Philip Lawton on Why Cities Need Connected Thinking And Planning To Work
“There is a resistance to develop large scale social housing but there’s no resistance in terms of allowing these private developments to be only private housing - so that, for me, is quite problematic.”
Dr Philip Lawton is Assistant Professor of Geography at Trinity College Dublin and someone with a keen interest in shaping sustainable cities and towns. His work has explored the impact of gentrification, the tension between commerce and citizens and the developing model of new urban towns like Adamstown, home to 25,000 people in west Dublin.
Helen Shaw catches up with Philip for This is Where We Live to chat about cities at the junction where Pearse Street meets Trinity College Dublin and they wandered through a campus which dates back over 400 years but which, like Dublin itself, is constantly reinventing itself.
You can find out more about Philip Lawton's research work at:
phillawton.wordpress.com/
www.tcd.ie/research/profiles/?profile=lawtontp
Uneven development, suburban futures and the urban region: The case of an Irish ‘sustainable new town’: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…69776417694679
The Repackaging of Dublin: The Relevance of the ‘Urban Growth Machine’?
www.researchgate.net/publication/32…wth_Machine%27
And you can find him on twitter @PhilLawton
Transcript: Dr. Philip Lawton on Why Cities Need Connected Thinking & Planning to Work
There is a kind of a resistance to develop large scale social housing, but there's no resistance in terms of allowing these private developments to be only private housing. So that's for me quite problematic.
That's Philip Lawton and he's an assistant professor of geography at Trinity College, Dublin, and someone with a keen interest in the political economy of cities and urban development. Philip's work has looked at the impact of gentrification, the tension between commerce and citizens, and he's explored the model for Dublin's new urban towns like Adamstown in the west of the city.
I'm Helen Shaw and you're listening to This is Where We Live. A podcast series about how we shape and create great places to live and why housing has become such a breakpoint issue for cities today, particularly here in Ireland. So to chat about these things, I met up with Phillip at Pearse Street where the city meets Trinity College and where TCD is now building a new wing. And we wandered into a campus that dates back over 400 years. But much like the city keeps reinventing itself.
So where we are now, we're in Trinity College, Dublin. It's one of those beautiful buildings, in a sense, a campus within the city. The whole of Dublin and its story is around these buildings. And yet we've cranes above us with building happening everywhere across Pearse Street and the city. The Trinity itself is expanding and growing. I mean, when you look at Trinity College, Dublin, it really has that aspect of telling us the story about the city as well as what's happening now within the development of it and these multiplicity of cranes that hang over every part of the sky at the moment.
Yeah, I suppose in terms of the university, for me as a place, one of the things that I like about it is and I try to draw upon it in my teaching is that the minute you walk out the door, you've got an incredibly diverse and complex social environment surrounding you. And so yeah, on the campuses is very interesting and it's very unique. And, you know, you can look at the planning and the layers and that's something that interests me, interested in the various different architectural layers and the way in which it's come together over time. But probably what I'm interested in more is, is that you go different directions from the campus and you end up in very, very different environments. So you go up to Grafton street and you know well-known as a kind of a central retail space. At the moment, you can see the significant changes in terms of the current manifestation of investment. You can see this on Dawson Street. You know, the transformation is quite incredible. It's it's it's becoming almost unrecognizable compared to four or five years ago in terms of the new developments. And the bottom is about to be redeveloped as well. But then go on to Pearse Street and you see a very, very different sort of space again. So these are things that, you know, I think I've drawn upon in terms of my research. You know, particularly recently in terms of looking at some of the development hoardings around, Dawson Street. And what story they're telling about the the transformation of the city. So a little bit more detailed ... there's kind of a tendency for the new development there to take on a notion of the history. And it's a little bit of a kind of a mythologizing of the history of the space and try to push that as a means of literally selling office space, whereas you go down Pearse Street and beyond and you see this really interesting social layering in terms of the groups of people who've been there for a prolonged period of time and carried out research a number of years ago with National Economic and Social Council. And it was fascinating to hear local community representatives talking about the fight to maintain social housing within within that area and and how difficult that was in the context of a rapidly globalizing city. And that transformation is happening in terms of the Docklands, for example.
