`If you look at a map of Dublin, there's an awful lot of green blobs," says economist Colm McCarthy of DKM, referring to the fact that the capital reputedly has more public parks per capita than any other city in Europe. "Some of the parks, such as Herbert Park in Ballsbridge, are used intensively, but others not so. St Anne's Park in Raheny is the size of a suburb, but it's so sparsely used that women, in particular, won't go for a walk there even during the day.
"Apart from the arboretum, the rose garden and the Red Stables, the rest of it should be built on. Of course, there should be some yardstick, such as the number of punters per acre per day, but if it's below a certain footfall, the park is not worth having." Such clinical surgery on some of the city's green spaces would be very radical stuff, but McCarthy insists the alternative of dispersing new housing further and further out, with no public transport to serve it, conjures up a nightmare scenario in terms of traffic and car dependency.
"You have to break eggs to make an omelette, and those eggs might include the likes of St Anne's Park. The local authorities should also be identifying derelict or under-utilised sites and using their compulsory purchase powers to buy them for housing, public or private.
"For example, you could almost fit the city of Limerick on the site of CIE's Inchicore Works, and it's right beside a good railway line. Some of the Army barracks, such as Clancy at Kingsbridge or Cathal Brugha in Rathmines, should also be sold off for housing.
"There are also lots of open spaces in the suburbs with no use. Some fellow mows the grass there every so often and if he sees 20 kids arrive with four jackets for goalposts, he tells them they're not allowed to play football there."
Many planners agree. Even where pitches are provided "only a tiny proportion of the local population, around 20 per cent, actually uses them," according to David O'Connor (Fingal County Architect). He would favour the alternative of purpose-built recreation centres, such as the very successful leisure centres in Belfast - not only because they would cater for a much larger and more diverse range of users, but also because it would spare more land for housing.
"All-weather playing facilities, such as what we've agreed with the Corporation for Pelletstown, are worth 10 pitches on grass," says James Pike, senior partner of O'Mahony Pike Architects. Where local authorities provide such community facilities, the 1999 Planning Bill allows them to recoup the cost by imposing a levy on house-builders in the area - though this, in itself, will not overcome chronic staffing difficulties. Alternatively, they could be built and operated by the private sector, but this would obviously mean charging user fees. The "densification" of established suburban areas might also involve developers buying up entire housing estates and demolishing them to make way for higher density, more urban schemes. This is already happening on a smaller scale; on the corner of Trees Road, in Mount Merrion, one developer paid a large price to acquire a pair of semi-detached houses and later obtained planning permission to replace them with a small apartment block.
Golf clubs such as Milltown and schools with land to spare such as Blackrock College may also be tempted to cash in, particularly if they are located close to good public transport routes. But judging by the number of councillors coming out of the woodwork to denounce higher-density housing, the public remains deeply sceptical.
Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council had a tough time convincing local residents of the need for such an approach in Cherrywood and Stepaside. The residents' fear, based on personal experience, is that every household will have at least two cars: high-density housing would simply mean more cars, causing horrendous traffic congestion.
If housing was to be built at all, the locals had a preference for individual houses on their own sites or, at least, a very low-density pattern of development, rather than the 15 units per acre adopted by the council. "The planners really didn't sell the benefits of a more compact approach," according to John O'Sullivan, An Taisce's overworked planning officer. But at least Dun-Laoghaire-Rathdown prepared an action plan for the Stepaside development area, albeit based on a quite conservative density of 15 units of housing per acre, or 36 per hectare. Elsewhere, in general, planners have not been planning for housing at a scale of 10,000 to 20,000 units; Maynooth, for example, may have started out as a planned town, but it is now surrounded by haphazard, low-density sprawl because of the absence of any overall view of where it is going. "The lower the density (say, 20 dwellings per hectare), the larger the amount of area that is occupied by buildings, roads and open space," as the final report of Britain's Urban Task Force notes. "It is, however, not just about the loss of land. The implications of unsustainable forms of development go much wider. It means more traffic on over-crowded roads, more energy use, further depletion of natural resources, fewer tranquil areas, loss of biodiversity, increased air pollution and intensified social segregation."
The task force, chaired by Richard (Lord) Rogers, cited a hypothetical low-density housing estate which could extend to nearly 1.5 kilometres in diameter, pushing more than 60 per cent of the houses beyond the acceptable 500-metre or five-minute walking limit to the nearest transport service.
"This form of layout promotes excessive car use and makes it difficult to justify a bus route. As density levels are increased, even to the moderate levels of 40 or 60 dwellings per hectare, the land-take diminishes rapidly. More people are close enough to communal facilities to walk, and an efficient bus service can be made viable. Moreover, the critical mass of development contributes to the informal vitality of the streets and public spaces that attracts people to city centres and urban neighbourhoods as well as contributing to energy efficiency."
The Construction of Dublin by Frank McDonald is published by Gandon Editions tomorrow, price £15.
