectors’ get a free ride on costs.
The lack of self-awareness here was quite staggering. There was no introspection whatsoever of the fact that An Bord Pleanála had lost pretty much every SHD judicial review taken against it or, less still, of the quality of the units being permitted. Instead, specific opposition to high-volume, low-quality BTR units was lumped into a generalised opposition to ‘housing’. Ms. Kenny rhetorically asks, “Who speaks for future residents…those that need homes?”. The answer is, An Bord Pleanála does! Fair enough, they might counter that it is simply applying ministerial guidelines. But as Mr Justice Humphreys wrote in one judgement on an SHD application:
“The clear language of the ministerial guidelines sends the message that the reasonable exercise of planning judgement requires that an enthusiasm for quantity of housing has to be qualified by an integrity as to the quality of housing. Among other obvious reasons, and speaking about developments generally rather than this one particularly, such an approach reduces the prospect of any sub-standard, cramped, low-daylight apartments of today becoming the sink estates and tenements of tomorrow.”
It’s a sad indictment when a High Court judge exercises more planning foresight and agency than An Bord Pleanála. But here we are.
The reality is that, despite what is constantly reported in the media, there is very little fundamental or widespread public opposition to new housing developments in Ireland. The increase in judicial reviews in recent years simply directly mirrors the growing frequency in cases where decisions by An Bord Pleanála overrule agreed statutory development plans, which have been consulted upon with local communities and adopted by their local elected representatives. This is a situation that is unusual in Europe. Take, for example, the controversial Holy Cross College SHD development in Dublin of 1,614 BTR units comprising 70% tiny studios and one-beds. Here the local planning authority, Dublin City Council, expressed ‘alarm’ at what was being proposed but, despite its strenuous opposition, An Bord Pleanála simply went ahead and granted it anyway, using ‘Specific Planning Policy Requirement’ legislative directives introduced by former Fine Gael minister Eoghan Murphy to override democratically determined local development policy.
One has to ask what is the point in engaging in detailed public consultation and planning exercises to achieve consensus amongst all stakeholders on what is envisaged for a local area, only for it to be summarily ignored? It should come as no surprise, in these circumstances, that people seek access to the courts to challenge these decisions, as their only recourse to this breach of contract. Indeed, Dublin City Council has even had to take An Bord Pleanála to court on two separate occasions to defend the integrity of its development plan. Yet still, of the 381 SHD applications determined to date, just 84 have been subject to judicial review (22%). Overall, a tiny fraction of housing developments permitted nationally is subject to judicial review. Tens of thousands of units have been granted without any legal challenge whatsoever and are, in principle, ready to go—although, you would not know this by reading the pages of the national newspapers.
But here is the crux. The truth hardly matters. Just like in 2016, instituting a self-perception of failure amongst planners through constant criticism to generate a self-governed desire amongst them to adherently ingratiate their values to better meet short-term political objectives of governing ideologies, the same is happening again today. Neoliberalism fails forward, achieving its goals by whatever means necessary, often capitalising upon its own chronic failures to implement ever more regressive and anti-democratic planning ‘reforms’. Recently, for example, Minister for Planning, Peter Burke of Fine Gael has been out on the stump decrying the rise in judicial reviews, which are a direct consequence of changes to planning laws, including the SHD system, which his own party introduced! He quotes business groups who are telling him that the number of judicial reviews is “frightening”, insisting that “it’s so important that we have business leaders, business voices to the forefront”. The level of gaslighting here is again quite something. Before the introduction of SHD, you could count the number of judicial reviews against housing developments annually on the fingers of one hand, if at all.
Regrettably, debates on the future of the Irish planning seem destined to go the way of the English planning system which has gained an unenviable reputation in recent years for having undergone a rapid succession of reforms and counter-reforms as a consequence of persistent anti-planning rhetoric from the political right to make planning more market-oriented. As noted by planning scholars, Graham Haughton and Phil Allmendinger, the near-perpetual state of reform has created the very conditions of crisis instability that helps feed the perception of constant failure that the ideological right thrives upon and, in repeatedly failing to achieve their marketised outcomes, they can simply continually blame the planning system and try, and fail, again on the basis that any failures were simply well-intended experiments that went wrong and always someone else’s fault.
Right on cue, along comes Minister Burke’s recently announced establishment of a Planning Advisory Forum stuffed full of all the usual suspects from Property Industry Ireland, Irish Institutional Property, the Construction Industry Federation and, of course as always, that erstwhile Fine Gael contrarian advisor Conor Skehan who recently proclaimed that, if you cannot afford to live in Dublin, you should just simply move somewhere else. According to the Terms of Reference for the forum, the main objective of the exercise is to ensure “increased clarity and streamlining” of planning legislation in the context of the “major debate, particularly on the scale of housing requirements”, “the needs of the future population of new and expanded communities” and “the nature of planning decisions, which require careful balancing of public policy, public participation and environmental issues”. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought planning was about the public interest and the common good? Are environmental issues not amongst the most important public policy issues?
Regardless, we all know what this is code for—deregulation. Having previously unsuccessfully proposed a bill, again at the behest of the property industry, to effectively abolish public access to justice in planning cases, which was condemned by the Free Legal Aid Counsel and many others as offending both the Irish constitution and EU law, this latest initiative has all the hallmarks of a workaround attempt to give legitimacy to these reactionary intentions by co-opting organisations like An Taisce, the Environmental Pillar and, of course, the Irish Planning Institute. One wonders why we give credibility to such charades.
The planning system does not require ‘reform’. We need to stop ‘reforming’. It has already produced all the permissions we need for many years of supply. What it needs is proper resources and for the incessant, destructive meddling by development lobbyists, which precipitated the current dysfunction in the first place, to cease. As for An Bord Pleanála, it is beyond time that it shunned the fast-track limelight and retreated back to being the relatively obscure, prosaic and largely progressive, far-sighted institution it once was. We need it, but it will take some time for public trust in its shattered reputation to be restored.
Embodied carbon is the elephant in the room that may stymie all of our best-laid housing plans
One of the biggest myths we tell ourselves, in the context of the unfolding climate emergency, is that our normative expectations of the future can, more or less, carry on as normal. This applies equally to national political debates around how to solve the housing crisis, as to anything else. Whether on the left or the right, everybody agrees that more housing supply is the answer, although the manner in which that supply should be delivered of course differs markedly.
Yet, more often than not, the issue of expanding housing supply is discussed in near total isolation from the climate crisis and how we respond to it. The most recent figures from the Central Bank suggest that approximately 34,000 housing units will be required each year for at least the next decade – a figure which is largely accepted as gospel by all sides of the housing debate and likely to be included as the headline target in the Government’s forthcoming ‘Housing for All’ plan. Other estimates, such as those from Trinity College Dublin’s Ronan Lyons, puts the required number at closer to 47,000 per annum. Regardless, the general consensus is that an awful lot of new-build housing supply is required.
Private developers and the construction industry respond with glee to such projections, using them to put downward pressure on planning and building regulations, and to delegitimate public opposition to the ever increasing preponderance of very poor quality mass housing schemes. Activists on the left, on the other hand, argue that the government must commit to a doubling housing capital expenditure, as recommended by the ESRI, so as to achieve a build target of at least 20,000 public homes annually, insisting that anything less is just tinkering around the edges of an ever ballooning crisis.
