Needs must

James Pike

The vital role of the major multi-national corporations in cities, and the requirement for cities to be attractive to these corporations as a base for their activities within a wider region, as set out by Saskia Sassen, needs to be fully appreciated in Dublin. The city has succeeded in becoming a focal point particularly for American corporations establishing a base for Europe. This will be reinforced if the United Kingdom stays outside European Monetary Union, but the city needs to consolidate its position by expanding its amenities and infrastructure, and by remaining economically competitive.

We need to offer a more sustainable city framework than the American model we seem to have been following, perhaps by default. Many worrying traits of �edge city� are emerging in Dublin, with major industrial parks and business parks swallowing the countryside, segregated form similarly sprawling residential development, now also enveloping the surrounding country towns and villages. The promised investment in transport infrastructure should be further increased and supported by policies for mixed use, rather than segregated development, which is now an important element in Dublin Corporation and Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown Plans, but not those of the other authorities in the Dublin region.

There is also the urgent need to create new, more urban forms of residential development, and to break the stranglehold of the semi-detached house. This is no longer the suitable staple of urban housing as we approach the European demographic norm of a majority of single-person households, and only twenty-five percent of households of families with children. We have not woken up to the impact of this fact on the market for housing. I consider it presents us with a great opportunity to create a much more sustainable urban environment, which will offer us less dependence on the car, and a much richer mix of employment and recreational opportunities, readily accessible throughout the region.

We also need to look much further than the recent regional study, whose presumptions on population expansion already look to have seriously underestimated. We should study the urban form of a region with two million people, and subsequently up to three million people. This should include a detailed study on the expansion of a number of smaller towns in the region to take larger target populations. Present densities and forms of development are strangling the centres of these towns, and forcing unsustainable forms of urban expansion. We need to look well beyond the current phase of development, to project how further phases will be accommodated by our present developments, and spot the areas of past development which will become the future opportunities for changing urban structure. Recent suburban residential development, with its almost universal individual ownership, is going to prove extremely intractable to adaptation and change, as against the earlier urban terraced house.

Architects must engage more directly with the market place and present the value of alternative dwelling forms, drawing on excellent examples from the past, but exploiting new technology to provide more sustainable dwellings which can be tailored to the more varied lifestyles offered by greater affluence. Very little co-ordinated effort and research has gone into the urban dwelling since the pattern books of the eighteenth century. One exception, Parker Morris, needs to be revisited, updated, and its scope expanded. Bungalow Bliss, Ideal Homes and similar American packages make no contribution to urban housing.

James Pike was Assessor on the panel for the XV AAI Awards. He is a director of O�Mahony Pike Architects, Urban Designers & Interior Designers. Their recently completed housing project at Charlotte Quay was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Prize. Currently preparing Development Plans for four towns, and Action Plans for the extensions of fourteen towns, he is also chairman of the RIAI Housing Task Force.