So because that is what's fascinating, as I say, Trinity, with all its history, it's privilege, because while things have changed for many of us in Dublin, it still represents that past when it was more for the elite than for the every man. And we're on a curve here with Pearse Street where the building is happening. And many of the communities there are on the other side of the river where working class, the Docklands, the cottages, we still have social housing on both sides of the river. And yet one of the things that you've been looking at in a lot of your work is what happens when development pushes out some of the pre-existing communities. In a sense, we've seen that in the Docklands and we're seeing it in lots of areas now as well. And often there isn't that capacity for them to go back and rebuild. Things are broken which can't be reformed again. And in some ways, that brings us to the heart of your work, which is what is a city and what makes a city sustainable, a good place to live and to work. Have you a sense about now about what you would describe as a good working city?
Well, there's the typical kind of academic answer to that, I think is how you define good. But I think you have to have something that's inclusive. And that's one of the big challenges, I think. And, you know, in the context of the types of development going back to the boom years that were happening and granted there was part 5, which was supposed to supposedly to provide certain amount of social and affordable housing and in certain places it did. And actually, ironically, the Docklands sort of stands out in that regard. But there was some really serious failures there as well. But the real challenge at the moment, you know, and you can see this and it's coming out of newspapers, you know, on a weekly basis. Now, is that essentially the manoeuvring to get social housing taken away from certain developments in the Docklands.. And so there's a very real.
We've talked about Kennedy Wilson. At the docks where we have, I think, a 22 storey tower, you know, just four private apartments. Rental only. Yeah. And their part five is being placed in Rialto.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's you know, and so the government, for example, talk about not ghettoizing, but at the same time some of the jokes was real kind of politique of this is that there's a push, you know, that these developers are calling the shots to a very large extent. Now, the part five policy, it's not ideal, you know, that. The reality is, is that the state needs to start developing housing and then you get into a kind of a tricky argument where there might be a pushback against and there has been a pushback against the delivery of state ising because there is a tendency within Irish media to use the word ghettoisation and a very loose manner without a real understanding of it from a social perspective. And so sometimes I think the debate can be pushed out in these kind of binary terms, if you see what I mean. But if we have a policy that says such, we should have a certain amount, a social mix through Part 5. Well, then what needs to happen. And the problem at the moment is, is that it really isn't happening in a lot of circumstances are not that that's problematic because it is pushing. You know, it is essentially ghettoizing the wealthy in a sense, you know, and it's allowing these enclaves to be developed, whether it be in the Docklands are in, you know, near where I live. You can see this happening in terms of ..
where do you live now?
Sorry. And in Dun Laoghaire and, you can see an up to the outer edges, let's say, of kind of Rathmichael, places like that. You see these high end types of housing that are being built. And there's no question whether there should be social housing in there from a government perspective. These are just being allowed to be developed very small complexes. But when you add these all up together, it's quite significant in terms of developing a very sort of exclusive space in the site part of the city at the moment. So so there's a sort of a duality, I suppose, where there is a kind of a resistance to develop large scale social housing, but there's no resistance in terms of allowing these private developments to be only private housing. So for me, quite problematic.
Philip, tell me a bit about your background. Where was home for you and why did you grow up?
So I grew up in Dun Laoghaire town, an avenue called Charlemont Avenue. And so it's to the north, to St. Michael's Hospital, just essentially down from the main street. And it's an a block that's bounded by a place called Georges Place, Charlemont Avenue, Crofton Avenue, Kellie's Avenue. And yeah, growing up there, I suppose for me, I really think it had a huge influence in terms of what I did in the decisions around what I did and the interests that I took.