The trouble is that building new housing is an incredibly carbon and energy intensive process, a fact which gets virtually no coverage whatsoever in the debates. While the data inevitably varies, research has shown that, on average, the carbon emissions associated with the construction of a new dwelling in Ireland, known as embodied carbon, is around 30 tonnes. This does not include the ongoing operational emissions associated with the use of the dwelling over its life-cycle or its eventual demolition, just the upfront carbon emitted during the manufacturing of the building materials, the transport of those materials to the site and the construction process itself.
Traditional cement and concrete based products, which remain highly predominant in new building in Ireland, account for roughly half of this embodied carbon. Indeed, concrete has been described as the most environmentally destructive material on earth, emitting 2.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases annually and responsible for 8% of global emissions, approximately three times that of aviation. The figures on worldwide concrete use are truly staggering. Since 2003, for example, China has poured more concrete every three years than the USA managed in the entire 20th century. If concrete was a country, it would be the third highest emitter of carbon in the world and it is the second most used substance globally, after water.
In Ireland, buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of energy related carbon emissions, with 28% coming from operational carbon and 11% coming from embodied carbon. However, while the policy and media attention has focused almost exclusively on the issue of operational carbon, such as the roll-out of energy retrofitting programmes, according to the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC), following the introduction of new building regulations in 2019, it is embodied carbon which now accounts for the major proportion (c.50%) of the total life-cycle carbon emissions of new homes.
Taking an average value of 30 tonnes of carbon per dwelling unit, building 34,000 houses would result in the production of over 1 million tonnes of emissions every year. The IGBC has estimated that, unless embodied carbon is radically reduced, constructing the 500,000 housing units envisaged as part of the National Planning Framework, and all the associated infrastructure, would result in between 38 and 50 million tonnes of carbon being emitted over the period to 2040.
The recently adopted Climate Change & Low Carbon Amendment Act 2021, however, requires that Ireland’s emissions fall by an annual average of approximately 3.5 million tonnes per year to 2030, halving our total annual emissions to just 31 million tonnes per annum by the end of the decade. It is evident that when housing supply and climate targets are set out side-by-side, the dilemma is stark. Developing that many new housing units while seeking to reduce emissions by that magnitude is problematic, to say the very least. The irony here is that if we were actually currently solving our housing crisis by providing much more supply, we would be simultaneously making our climate challenge worse, much worse.
At present, there are no firm proposals to regulate embodied carbon in Ireland. However, there are some promised changes at EU level and a number of European countries have already introduced measures which may ultimately have an influence here. However, given the immense lobbying power of the Irish Concrete Federation (ICF) and the general deference to the construction and property sectors, alongside the huge political pressure to urgently deliver new, affordable homes, it is probably unlikely to expect Ireland to be an early mover on enhanced regulation.
The difficulty of course is that concrete is both abundant and cheap, very cheap, accounting for just 3.4% of the cost of an average semi-detached house, according to the ICF. It is also a brilliantly adaptable building material, hence its ubiquity. The ICF estimate that delivering 500,000 new houses over the next 20 years will require the production of 1.5 billion tonnes of aggregates, which is also essential for concrete and cement production. The industry has therefore been busy lobbying for new fast-track planning rules to facilitate expanded quarry development, despite it’s rather dubious history of planning and regulatory compliance. To this day, there are dozens of illegal quarries operating throughout the country, causing significant environmental damage. Even during the recent high-profile mica and pyrite scandals, political criticism of the industry has been extremely muted.
The IGBC, on the other hand, whom have been a very lonely voice in trying to raise the profile of the hidden significance of embodied carbon, has been advocating for Ireland to commit to Net Zero Carbon Buildings, which would account for both the upfront and ongoing carbon emissions. At the very least, this would involve prioritising alternative and more sustainable construction materials which are low or zero carbon, such as the greater use of ‘green concrete’ and locally sourced timber products. The bad news is that many of these alternatives are in their infancy or face significant technical barriers to adoption, not least cost. Worse still, is that the main problem is really a matter of scale and the sheer demand for new buildings and urban infrastructure, which greatly outruns any carbon efficiency gains.
The IPCC Report published this week has unequivocally shown that we have entered the age of consequences and we are witnessing first-hand the devastating effects of global heating wreaking havoc around the world. Increasingly our lives will become dictated by rigorous adherence to carbon budgets, due to be published shortly, which will intersect all policy spheres, including housing, in multiple, complex ways. It is perhaps because of our inherited, implicit biases towards departmentalised, technical and supply-side solutions that we consistently fail to apprehend that climate change is a classic wicked problem. For example, we are already experiencing a chronic shortage in the supply of timber and any major expansion of the use of alternative low-carbon building technologies to address embodied carbon, especially the use of biomaterials, would have very significant knock-on implications for land use, particularly in the context of competing priorities such as biodiversity, carbon sequestration and food production. Similarly, Ireland is currently experiencing acute skilled labour shortages and lack of capacity in the construction sector, exacerbated by the pandemic, which may even see it have to choose between building new homes and retrofitting existing homes.
University College Dublin academic, Aidan Regan, has been to the fore in attempting to break down the silo mentality infecting housing policy debates, insisting instead that it must be seen as part of a broader urban crisis. To this, we urgently need to add the climate crisis – not just in respect of the relatively well understood issue of operational emissions, but also the very significant hidden challenge of embodied carbon. Moreover, achieving emissions targets directly calls into question Ireland’s preferred means of delivering new housing – the private market. Over the past decade, government has repeatedly foot-dragged on introducing higher building efficiency standards, fearful that increasing costs would be an impediment to supply and deter international capital. Given the basic profit fundament governing the property market, it is probably unreasonable to expect that it will be capable of delivering the homes needed in the context of an increased regulatory burden. This is, yet again, further justification for a much greater direct state involvement in the regulation and supply of new housing.
All of this of course will also have profound implications for how we plan and develop our cities and towns into the future. It is often said ‘the greenest building is one that is already built’ and it is estimated that Ireland has somewhere in the region of 200,000 vacant homes, enough for at least six years supply. Currently housing targets are allocated centrally and handed down from on high for local councils to prepare their zoning plans. It’s a simple numbers game. However, living within carbon budgets will mean that planning policy will have to become less about zoning, supply and densification within ‘compact growth’ principles but increasingly about how to avoid new building and infrastructure altogether through the creative reuse and repurposing of existing built stock within existing urban footprints. It will also mean that, instead of slavishly responding to market vagaries, planning will have to become more interventionist and directly involved in dictating what gets built, where, when and by whom (e.g. homes v. hotels etc).
Using a simple linear trajectory, the MarEI Institute at University College Cork has estimated that Ireland’s maximum carbon budget to 2030 is in, or around, 423 million tonnes. This budget will be subject to many competing demands (e.g. agriculture) and very complex decarbonisation challenges (e.g. transport). On our current trajectory we are estimated to emit 654 million tonnes over the same period. The challenge is without parallel. How we choose to spend our available carbon budget will be a matter of political will and choice involving very painful decisions, at least in the short-run, in staring down business-as-usual vested interests.
None of this, of course, is to argue against developing new housing. There is an absolutely necessity to provide high-quality net zero carbon homes. But as I have argued before, we may also need to downscale our taken-for-granted assumptions of very high future housing demand, which are substantially based on an extrapolation of historic trends of high economic growth and immigration into the future. In a climate changed world, past results are not a reliable guide of future performance. Lands zoned for housing may also need to be re-tasked for other uses, such as providing more natural green spaces and adaptation to ever more severe and disruptive weather events (e.g. flood attenuation, urban heat island effects etc.). It is hard to overestimate the revolutionary implications this will have for, not just planning, but also land markets, the entire functioning of the economy, fiscal policy, balanced regional development etc., and will require nothing less than a transformed planning culture.
