I want to live in Frank McDonald’s Dublin. I have always known this, but reading his latest book on our capital city has sealed the deal.

McDonald is no stranger to Irish Times readers. Former environment corespondent for the paper, he has published a number of groundbreaking books on the development of Dublin. A campaigner as much as a reporter, in recent years his focus has been to rail against bad planning policy and planning decisions that are destroying much of the capital’s cultural fabric.

A Little History of the Future of Dublin incorporates all of these facets of McDonald’s work. It is part history, part critique, but in the main a manifesto for a better built environment.

The first few chapters take the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the architectural and planning tour of the city, from the Vikings to the foundation of the Free State. For those unfamiliar with this period in Dublin’s development, these chapters are a delight.

On this brief historical foundation, McDonald recounts the record of successive governments and city councils from 1922 to the present. So starts the era of Dublin as a Modernist city. The focus of civic improvement is on public development, including local authority housing and public transport infrastructure such as Busáras.

If the early years of the Free State are defined by public architecture and planning, the economic boom of the 1960s shifts the focus to private developers. This is the era of the destruction of Georgian Dublin and the rise of the modern office block. McDonald treats all of these developments with a keen eye, separating the good from the bad and, according to his aesthetic tastes, the downright ugly.

The history is also valuable for understanding the legislative and political context to each phase of the city’s development, from the 1963 Planning and Development Act to the 1991 Temple Bar Area and Renewal Act. The author then guides the reader through the highs and lows of the Celtic Tiger and great recession. Nama and its impact of future urban development also features.

Again, all of these chapters are an absolute joy to read, whether you are coming to the material for the first time or benefiting from them as a summary of already read works. But none of this is the main focus of McDonald’s book.

Crusader

Where A Little History of the Future of Dublin really comes into its own is in the second half. Beginning with a charged chapter title, The Planning Industrial Complex, McDonald the historian and journalist is replaced by McDonald the crusader for a better Dublin.

The chapter title is a play on the 1961 warning by US president Dwight Eisenhower of the malign influence of the military industrial complex. McDonald attributes the coining of the planning industrial complex to his colleague Alan Mee. It carries the same ominous foreboding – a warning of the malign impact of developers, planners and politicians on the capital’s built environment.

In setting out the main players McDonald doesn’t pull any punches: Alan Kelly’s mandatory ministerial guidelines; Simon Coveney’s An Bord Pleanála appointments and Strategic Housing Development legislation; and Eoghan Murphy’s building height and design standard guidelines. Together, argues McDonald, these political interventions, all at the behest of large institutional investors and developers, are destroying our city.

The body of evidence presented for the prosecution is large and damning. At a time when the city needs a huge supply of affordable homes and accessible public amenities, it is being offered high-cost and high-rise developer-led vanity projects, from co-living to Johnny Ronan’s Waterfront South Central and Hines’ Clonliffe Road development.

Despite a decade of bad planning law and decision-making, McDonald is not despondent. Two years into the Covid pandemic he detects a shift in public opinion. Having returned from a protest to save the Cobblestone Pub, one of Dublin’s most important traditional music venues, he is heartened by the level of interest and desire to build a better city.

Future vision

The book concludes with McDonald setting out his vision for the future of Dublin. He makes a compelling case for a directly elected mayor to bring much-needed accountability to the city’s planning and development.

McDonald warns against letting Dublin become “an Anywhere City merely to satisfy market forces”. Instead, he calls for “a coherent plan” with “clear-sighted vision of the future based firmly on achieving the common good”.

Whether you agree with all of his opinions – and he has a lot of them – the core appeal McDonald makes is compelling. The essence of Dublin as a city, he argues, is “its characteristic human scale and intimacy”. It is an essence that is indeed worth fighting for.

Eoin Ó Broin TD is Sinn Féin’s housing spokesman. His latest book is The Dignity of Everyday Life: Celebrating Michael Scott’s Busáras