It was an area that was mixed in terms of a mix of different uses. You had it was residential, but then also kind of very traditional kind of pub on the corner called McKenna's. At that time, there was an office block just up the way from us and then obviously bounded by the hospital as well, then down the way a place that we called the structure. But then subsequently I found out it was the destructor as in the waste destructor. So you had these old environmental kind of uses as well. And the fire brigade station as well, which has moved subsequently, it was also quite socially mixed. I mean, I suppose I typified, you know, in retrospect, my parents coming from Cork and Waterford respectively typified the kind of early gentrifier in a sense, you know, that we moved into an area where it had been for fairly prolonged period of time. The houses had been owned by one family and quite a lot of kind of inheritance you inter-generational housing setups. So we were quite different in terms of our arrival us than a few of the families. but Yeah. You know, during that time of the 1980s playing on the street, it's obviously very difficult now in terms of cars and so on.
It was kind of the done thing and that was quite different, I think from a lot of my my friends, you know, in school who would have probably grown up in what you would have seen as more typical suburban environments that kind of feel of the space and the context of the space was quite unique for me. Anyway, to put it in perspective, in kind of the late 1980s, there was a group of older children, you know, it was their teenagers at the time with a skateboard half-pipe in their back garden and just up the road, you know, and I think that was for me anyway, probably quite unique for the time.
So yeah, most of us are living in cities and increasingly as we move forward, you know, we're looking at a figure where I think it's going further to 75 to 80 percent in cities. So it really matters for us as humanity as to how we make it work and make it a sustainable environment. But what are the challenges in some ways and in the work you're doing and the work that's coming as across the world on this, it's also pointed to some of the trends. I mean, what are the challenges facing cities?
Well, I think in terms of the work that I've done, you know, I always tried to frame it within what I would summarise as a kind of a political economy framework. And that terminology in a way is is useful. So, you know, this sort of notion that's been around within geography and sociology for quite a long time now of the urban growth machine. And that's, you know, where the growth of cities is driven largely by very powerful interests and on a local level. And that's, I suppose, where the theory originally revolved around whether it be owners of shopping centres, owners of car parks, developers, whatever it might be. But but increasingly what we're seeing is, is that these groups and individuals can be from anywhere. And this is where the terrain is kind of tricky because it becomes more and more abstract as to where the ownership, to put it simply, the ownership of of urban space and who actually gets to control urban space.
Who the city is for
Well yeah but but from that then you can draw from that as the city is for because if you look at the trajectories. Increasingly because because the labour market is changing and because people are moving in and out of cities quicker. There's an assumption around that of course, but there is to a degree a tendency within that creative workers and so on that there's a push more towards rental accommodation and then. You have individuals, groups who are driving the rental accommodation, the owners whom Kennedy, Wilson and so on. Fundamentally, that's about profit making. And so that's that for me is the key issue, because if you've got actors like that who, whether it be overtly are or otherwise are really driving, I wouldn't call it policy, but it's a de facto policy in terms of how the city is being molded. Docklands is an exemplar of that, of course. But you see it all around. You see it in the liberties you see it up in the north side of the city as well in terms of student housing, for example. And so where I try to differentiate is between the narratives that maybe emerged through planning and design and so on around urbanism and that there is a desire for a better quality of life. There's a desire to improve areas that have been derelict or have been vacant for a prolonged period of time. And maybe unsurprisingly, there's celebration around a new space that has been developed. But we don't take a step back enough to ask the bigger picture questions of, well, what is this being developed for? And it gets into this binary thing of people say, well, we don't need the student housing here. And then the kind of counters that as well students need housing, the type of housing that's been developed within the student accommodation isn't for the types of students. And Trinity, UCD, DIT, or DU Dublin I should say, or wherever it might be. You know, so there are question marks there about why this is the type of development that's being pushed and planning for me. And I'm very careful about how I critique planning because planning can't really control those issues. This has to be done at a more macro level from a governance policy.