We have not just entered the age of consequences, but the age of (very hard) choices.
Gavin Daly
*This blog post was referenced in a recent media article by Dr. Rory Hearne in the Irish Examiner. You can also listen to the article on the Reboot Republic .
Back in 2009, at the height of global financial crisis, John Lovering in a hard-hitting editorial in International Planning Studies declared that, finally, it had happened.
The recession marked ‘the end of planning as we had known it’. There was no going back. The neoliberal model of urban policy-making, “it’s inequities, it’s harmful social and cultural effects, it’s disastrous impact on the environment and its economic unsustainability” was dead.
Except of course, like previous crises, it wasn’t.
Phoenixlike, the strange non-death of neoliberalism emerged unfazed. The Irish planning profession, anxious to deflect from its complicity in the Celtic Tiger and unsure of what else to do, slavishly followed along as every manner of idiotic mass tourism hotel, student housing scheme, build-to-rent apartment development, co-living unit and high-rise office block was approved, each testament to the parasitic power and private fortunes of international capital wrapped up in some Orwellian supply-side doublespeak of what is good for us.
Fast forward ten years, and there has been much talk again recently, in light of the COVID19 crisis, of the urgent need for a deep structural change in the planning and organisation of our urban environments. We have seen some promising signs in this direction as cities across Europe, including Dublin, seize the opportunity to repurpose streets from private cars to pedestrians and cyclists – initiatives long held back by reactionary interests – and a greater acknowledgement of the real value of green spaces, clean air, noiselessness, social cohesion and nature in urban liveability. These may be temporary, but demonstrate what is possible.
The pandemic has also laid bare the recrudesce of a planning system that has once more been reduced to a reactive, short-term and opportunity-driven activity which is likely to see the our cities littered with overcapacity and stranded assets.
The economic impact of COVID19 is, as yet, unknown but projections suggest it is likely to be severe and turbulent. As in 2009, the planning profession is about to be again sharply thrust up against what is probably its chief intellectual weakness – what to do when the land market is rendered largely inoperative? In such a situation the pattern of land-use will have to be determined administratively, but planning, as a body of knowledge, offers no ideas as to how this might be done. Paralysis ensues.
Like all cultural shocks, the COVID19 disruption presents liminal spaces, moments of cultural rupture, to rethink and do things differently, and to listen to alternative voices from outside the mainstream proposing hitherto unthinkable solutions – but who are almost always ignored – that radically challenge our take-for-granted worldviews in ways that is impossible through incremental change.
In order to make the best of this opportunity, planners will first have to wake up to the inexorable socio-ecological realities and discontinuities that will transform their identities in the 21st Century and recognise that, as Lovering advised, the best place for many of the policies pursued over the past decades is in the bin.
First to go should be the speculative, pseudo-planning ‘compact city’ doctrine and the much-purported groupthink amongst developers and urban growthists that urban regeneration needs to be hyper-densified in order to be sustainable, but which has thus far failed to regenerate much beyond the bottom-line of the property developers, financiers and consultants.
Alternative pathways abound, leaning on insights from the peripheries of orthodox received wisdom. The City of Amsterdam, for example, has recently adopted a new holistic strategy for transformative urban action based on the pioneering ‘Doughnut Economics’ of British economist, Kate Raworth.
The Amsterdam ‘City Donut’ presents a long-term planning policy vision which seeks to supplant the growth-orientated and competitive commodification of the city with ‘a thriving, regenerative and inclusive city for all citizens, while respecting the planetary boundaries’ to tackle climate breakdown and ecological collapse. To this end Amsterdam has joined the Thriving Cities Initiative (TCI), a collaboration between C40, Circle Economy, and Doughnut Economics Action Lab, which works with cities pursuing such a transformation.
Such dissident thinking, which has long been ‘beyond the pale’ for Irish policy elites, resonates with the open letter, signed by more than a thousand academics and experts from more than sixty countries, calling for Degrowth – a democratically planned yet adaptive, sustainable, and equitable downscaling of the economy – to be put at the centre of the COVID19 response, to build a more just and sustainable society and prevent further crises.
The Degrowth urban manifesto seeks to give the city back to its people, radically reorganise transport and mobility, (re)naturalise and decommodify the city, and, rather than densify, significantly increase space dedicated to green space, tree cover; biodiversity and urban ecosystems; and public housing, with a focus urban mobility on cycling, walking and public transport. These ideas reflect new ideas emerging from ‘post-growth’ planning thought which emphasises, solidarity, wellbeing, connectedness, empathy and a lifestyle based on principles of sufficiency.
Supporting growth and an irrational belief in ever rising asset values has, of course, always been the primary and unquestioned motivation of urban planning. It shall come as no surprise that, just as it was in the aftermath of the 2009 crisis, embracing new ethics and post-materialistic values will be stringently resisted by the old order who, as long as there are no viable alternatives, will engage in predatory delay insisting that the solution to the crisis is to work even harder at business-as-usual. Neoliberal urbanism has, after all, demonstrated extraordinary asymmetric capacity to crimp and contain disconfirming alternatives .
However, these are ideas whose time is coming. Nature is foreclosing our culture. To return to Lovering’s exhortation, planners will not be leading the action here, however “if they can shed the myopic habits of recent years and recapture the broader social and ethical inspirations with which the very concept of planning in modern times began, then planning might once again become worthy of the name”.
We cannot afford to waste the opportunity of crisis once more. Resigned realism is the best way to ensure the least transformative outcome.
Densification. It’s all the rage. Everywhere, everyone agrees we must densify, “build up, not out!” the now familiar slogan goes, upzoning and compacting our urban footprints, all in the cause of increasing housing supply, boosting competitiveness and avoiding sprawl. Influential apostles of this mantra, such as David McWilliams and Ronan Lyons et al. (typically, always economists), effuse that our cities must go ever higher, easing restrictions on building height, while the populace must simply accustom itself to living in smaller housing, if it wants housing at all.
And it’s certainly working. Following Minister Eoghan Murphy’s diktat on building heights, we have seen a preponderance of new development proposals across our cities of such perpetual sameness, branded and bland homogeneity, a form of ‘Zombie Urbanism’, where the dull compulsion of economic and political space merge toward the elimination of all differences.
The new ‘Connolly Quarter’, for example (pictured above), proposed by Ballymore Group on lands owned by state body, CIE, in Dublin’s North Inner City proposes 741 build-to-rent apartments in towers of up to 23 storeys, including 228 studios, 256 one-bedroom, 251 two-bedroom and just 6 three-bedroom units all aimed at the “upper end of the private rental market”.
Here in this rationalised, functionalised and, above all, ideologically planned and designed space everything will look nice and urban, but in terms of social and community life, it’s monotonous, sterile and dead. Elite tenements where you literally live to work. I guess we are supposed to just count ourselves lucky that ten percent of these units may eventually trickle down as social housing or, that by providing high-end housing, it will free up supply for the poor. All hail the supply gods.
