on the edge of nowhere : urban placelessness

Andrew MacLaran

During the past fifty years, Dublin has been transformed from a relatively compact city to a sprawling amorphous metropolis of mind-numbingly nondescript suburban developments and an outer commuter belt which extends some 90 km from the city. New housing schemes in places as distant as Arklow, Carlow, Portlaoise, Portarlington, Mullingar, Navan and Dundalk are being targeted at commuters fromdistant as Arklow, Carlow, Portlaoise, Portarlington, Mullingar, Navan and Dundalk arbeing targeted at commuters from the city, refugees from the housing crisis in the capital.

It was the residential population which was first to abandon the core. The midrst to abandon the core. The midapital.

It was the residential population which was first to abandon the core. The middle-classes sought a better quality of life in garden suburbs such as Mount Merrion, while Dublin Corporation oversaw a process of peripheral estate development as it proceeded to eliminate the city's overcrowded tenement slums. Insofar as the availability of first-time buyers' grants, the exemption of stamp duty and abatement of domestic rates were available only for the purchase of newly completed dwellings, the structure of government subsidies for owner-occupation long favoured the purchase of new dwellings over refurbishment. They also tended to favour peripheral expansion over redevelopment of inner-city sites where little new accommodation was being developed.

Estate layouts became designed around road schemes which could hasten traffic flow rather than create intimate urban landscapes, while prescriptive planning formulae covered a wide range of elements from set-back lines to the provision of open space. In response, developers tended to interpret planners' minimum development requirements as maxim, the planned low density of most of the new peripheral housing developments, predominantly of low-rise detached, semi-detached or terraced houses with gardens, built at a density of 20-25 houses per hectare with mandatory provision of 10 per cent open space, would prove costly in its extravagant consumption of land and expensive in service provision, from refuse collection to public transport.

From the 1960s, the geography of industrial functions and employment also shifted firmly in favour of purpose-buuilt industrial estates located overwhelmingly in the outer suburbs (MacLaran & Beamish, 1985). Although Dublin retained a strong retailing and office core throughout the twentieth century, a vigorous suburbanization of retail functions did take place fromm the 1960s towards newly developed shopping centres which served the suburbanizing residential population (Parker, 1997). During the closing decades of the century, office suburbanization was also occurring (MacLaran, 1993, 1999). The paucity of potential office development sites in the central city, resulting from restrictive central area planning policies, together with the administrative fragmentation of the metropolis which encourages suburban local authorities to compete with one another for the rates income brought by commercial developments, increasingly encouraged private-sector developers to recognize and respond to the profit potential of the edge. Simultaneously, for many operations, the necessity for a central city location was much reduced by advances in communications technologies. Thus, during 1998 and 1999, some 30 per cent of the office space which reached completion was located in Dublin's southern suburbs, with the office core in Dublin 2 accounting for just 12 per cent (MacLaran, 1999). IIndeed, during 2000-2002, over a period which will witness the greatest office development boom in the city's history, 68 per cent of the office space reaching completions will be located in suburban locations. By late 2001, while Dublin 2 will accommodate around 38 per cent of the city's modern office stock, some 32 per cent will be located in the suburbs, the remainder comprising space in centrally located 'overspill' areas around the core in Dublin 1, 4, 7 and 8. Twelve months later, the modern stock in the outer suburbs will actually match that of Dublin 2.

There is also a growing quantity of modern high-quality office space located on industrial estates, frequently linked to headquarters or teleservices functions rather than purely to industrial mannnnnnagement operations. A number of these blocks are of substantial size, exceeding 4645 m2 (50,000 sq. ft.). Office accommodation on Dublin's industrial estates, where the office content either exceeds 465 m2 (5000 sq. ft.) or where ovor where ove ovhere ovvver 70 per cent of the building comprises space office component, now totals over 105,255 m2 (MacLaran, 1999).

Thus, Dublin is rapidly developing an 'Edge City' where substantial quantities of industrial, retail, office and public-sector emplsector empllllloyment are to be found (Williams and Shiels, 2000). This will be further encouraged by the completion of the M50, Dublin's C-ring motorway. For example, at Sandyford-Leopardstown, the stock of modern office space amounted to 31,000 m2 at the end of 199 1999. This will increase by over 170,000 m2 by the end of 2002. It is likely then to comprise the third largest concentration of office space in the city, exceeded only by Dublin 2 and Dublin 4. Other recently emerging peripherally located office nodes ins include Tallaght, currently with around 36,000 m2 of office space, which will increase to over 52,000 m2 by late 2001. Neighbouring clusters at City West at Baldonnell, and Park West Business Park, Nangor Road, will by that time also have become esttest esttablished as significant centres of office employment, respectively providing 31,000 m2 and 73,000 m2. of accommodation.

The twenty-first century geography of highly dispersed employment is thus rapidly being shaped. Set amid low-density suburban rr ran rresidential areas, the new Edge-City landscape of retail centres, medium-rise high-specification office blocks and light-industrial units embraces an eclectic mix of architectural styles, creating an 'Anywheresville' sub-urban space on such a large scale that we can relate to it and negotiate our way through it successfully only via the medium of the motor car. It is the Baroque city gone mad ; 'space in motion' taken to extremes, from high speed to gridlock. Occasionally, the quality of building design and landscaping reaches a high level and merits more than a passing glance, but this is all too rare. The only element of design uniformity is often to be found in the ubiquitous presence of large areas of surface car parking, a necessary corollary of the almost ubiquitous underprovision of public transport infrastructures. It might be Dublin, but could equally be outer Birmingham, Sydney, Minneapolis or Paris ; a globalized edge.

Of critical concern is that not only have the peripherally situated workplaces developed in the absence of adequate infrastructures, but that there has been little consideration of how we can ever service all of these adequately. Public transport can cope reasonably well only with relatively simple radial patterns of movement, primariily conveying suburban residents to the city centre. Gradually, however, market-led trends in land-use and development are giving rise to highly complex patterns of inter-suburban commuting, reminiscent of American metropolises. For the daily assembly of their workforces, such Edge-City locations rely overwhelmingly on commuting by private car. Periodic crises in the distribution or pricing of fuel supplies underline the degree to which the modern metropolis, characterized by an intense geographical separation of functions, particularly where Edge City is concerned, has become sustainable only with the expenditure of immense quantities of energy and reliant upon an efficient operation of 'circulation space', which is becoming ever less so in all but nameeee. As the prospect of impending suburban gridlock looms, the long-term viability of more dispersed Edge-City developments will be further challenged by the inevitable increases in the real cost of private transportation as the global availability of fossil fuels diminishes.

Failure to cluster peripheral office development into a limited number of well-defined suburban nodes, preferably in the vicinity of retail complexes whose patrons would provide additional justification for more than a skeletal public transport service throughout the day outside commuting hours, and to restrict them elsewhere in suburbia will render it virtually impossible for public transit to cater for the multi-origin multi-destination patterns of inter-suburban travel which are emerging. As in the United States, the alternative will necessitate an ever-increasing reliance upon the motor car, with public policy being obliged to respond in an increasingly costly manner to demands for road improvements and new highway construction to o address suburban traffic congestion.

Andrew MacLaran is professor at the Department of Geography, Trinity College, Dublin.