The Power of Plans - Dublin

50 Shades of Planning

This episode is part of an international triumvirate, which has been put together with the help of old friend of the podcast, Ian Wray, and new friend of the podcast, Lucy Natarajan.

Ian, regular listeners will know, is a Professor at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place at University of Liverpool.

Lucy is one of the editors of the Built Environment journal, a co-founder of Place Alliance, an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes and an Associate Professor at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning.

Ian and Lucy compiled the December 2022 edition of Built Environment and sought in so doing to explore ‘the power of plans’. This, they endeavoured to do, by way of a series of internationally commissioned case studies on grand plans that have been shown to work, asking how they worked and why. In this series Sam Stafford explores with Lucy and Ian three of those case studies.

In this episode, in a conversation recorded remotely at the end of November 2022, Sam and Lucy to Jim Steer about Dublin, to which, by common consensus, town planning in the 1960s and 1970s was not kind, with large-scale road building to serve car-dependent suburbs and little investment in public transport. In the early 1990s though an EU-funded Dublin Transportation Initiative put the city on a new path…

Some accompanying reading.

Built Environment – The Power of Plans

https://www.alexandrinepress.co.uk/built-environment/power-plans

The Dublin Transportation Initiative

https://voicesofsteer.steergroup.com/post/102i3aj/the-importance-of-process-in-planning-the-dublin-transportation-initiative-par

Jim recommends the following by Frank McDonald:

• The Destruction of Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1985
• Saving the City, Tomar, 1989
• Ireland's Earthen Houses (jointly with Peigin Doyle), A&A Farmar, 1997
• The Ecological Footprint of Cities (editor), International Institute for the Urban Environment, 1998
• The Daily Globe: Environmental change, the public and the media (contributor), Earthscan, 2000
• The Construction of Dublin, Gandon Editions, 2000

Some accompanying listening.

Jim’s recommendation.

Summer in Dublin by Bagatelle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMhWll_mfGk

Ian’s recommendation.

The Maids of Mitchelstown by The Boty Band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVE7gZ1GnBc

Sam’s recommendation

Big by Fontaines DC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiLk6G5N-3Y

50 Shades T-Shirts!

If you have listened to Episode 45 of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast you will have heard Clive Betts say that...

'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'.

Sam said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt and it does. Further details can be found here: http://samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2021/07/50-shades-of-planning-t-shirts.html