It was not so long ago that the North Inner City was in the news for other reasons. The Mulvey Report, commissioned by the government in response to a string of gangland violence, concluded that “there was a strong and deep local community sense of being ‘left behind’ during the Celtic Tiger period in relation to the IFSC/Docklands developments and the ‘false promises’ given and a real and genuine concern that this will be repeated” including “the possibility of further ghettoisation in the area between centres of affluence along the Quays and the ‘legacy’ areas of urban/community neglect and deprivation.” (p.13).
Mulvey recommended a carefully planned and integrated strategy to overcome the widespread and perceived sense of inequality and of a divided city epitomised by the stark contrast between the “modern architecture, world leading businesses and high worth residences within hundreds of metres of a large concentration of social housing with little or no business activity within the community” (p.13). The plan was to carefully link the ‘place’ and ‘people’ aspects of the local area to improve social cohesion and wellbeing, through the bottom-up and grassroots harnessing of community and heritage assets.
Instead, following decades of disinvestment and stigmatisation, we are now seeing the rapid resurgence of the seemingly never-ending spread of a market-driven policy of gentrification – what Neil Smith calls ‘generalised gentrification’. As rents have exploded, private capital is flowing back to where the rate of return is highest in a systematic attempt to recommodify and retake the inner city from disadvantaged communities in the form of balkanised student housing schemes, exclusive hotels, speculative high-end build-to-rent units and upmarket offices. Islands of privilege in a sea of displaced exclusion.
In seeking to close down any criticisms, visualisations depicting the everyday life of successful, creative professionals and highly-paid millennials ambling around their trendy new cosmopolitan quarter against the backdrop of hazy blue skies, and all the resplendent transformative qualities that the development will allegedly bring to the area when completed, are increasingly being mobilised as key discursive devices, such that any objection is curbed. For who could really be against it?
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Indeed, in the aftermath of the recession, the triumphant dominance of a market-driven supply-side polemic has become remarkably effective in censoring dissent alongside an alarming rise of intolerance in national discourse of differing viewpoints or opinions in the planning system, with so called ‘NIMBYs’ habitually berated for allegedly impeding supply. To criticise is to be subjected to a form of gaslighting and routinely discredited for consigning countless thousands to a life of homelessness. After all, it is the role of ideologies to depoliticise and secure the assent of the exploited and dispossessed through the colonisation of commonsense values, ideals and priorities.
Cuttings from the Ronan Real Estate Group/Colony Capital newspaper advertisement and #growupdublin social media campaign seeking building height policy changes.
In the process, neoliberalised public policy initiatives, so favoured by the current government, such as the ‘fast-track’ Strategic Housing Development planning process, present further restrictions on opportunities for public participation and meaningful debate. The final ideological coup de grâce is the proposed new Housing & Planning Bill 2019 which seeks to dramatically rollback public access to justice in planning cases via the courts.
None of this is to say that urban consolidation is unimportant. We have seen so much sprawl, and all of problems it brings, that it is hard to see how its malign impacts can now be reversed. In fact, despite the present emphasis on urban containment, in a parallel universe offstage from the contentious and loud debates over our city skylines, business-as-usual urban dispersion continues apace, with little evidence that the new found emphasis on density will reverse it anytime soon.
However, it is also incumbent on planning professionals to look beyond the inveterate econocratic ‘growth machine’ dogmas currently shaping our cities, and to consider the real structural dynamics at play, and who benefits, which are often beyond the grasp of their inhabitants. Like the living dead, these zombie doctrines are alive in our heads and our language, but no longer visible to us in understanding our urban realities.
In truth, the densification/supply nexus is now being usefully exploited as a ploy to unwittingly conflate the needs of society with the needs of capital so as to legitimise the conditions for maximising profit and to conquer and shape urban space for the short-run priorities of finance, of capital, of economic and political elites, of those with power, a situation which is not unique to Ireland.
A more perceptive critical understanding of present-day urbanisation is particularly important at this specific historical juncture. Our built environment is long-lived and the impacts of the urban form we create today will be multidecadal, stretching into the lives of many generations and into a future of unknown resources, pollution and unstable climatic conditions, including probable major inundations of all of our coastal cities.
One of the chief justifications for the compact city ideal is the claimed environmental dividend particularly for reducing greenhouse gas emissions through, for example, increased efficiency and use of sustainable transport modes. However, this enthralled enthusiasm for so called ‘sustainable urbanism’ is contradicted by multiple empirical studies which demonstrate that there is no such correlation.
This literature instead argues that the inured idea that ‘density is destiny’ may actually run directly counter to the problems we are trying to solve, but gains no traction in planning debates or urban conversations. Indeed, higher density urban forms are, on the whole, more, not less, consumptive of resources than medium- and lower-density development, with affluent, high-density areas dominated by small and single-person households having, by far, the highest environmental impacts (See also Næss et al. 2020).
As discussed by Brendan Gleeson in his book, The Urban Condition: “Straightforward density advocacy has the potential to mask and distort the real geography of environmental burden that derives from unequal consumption capacities and patterns” (p.115). The fetishised hyper-densified green city ideal is therefore, in reality, an ecological fallacy, an impossible utopia, and simply the latest fix to align the elite rent-seeking interests that dominate neoliberal urbanism with the resurgent environmental agenda.
What should be at the forefront in planning debates is, not densification, but what type of city we wish to create. Most of the low-density and sprawling built environment that has evolved over the last century will still be with us at the end of this century. We are not starting from a blank slate and, even if planning could implement rapid change, it is unlikely that this could reduce emissions of the scale and urgency required, as it is largely beyond its levers to control, diverting our attention from real urban challenges.
This points planning’s purpose towards the field of adaptation. That is, to propose that new development in cities, towns and suburbs must be planned, designed and, crucially, retrofitted for people as progressive, humane, accessible, liveable, equitable, green and just spaces for downscaled consumption within planetary boundaries, and not just sites for maximised urban production and profit. Density is not our destiny. Our future should be built around a renewed ‘Right to the City’.
“There is a revolution in transport coming”, An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar proudly pronounced this week as he launched the Government’s latest ‘sensible’ and ‘pragmatic’ Climate Action Plan to ‘nudge’ people to make the right decisions to reduce carbon emissions over the long-term. I guess he didn’t fully get the memo. Perhaps twenty years ago such slothlike incrementalism might have been appropriate, maybe even auspicious. However, in the midst of the seriousness, scale and absolute emergency of our present planetary arson, such a chary level of business-as-usual lethargy is an irretrievably misconceived and delusive policy goal.
In his book, After Sustainability, John Foster describes three types of denial. The first, ‘literal denial’, is the type we’re all familiar with. The second, ‘interpretative denial’, accepts the facts but rejects the meaning, interpreting them in a way that makes them more benign to our personal psychology, in what Norwegian psychologist Kari Norgard calls the social ‘construction of innocence’ (e.g. Ireland is too small to make a difference; What about China?; If we stop producing beef, it will be produced elsewhere etc.).
The third form, ‘implicative denial’, which Foster argues is the most pernicious, is where we accept the facts and the interpretation but suppress the psychological, political and moral implications that would logically follow. For Foster, implicative denial is rife in our contemporary culture and is why so many of us, politicians and campaigners included, can continue to talk about how important climate change is without ever seriously confronting its reality and actually doing something about it.
An instructive example of this is the continued exaltation of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in Irish climate policy. This fixation with technologising ourselves out of our runaway transport emissions through ‘clean and green’ private mobility has been assiduous feature of all recent government policies, with each failed strategy being accompanied by ever more dizzying targets.
