To many, it may seem like a whole lot of unnecessary clutter. All the poles, signs, bus shelters, litter bins and public information panels that decorate the footpaths add up to an obstacle course, particularly for those who are blind. But for the advertising sector, street furniture presents an unrivalled business opportunity.
Why else would Adshel have sought the contract to provide some 37 taxi shelters on the streets of Dublin, at no cost to the city authorities, and agreed as part of the deal to maintain them all free of charge - and pay rent for the privilege. The payback is the revenue it will earn from advertising panels incorporated in the shelters.
It is, of course, bizarre that any city would feel the need to provide taxi shelters in the first place - in effect, acknowledging that the taxi service itself is so bad that people face long waits for a cab. But at least the glass and stainless-steel prototype unveiled recently in O'Connell Street is a cut above bus shelters from the brown period of design.
Gone are the days when outdoor advertising almost exclusively consisted of 48-sheet billboards, many of them erected illegally; urban redevelopment in recent years has seen to that, simply by reducing the number of derelict sites in the city. A more sophisticated approach is now being taken, with the emphasis on high-quality design.
Much of the running in this area has been made by the French company, JC Decaux, which pioneered the idea of incorporating advertising panels in city bus shelters as long ago as 1965. It also devised the now-ubiquitous cast-concrete automated public toilet, embraced as a godsend by local authorities throughout the world.
From its classically-modern headquarters in manicured grounds at Plaisir, near Paris, the company has commissioned such stellar architects as Norman Foster, Phillipe Starck, Guy Aulenti and Renzo Piano to design everything from bus shelters to news stands, poster columns, street lamps, recycling units and other paraphernalia.
Over the past 30 years, JC Decaux has provided street furniture for hundreds of cities worldwide, ranging from Amsterdam to Stuttgart and Barcelona to San Francisco. With more than 6,000 employees in 23 countries, most of them involved in maintenance, it is the world's leader in this field, with an annual turnover of nearly $2 billion.
Its flagship project has been the Champs Elysees in Paris, completed in 1994. More recently, the company won tender competitions to supply street furniture for Expo 98 in Lisbon and the Sydney Olympics in September. Its first foothold in Dublin comprises three stylish public information panels designed for the rejuvenation of O'Connell Street.
Much of the company's current output is on show on both sides of a "runway" at Plaisir, including the "basic" bus shelter from 1965. Inevitably, with the advance of contemporary design, this now looks quite dated compared to the sleek models produced more recently, some of which incorporate toilets, telephones and recycling units. Though global in its outlook - a shelter designed by Australian architect Phillip Cox is currently being installed in Glasgow, for example - JC Decaux does not ignore local context. An art nouveau-style shelter was produced for Brussels, in homage to Horta, while "heritage" street furniture is favoured in southern England.
A similar approach was taken in San Francisco, in deference to the dominant image of its cable cars, though chief executive Jean-Francois Decaux pointed out that more contemporary furniture was installed outside the historic district - including a very striking lamp standard by Phillipe Starck that's hinged to move like a nodding donkey.
Rigorous maintenance is one of the company's strongest selling points. "When we started installing bus shelters in Amsterdam, they couldn't imagine how we would deal with graffiti. So we set up a squad of "graffiti busters" on motorcycles to get rid of it six times a day and now there is no longer any graffiti on the street furniture," he says.
Mr Decaux, who admits he spends much of his life aboard planes, has visited Dublin and says politely that there is "room for improvement" in the city's street furniture. And having taken over David Allen, Ireland's largest outdoor advertising company, he believes that JC Decaux could "nicely contribute" to upgrading the streetscapes of Dublin.
However, he believes that Dublin Corporation's plan to offer separate contracts for taxi shelters, bus shelters, public information panels and other new facilities makes no sense. What's needed, and he is clearly right in saying this, is an integrated approach similar to what the city of Paris adopted in renovating the ChampsElysees.
The beautifully-detailed paving of its extended footpaths, in granite and limestone, was done by the city administration, but JC Decaux won the prestige contract to supply the new street furniture - a combination of retro-style news stands and poster columns, so characteristic of Paris, and ultra-modern bus shelters designed by Norman Foster.
As in the corporation's plan for O'Connell Street, one of the principal aims of the Champs Elysees renovation was to give space back to the people. So the slip roads on both sides of the famous avenue were eliminated and the footpaths doubled in width, partly to provide outdoor terraces for its over-priced restaurants and bars.
Le Notre's original design for Louis XIV, incorporating a double line of plane trees on each side, has been fully reinstated while the pre-existing Late Empire-style street lamps were retained - even though their function has been largely displaced by 11.5 m-high modern twin-lamp street lights designed by Jean-Michel Wilmotte.
The value of a comprehensive approach to paving and street furniture is most evident in the remaking of Henry Street and Mary Street in Dublin, designed by landscape architects Mitchell and Associates in collaboration with the corporation. A similar approach is now required in O'Connell Street, instead of just making it up as we go along.