The original target was 250,000 by 2020. The National Development Plan, published last year, proposed half a million EVs by 2030. The latest strategy goes all out with a plan to increase the total number (currently less than a few thousand) to somewhere north of 800,000 by 2030 i.e. in 11 years. By way of comparison, there are around five million EVs currently in existence in the entire world.
The heedless assumptions at the heart of the EV technotopia was laid bare in a recent open letter by Professor Richard Herrington, Head of Earth Sciences at the UK’s Natural History Museum, which explains that, for the UK alone to meet its 2050 EV targets, it would require two times the current total annual world cobalt output, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, 75% of the world’s lithium production and at least 50% of the world’s copper production. If that analysis was extrapolated worldwide, global output in all rare earth metals and other scarce natural elements would have to grow to implausible levels.
All of the elements used in battery production are finite and in limited supply. Scarcity of cobalt is already threatening the production of EVs, with over half of the world’s supply mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo and regularly linked to reports of child labour exploitation and horrendous environmental destruction. There is also currently no environmentally safe way of recycling lithium-ion batteries. And that is before we get to the thorny issue of where all the clean renewable energy, grid infrastructure and accompanying resources required to power EVs and the complete electrification of society will come from?
Add in the fact that Project Ireland 2040 proposes an aggressive strategy to double the size of the economy in the next 20 years, increase the population by over a million people and the current predilection for promoting Ireland as a location for data centres, which are projected to account for as much as 31% of Irish electricity demand by 2027, and all of this starts to become very far-fetched very quickly.
EVs also do nothing to resolve chronic traffic congestion, road investment requirements, sedentary lifestyles and all of the other pathologies associated with excessive private car use. A full life-cycle assessment of EVs shows that, in reality, they produce very significant amounts of greenhouse gases, particularly during production, such that it is difficult to see how replacing the Irish fleet of two million fossil-fuel powered cars with two million somewhat-less-polluting electric cars, is going to get us anywhere near where we need to be in terms of emissions reductions.
It is often said that politics is the art of the possible. It should therefore come as no surprise that; given the complete dereliction of spatial planning policy over the last three decades, the resultant sprawl and path-dependent carbon lock-in; the impulsive political instinct is to passively appeal to technological quick-fixes. Deus ex machina.
According to Foster, this is how we let ourselves off the hook, “quasi-intentionally not following up on the uncomfortable implications” of what we know and thereby suppressing any real discussion on changing the way we live, such that nothing really has to change. It is a truism, after all, that capitalism can never resolve its environmental contradictions, it can only move them around. While we can countenance different cars, one thing we cannot accept, is less cars.
In reality, only a drastic reduction in private car use through bold policies to promote public transport, walking and cycling, with the balance of travel demand accommodated through electric car sharing schemes, will give renewable energy any chance of meeting the energy requirements of the transport sector. That’s what a transport revolution looks like. Unfortunately, imagining a post-car future is paradigmatically rejected as a violent encroachment on personal freedoms, which is ultimately the ideological rock that all meaningful climate action flounders upon.
One of the most progressive policies in recent years, ‘Smarter Travel – A New Transport Policy for Ireland 2009 – 2020’ which, contrary to utopic hyperreal EV futures, actually included defined targets for reducing travel demand, travel distances and private car ownership. This strategy committed to 500,000 more people taking alternative means to commute to work to the extent that the total share of car commuting will drop from 65% to 45%; walking, cycling and public transport would rise to 55% of total commuter journeys; and eliminating long distance commutes.
Smarter Travel, which as far as I am aware, still remains official government policy, has been quietly abandoned to the peripheries such that it received just one insipid mention in the Climate Action Plan. A Department of Transport report in 2014 concluded that its targets were impossible. The fact that such policies are considered impossible while the blind optimism of the aforementioned EV targets are somehow considered plausible, says a lot about the irrational hyperstistion of our current zeitgeist. Paradoxical is too weak a term for this. Its dishonest.
Climate change demands a politics of the impossible, made possible. A politics which problematises climate change in purely technical terms is simply a project to sustain and defend socio-economic structures that are well known to be unsustainable. The reality is that the chances of now remaining below two degrees of global warming are slim to none. Life this century is therefore likely be accompanied by a significant deterioration of humanity’s physical, social, and economic environment and, for much of the planet’s population, will become increasingly precarious.
The actions we must be calling for to negotiate our climate changed future are, not reactionary techno-managerialist platitudes, but real political asks for systemic change such as an abandonment of the arbitrary fetishisation of GDP growth as the dominant benchmark of societal progress and wellbeing (as recently in New Zealand and Wales), land reform, basic income and natural climate solutions all of which are conspicuously absent from the Irish climate change debate.
It’s not my intention to be unnecessarily churlish and despairing of the Climate Action Plan, which does repeat many long-standing and worthwhile progressive policy measures, but as Foster puts it: “willed optimism, kept afloat by denial, is not an alternative to despair but a form of it”.
Invitation to planning practitioners, academics, geographers, students, environmentalists, community activists and individuals to establish a Planners Network Chapter for Ireland.
The Planners Network – the Organisation of Progressive Planning – is a community of professionals, activists, academics and students in North America involved in physical, social, economic and environmental planning in urban and rural areas, and dedicated to ideas and practices that advance radical change in our political and economic systems, through planning.
Since its inception by Chester Hartman in 1975, it has been a voice for progressive professionals and activists who believe that decisions about how land is used, who benefits and who loses, matter profoundly, and that planning should be used as a tool to eliminate the great inequalities of wealth and power in our society, rather than to maintain and justify the status quo. Working with an eclectic mix of other progressives; including those with an interest in environmental justice, community development, housing, and globalisation; it seeks to be an effective political and social force to inform public opinion and public policy, and to provide assistance to those seeking to understand, control, and change the forces which affect their everyday lives. The network hosts regular events and has amassed a wealth of publications, including the wonderfully titled ‘Student Disorientation Guide‘ which should be required reading for all planning students. Outside North America, a Planners Network has been established in the UK who have produced their own manifesto for planning and land reform. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been an equivalent in Ireland.
Over the past ten years, contributors to this blog have documented the central role of planning in the pell-mell urban growth of the Celtic Tiger and the ensuing ruinous property crash, and offered a counterpoint to neoliberalism’s dominant status as political ideology in responding to the crisis. These were heady times, when the fallout from the crisis was visceral and raw and, from within the moment of economic wreckage, there was time, space and inspiration to write and debate transformative alternatives to mainstream urban planning. True to form, however, the economic recovery has been accompanied by an ideological ‘circling of the wagons’ and the swift resurgence of uncritical pro-market, pro-development discourses, inducing reassuring stimuli that the underlying structural problematic in the political-economy has been durably resolved. As blog contributor Cian O’Callaghan wrote back in 2014, for many of us it has been dispiriting to see the collective zeal of post-crisis grassroots civic action dissipate, which seems only likely to set the stage for the next inevitable crisis, with perhaps far worse impacts.
With the publication of the Project Ireland 2040 and the associated Draft Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies, the ideological continuity of neoliberalism has resurfaced more powerfully than ever. Meanwhile, the mainstream professional representative bodies, such as the Irish Planning Institute, have remained comfortably conformist despite a supply-side deregulatory onslaught and the emergence of a powerful, and largely unchallenged, YIMBY sophistry. In a sense, this is unsurprising, as it has never been the prerogative of planners to dwell on planning’s deeper ideological nature and their own political agency, preferring instead to view their role as neutral and routine that transcends politics in pursuit of the ‘common good’. As economic historian Karl Polanyi wrote: “Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not”. Meanwhile, the symptoms of neoliberalism and the irreversible damage inflicted by the politics of endless growth are increasingly writ large in spiralling homelessness; housing unaffordability; longer commuting; inadequate public services; uneven spatial development; rising inequality; growing rates of obesity; political alienation and, above all, climate change and the unfolding global ecological emergency.
If, like me, you believe that there is a renewed need for a platform for forward-thinking progressive voices, or ‘radical planners’, to work together along the lines of the principles of the Planners Network and speak out against the hidden planning rationalities that increase inequalities and injustices, and that contemporary planning practice in Ireland is in need of a thoroughgoing introspection which fundamentally questions its very purpose, get in touch. Such an endeavour may be a hopelessly naïve and quixotic call to arms, and may become more of self-help group, but optimism of the will and all of that!
If interested in collaborating contact me at: gdaly@liverpool.ac.uk and put ‘Planners Network’ in the subject line. You can also leave a comment below or contact me on Twitter.
“Make no little plans”, once wrote American modernist architect and planner Daniel Burnham, as “they have no magic to stir men’s blood“. Twas ever thus. National planning has always been the political terrain of narrating a grand hegemonic fantasy of an ideology that is never clearly expressed. With the publication of ‘Project Ireland 2040’, jointly comprising the National Planning Framework (NPF) and the National Development Plan (NDP), Ireland’s recrudescence as a neoliberal vassal state is reaching towards its apotheosis. No longer a ‘society’, we are now a ‘project’ and there is no doubt as to what the project is about – growth! In fact, a stupendous 1.1 million additional people, 660,000 new jobs and 500,000 additional homes in the next twenty-two years.
It is perhaps testament to how normalised growthism has become in colonising the national consciousness that these quixotic projections were near-universally greeted as a deterministic fait accompli. Their provenance, or desirability, has caused not even a ripple of debate or discussion amongst the national commenteriat, planners or academics. On the contrary, with remarkable consensus they have been largely hubristically hailed as a self-congratulatory and entirely logical consequence of Ireland’s post-recession economic renaissance and prospects, and even, by business lobby groups, as far too conservative.
It is true, of course, that, if the past was a reliable guide to future events, demographic change actually exceeded the growth scenario selected in the NPF’s predecessor, the National Spatial Strategy, rising by 844,662 between 2002 and 2016. This primarily occurred during the rapid pell-mell expansion of the Celtic Tiger era and driven chiefly by natural increase. This time, according to the ESRI population and economic projections which underpin the NPF, population growth will be principally propelled by sustained in-migration as a consequence of “a relatively benign scenario which would see Irish GDP grow by 3 per cent or more each year until 2040.” (p.5). In other words, the NPF projections are fundamentally tied to the immigration patterns that would arise from this very optimistic economic trajectory, which, it is accepted, exceeds that anticipated for most international economies.
This magical growth rate of 3 per cent has become something of a fetishised article of faith amongst economists in recent years and fits with the conventional wisdom that it is the minimum acceptable level for ‘sustainable’ economic growth. In fact, the current mid-range ESRI econometric model runs only to 2030, so the last ten years in the projection horizon were simply linearly extrapolated forward to 2040. It is worth mentioning that a compound growth rate of 3 per cent per annum to 2040 would see an approximate cumulative doubling of total Irish GDP over this period.
Despite repeated caveats in the ESRI report which heavily emphasises that “the projections should not be taken as a forecast, but as a scenario that might arise given a set of assumptions and unchanged modelling parameters” and “subject to significant uncertainties” (p.15), these population ‘projections’ have now been unproblematically transcribed into ‘targets’ for an additional 1.1 million people (25% greater that the ESRI baseline) which the NPF, at a minimum, shall aim to achieve. A number of alternative sub-national ‘macro-spatial’ options were evaluated in order to allocate the regional distribution of this growth, albeit the headline national population target was considered a non-negotiable point of departure i.e. consideration of alternatives was permissible so long as they remained fully circumscribed within the clearly defined parameters of what was open for discussion. Notably, in a separate study, quoted extensively in the analysis underpinning the NPF, three hypothetical population scenarios were examined, whereby the difference between the ‘Low’ and ‘High’ scenario was over 800,000 by 2030. Regardless, and without much justification, the NPF discounted such options and selected a high growth scenario, apparently on account of “[t]he lack of fully worked alternative scenarios at the nationallevel that might encompass higher and lower growth than the baseline” (p.4).
The inadmissibility of genuine alternatives and the pensée unique of a ‘growth first’ approach to spatial development has, of course, long been recognised as a core feature of planning. In this view, ‘Project Ireland 2040’ is simply the latest attempt of an unquenchable political desire to capture and reorientate planning, and its associated geoinstitutional architecture, to provide for a new ‘spatial fix’ of collective consumption and to re-establish the self-fulfilling conditions for sustained capital accumulation. In order to displace political tensions, the resurgence of the inveterate growth agenda has now being wrapped in the soothing banner of a renewed national imaginary of harmonious balanced growth and parity, despite the sustained evidence (even, most recently, from the World Bank) that acute socio-spatial disparities are increasing globally, and will continue to increase, despite all territorial policies to the contrary.
The inherent contradiction of this ideological commitment is laid bare in the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Statement accompanying the NPF, belatedly published over a month after its launch. Climate Change is touted as one of the central pillars of ‘Project Ireland 2040’ with an aggregate reduction in emissions of at least 80% targeted by 2050 (compared to 1990 levels) in line with binding international obligations. Due to its exalted status, agriculture has been effectively exempted, with all the burden of reduction efforts now to come from the electricity generation, built environment and transport (the so called ‘EGBET’ sectors). Greenhouse gas emissions in these sectors is currently running at 31.8 Mt CO2eq (c. 6.6 t CO2eq per capita) and, if population targets were to be achieved, by 2040 emissions would need to decrease to 11.8 Mt CO2eq i.e. a wholly implausible 2 t CO2eq per capita. By 2050, per capita emissions in the EGBET sectors would need to be further reduced to less than 1 t CO2eq per capita, assuming there is no further population growth targeted beyond 2040 (For reference, this is the approximate emissions per capita of most ‘developing’ countries e.g. Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Angola etc). To date only economic recession and mass emigration (c.2008 – 2013) have been proven to be effective in achieving the scale of emissions reductions required to meet our 2050 trajectory.
This abstraction from reality is further underscored by the very latest EPA projections, published last week, which show that, following a brief downward interregnum during the recession, Ireland’s emissions have rebounded lockstep with the economic growth and, at best, an abject 1% reduction of emissions will be achieved by 2020 compared to a target of 20%. As it turns out, economic growth and emissions reductions are, as long predicted, inimical goals and, despite the mantra of ecological modernisation and ‘sustainable growth’, economic growth does not result in absolute higher returns to resource efficiency (See Jackson (2009) for a useful exposition on this). The EPA also projects that emissions will continue to grow in tandem with a growing economy and, with all existing and currently planned measures, a further meagre decrease of emissions of 1% is projected by 2030 compared to a target of 30%.
It should be noted that the current EPA projections are based on a future population in 2035 of 5.2 million, 650,000 less than the NPF 2040 targets, and do not take into account any of the policy measures included in ‘Project Ireland 2040’. However, for Ireland to achieve its 2050 emissions reduction target alongside 2040 growth targets, only the mobilisation of revolutionary policies and investment measures together with a massive technological shift on an historically unprecedented scale and scope would suffice, so as to deliver a decoupling of carbon intensity to outrun scale. Notwithstanding its superficial commitment to progressive climate measures, ‘Project Ireland 2040’ is certainly not that, and with its duplicitous promise of new business-as-usual fossil fuel dependent motorways, airport expansion, agricultural productivism and exponential economic and population growth, does not provide us, in any way, a pathway out of this dilemma.
It is often said that what is ecologically necessary is not politically feasible, which raises the spectre that our (un)sustainability conundrum is one of those problems that is simply not solvable. The subterfuge of power, politics and economism generally trump evidence-based analysis and long-term collective interest, resulting in cognitive lock-in and an aggressive shutdown of alternative perspectives. If we are to have any possibility of meeting the biophysical realities of the 21st Century planetary climate crisis, what is desperately needed is a new planning pedagogy and practice that decolonises the future, repoliticies the realm of possibilities and negates the governing fundaments of growth-orientated planning. Of-course, I realise this call to arms is haplessly naïve against the backdrop of planning profession and society that angelizes the imperative of growth as an inviolable normative goal – but from conformity to complicity is but a short step.
Gavin Daly
This Blog Post featured on the Irish Times Inside Politics Podcast. You can listen below.
The overwhelming sense you get when you read the newly published ‘Ireland 2040: Our Plan – The Draft National Planning Framework’ (NPF) is – haven’t I read all this before somewhere? At least as far back as the 1997 Sustainable Development Strategy, Irish officialdom has thoroughly excelled at composing convincing paeans to smart, sustainable planning. The trouble is, nobody has been listening, resulting in a yawning implementation gap between rhetoric and reality.
As we prepare to go once more into the breach, the dominance of Dublin and the steadily accumulated legacy of haphazard development sprawl, does not bode well for the successful implementation of the NPF. Strategic planning never emerges onto a blank slate where new policies can be easily established. Instead, they are unfurled across inherited and deeply contested spaces which create their own path dependencies. For Ireland, it is hard to contemplate a more inauspicious starting point for a fresh attempt at national spatial planning. Sigmund Freud once apparently said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis. Perhaps, as argued by Norwegian planning scholar Tore Sager, it is time to apply his concept of ‘parapraxis’ to understand the planning dysfunction and ultimate consequences which arise from continuously failed communication.
Back in 2002 when the draft NPF’s predecessor, the National Spatial Strategy (NSS), was first published, it was immediately met with a wave of derision from competing political interests. This time round, the draft strategy has studiously sought to avoid such partisan conflict and the bitter spatial politics of winners and losers. The generally muted political and underwhelmed media reaction to its publication is testament to how successful it has been in this task. This depoliticisation has largely been achieved through repeating general truisms on sustainable planning principles (high quality urban placemaking, infill/brownfield regeneration, compact urban growth, integrated communities, promoting sustainable transport modes etc.), which nobody seriously disagrees with, and delegating much of the actual decision-making to the three new regional assemblies via proposed Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies (RSESs).
Gone are the ‘Gateways’ and ‘Hubs’ of the NSS, replaced instead with a general commentary on Ireland’s five main cities and a vague objective of achieving ‘regional parity’ in population growth. Given past experience and the current make-up of the Dáil, obfuscation is perhaps an understandable tactic. Indeed, a noticeable feature of the draft strategy is the almost complete absence of maps – now substituted with the current fashion for infographics.
So after decades of failed attempts at national planning, will this time be different? One important distinction from previous attempts is that the draft NPF is proposed to be placed on a statutory footing and overseen, quasi-independently, by the new Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR) – a key recommendation of the Mahon Tribunal. It is also proposed to align the NPF with a new ten-year National Investment Plan (NIP). The absence of a strong coordinated relationship to a long-term capital investment programme for physical infrastructure was one of the major criticisms of the NSS and contributed, in no small part, to its ignoring in practice.
The potential of public lands to support NPF implementation is acknowledged with consideration to be given to the merits of introducing a new ‘National Land Development Agency’ (NAMA?) with enhanced compulsory purchase powers to unlock brownfield urban regeneration sites. The previously mothballed Gateway Innovation Fund will now be replaced with a competitive bid-based ‘National Smart Growth Initiative’ to leverage public and private investment. Funding will be available for both urban and rural areas, which is in clear recognition of the theme that runs throughout the strategy of the need to strengthen rural towns and villages and to counteract the corrosive effects of population haemorrhaging through urban-generated rural housing sprawl.
Interestingly, in a subtle language departure from the 2005 Rural Housing Guidelines, and most likely an implicit recognition of recent councillor agitation over European court rulings in respect of ‘locals only’ housing policies and fears of a free-for-all, the draft NPF floats the concept ‘demonstrable economic need’ as an alternative to ‘local housing need’ as the relevant siting criteria for one-off rural housing. Although no clarity is provided as to what exactly constitutes a ‘demonstrable economic need’, this policy is to be applied, in principle, to the commuter hinterlands (or Functional Urban Areas) of all cities and towns greater than 10,000 population. Again, no maps are provided but the OECD defined Functional Urban Areas (>15% commuting) for each of the five cities is proposed which, given Ireland’s far-flung commuter catchments, could affect very wide geographical areas.
The process of identifying rural housing demand is also to be supported by an officiously titled ‘Housing Needs Demand Assessment’ (HNDA) model, the methodology for which is to be prescribed in future planning guidelines. However, in layman’s terms, it effectively means the better use of standardised data collection and evidenced-informed methods to understand and project local housing policies. This is most likely a clear acknowledgement of the current housing data debacle. In cloaking the politically toxic issue in soothing technocratic jargon, the draft NPF skilfully dodges a bullet, for now. There is no doubt that, if the wider policies espoused in the strategy are to be successful, this nettle must be grasped. The ability of the draft NPF to navigate this hornets’ nest, withstand the inevitable political onslaught, avoid a fudge and bring about radical policy change will be a major litmus test.
In keeping with the 2015 Planning Policy Statement, the draft strategy is replete with time-honoured sustainable planning principles and references to currently in vogue EU policy vernacular, such as the ‘circular bioeconomy’. One innocuous-sounding provision is that accessibility between key urban centres will be enhanced only after regional cities, such as Cork and Limerick, have reached a sufficient population mass, as: “[i]nvestment in connectivity first without urban consolidation measures will likely worsen the current trends towards sprawl.” (p.123). Given the highly ambitious population growth targets (50-60%) for each of the regional cities, which would take significant time and investment to achieve, it will be telling if this policy can outlast the clarion calls for new motorways, such as the M20 recently prioritised by the Taoiseach.
What is interesting about this provision, however, is that it is a recognition that future population growth, rather than being merely an input to planning, is also an outcome and we can choose to effect it through targeted implementation measures. Nevertheless, bending future population growth towards NPF ideals, where the four cities outside Dublin are proposed grow by more than twice as much to 2040 as they did over the past 25 years, would be a monumental feat, requiring rigorous prioritisation stretching beyond short-term political horizons and spelled out in advance through definite targets. It also requires prohibiting growth elsewhere. Such notions are almost completely alien in Irish political culture and would demand, not just radical changes in policies, but an unlikely paradigm shift in perceptions.
Of more fundamental significance are the rationalities disguising the real political aims being pursued in the draft NPF. The strategy is fully reflective of the current economic consensus forged around corporate wellbeing and capturing globally mobile FDI flows as the primary driver of national economic growth, particularly in the knowledge and digital economy, internationally traded services etc. A well-worn path in an attempt to achieve this, is through the reworking of planning and governance spaces and promoting the competitive advantage of urban regions as locational nodes for transnational capital investment in the global marketplace.
Through rescaling Ireland into three new city regions, the draft NPF, for the first time, explicitly translates national industrial policy into a parallel spatial strategy. The ESRI forecasts of future population growth of 1 million people to 2040 (+20%), including 550,000 new homes and 660,000 new jobs, are unproblematically accepted as fact, to which planning and society must accommodate, despite how uncertain and prone to error such projections are. In keeping with the overall neoliberal approach to spatial governance, the assumption is that the benefits of growth will trickle-down to underpin the achievement of broader social, spatial and environmental goals in relatively uncontroversial ways.
Consequently, the draft NPF vision is ineluctably bound up in present perceptions, perspectives and views with an overweening emphasis on growth, devoid of any critical thought about the future. In the case of climate change, for example, we know that absolute reductions in global carbon emissions of 80% is required by 2050 in order to meet the IPCC’s stabilisation target. What type of society and economy does that look like? How can this be achieved and is it compatible with growing the population by one million people? One thing is clear. It’s a completely different kind of economy and society from the one we have at the moment which drives itself forward by emitting more and more carbon.
Instead, the draft NPF seeks to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable through the identification of ‘win-win-win’ approaches which do not foresee any inherent contradictions between policies or the need for trade-offs i.e. nothing really fundamentally has to change. For example, our major airports are to be expanded, inter-urban roads are to be improved with average journey speed of 90kph (i.e. new motorways) and the sacred cow of carbon intensive and polluting agricultural productivism is to be ring-fenced such that all future emission reductions will almost exclusively fall on transport and energy – a jaw-droppingly unrealistic goal. Smarter Travel policy, which targeted aggressive reductions in car commuting, is quietly dropped in favour of the equally far-fetched electrification of ‘transport fleets’. Again, to avoid ceaseless political rancor, future renewable energy production is to be significantly pushed offshore through the use of expensive and unproven technologies, necessitating major grid investments, while promoting Ireland as a global location for data centres, which are voracious energy consumers.
Realism, not growthism, is the principle which should guide the NPF. If the history of national planning worldwide has thought us one thing, it is that it has failed almost every time it has been tried. This should come as no surprise as, in an uncertain world, there is no such thing as total control of the object of governance. If we accept the likelihood of failure from the outset, then it is necessary to adopt a satisficing approach as an alternative to blind utopianism. The scientific evidence that 21st Century humanity has entered the increasingly unstable Anthropocene epoch is ever more alarming. As Brendan Gleeson writes in his recent book ‘The Urban Condition’, the coming century will be marked by a world increasingly in planetary overshoot; population and per capita consumption are increasing; global competition for Earth’s shrinking biocapacity is intensifying and sea level rise, mass migrations, resource shortages, famines, species extinction, energy insecurity and attendant geopolitical tension and economic breakdowns threaten the relationships between cities and their distant hinterlands even as cities become humanity’s major habitat. A resilient, adaptive society – capable of resisting external shocks, maintaining people’s livelihoods and living within our ecological means – is the only goal we should be aiming for.
Last month saw the publication of the latest government effort at an action plan for rural development. Realising Our Rural Potential takes the now familiar glossy format of recent government action plans replete with 276 actions, slickly produced with accompanying promo video and, for sake of appearances, an official launch in the suitably rural location of Ballymahon’s (soon to be staffless) public library.
The plan places a welcome, and long overdue, emphasis on rejuvenating rural towns and villages which are recognised as essential lynchpins to sustain and improve the living and working environment of rural dwellers.
It is acknowledged that, as the populations of rural settlement centres have diminished, so too has the demand for and provisioning of essential services, hindering their capacity to compete for investment and employment opportunities. A new town and village renewal scheme is therefore proposed (a rehash of a scheme launched last August), at a cost of €12 million per annum, to encourage increased residential occupancy in over 600 town and village centres (€20,000 each!).
In these so-called ‘post-factual’ times, it is without any sense of irony, however, that the plan completely glosses over the inconvenient reality that it was the assiduous political commitment over successive decades for policies favouring unfettered suburban one-off housing sprawl that has done most to undermine and depopulate rural towns and villages.
Between 2001 and 2011, 104,058 one-off dwellings were constructed in rural areas, 85% within 5km of a town or village. Since 2011, a further 18,500 have been permitted. The level of cognitive dissonance on this issue is all the more striking when you consider that the final report of the Commission for Economic Development in Rural Areas (CEDRA), upon which the action plan is largely based, also makes the same glaring omission. The reality is that, nationally, over 70% of dwellings in defined rural areas are built outside settlement centres, and higher still in some counties.
This haemorrhaging of population is not deterministic but as a direct result of a sustained and deliberate policy intervention. As one insightful letter writer to The Irish Times noted, what is killing rural towns and villages is not population decline, but their irrelevance, as rural areas become progressively (r)urbanised and assimilated into the functional reaches of larger cities. No amount of fiscal incentives will reverse this trend in the absence of corresponding firm policy measures to restrict and reverse dispersed suburban housing in the countryside.
Of course, such an idea would be an anathema in Ireland against a backdrop of political short-termism and patronage. So instead, the action plan includes a rather insipid reference to increase delivery of small housing schemes in towns and villages as an alternative to one-off housing.
Aside from the umpteenth re-launch of the national broadband strategy, one of the more eye-catching objectives of the action plan is the highly misleading target to create 135,000 new jobs and increase by 40% Foreign Direct Investment in ‘rural Ireland’ by 2020. Ensconced behind the attention-grabbing target is the actuality that the action plan opportunistically conflates ‘rural development’ with ‘regional development’ for the sake of appearances. What is, in fact, targeted is the creation of 135,000 jobs outside Dublin i.e. primarily in cities outside Dublin.
This sleight of hand epitomises the policy churning over successive decades on rural development issues in an effort to give the impression of doing something. As I have argued before, in a typical Irish solution to an Irish problem, in order to defer and displace the political strife that accompanies an implicitly urban-led national growth strategy, we have instead sanctioned the widespread (r)urbanisation of the countryside. Vague, populist and anachronistic concepts like ‘Rural Ireland’ and ‘Action Plans for Rural Development’ simply serve as a symbolic gesture to paper over and silence a more fundamental political discussion on the nature of urbanisation in Ireland – which is off-course the great taboo in Irish political discourse.
Our lack of collective memory is all the more alarming when you consider that almost twenty years ago the White Paper on Rural Development (still available on DAFF’s website) was published which contained all of the symbolic rhetoric of the current action plan (including, as today, a commitment to create a twenty-year spatial strategy to promote balanced regional development – sound familiar?). Unfortunately, this latest action plan is simply yet another episode of opportunism over strategy where we are failing to accurately conceive the true nature of the problem. No doubt twenty years hence we will be back having the same discussion again.
Alternative Population Projections in 
Ireland after NAMA 