A policy?
Yeah,
Because one of the challenges in student housing and I used to work for many years on Thomas Street had the digital hub. And there's a beautiful building which has been built there. And they've restored the facade on Thomas Street, which is student housing. But it was kind of shocked to discover, you know, last winter that there isn't one Irish resident student in that building. They're all. When we checked that they were all overseas students, mostly American. And in some ways, you know, you're kind of caught in this bind where, yes, students need housing. But these tax break buildings, which actually are facilitating universities like Trinity to expand their own economy by taking in more overseas students.
Well, that's the thing. And the university is very much intertwined with these forces. And then the language here becomes kind of important because it's not the fault of the international students that they are, you know, happened to be living in the same place. But then when we take a closer reading of it, it is problematic that the type of housing that has been built isn't actually really solving student housing issues. And so all it's doing is adding another layer to what is a complex issue.
And within that, in looking at Dublin and particularly, say within the city, we've heard some figures quite recently from the CSO about house building and new dwellings. And at one level, the government was very happy with these figures because it was showing a 25 percent increase year on year in new bills. What was quite interesting when you looked at where the new builds were where I spend quite a lot of time around Drogheda at that line between County Meath and County Louth, a huge chunk of our new bills, I mean, county Meath. Yeah. Using when you look at some of the best agricultural land in the country. And again, when you looked at who was occupying those houses, most of them were going to be commuting into Dublin.
Yeah. Now, this is this is the real challenge, I think. And this is where try to think where to start with this. But this is our questions of density. Start to arise
Why I raised it, I suppose, it was to bring you to something that you wrote when you started to look at this and you're looking at what happened after the 1990s. And you looked at the trends in housing that were were very particular in terms of Dublin in Ireland, was that we sprawled on our sprawl, wasn't just suburbia, which is how we often think about what happened with the development of Whitehall, where I come from, or I live close to Cabra. They're suburbs.
But what happened from the 1990s onwards was that they became County leap's Kildare and Meath, Wicklow. Any of our surrounding counties became satellite sub towns to Dublin.
I mean, the big thing for me here in terms of trying to analyze this is the question of governance. And as you saw in a lot of my work has tried to think about and look at what's referred to as policy transfer in policy mobility is one of the arguments that I put forward. It is as such there's a tendency in Ireland to draw upon other places as reference points and then to try and transfer them into already existing local governance structures. And we've very weak regional governance structure doesn't really have any power in terms of what it can achieve. So the reality in terms what emerges. Just to touch upon one example, that of Adamstown, you know, as such, when we have what are, you know, at face value, very, very well-designed and very potentially good quality, livable spaces such as Adamstown. The problem lies in terms of the delivery.
Philip, you've looked specifically at an area that was planned. it's a huge new area. And in County Dublin, which is Adamstown. What was your finding there?
So it's an area on the train line. It's in Lucan just to the west of Dublin. The ambition there was for, you know, what was could be referred to as a new town, a sustainable new town. It was to be higher density, a mix of apartments, houses with it, with a new town centre, with a focal point around the train station. The ambition is for approximately 10000 homes, around 25000 people. Originally, it was designated in 2003. It was hit by the crash. And talking to one of the planners who described the crash as a tsunami, and I thought it was a really great way of trying to describe the crash because he spoke about how they had to battle against the dominance of this semi-detached suburban dwelling, for example. And so in terms of the planning, in terms of the design, there's a massive amount of attributes that are very positive there. And that's why I tried to focus on these kind of questions around governance, because it was set up to fail in a way because it was trying to bring in a physical mould. What I'm trying to say is there's nothing wrong with the model of Adamstown itself, with the planning of the streets, with the desire for higher densities, with the desire to put something around a train station. But the problem is, is that we can't just look at these as single, single entities. We have to try and understand them in the context, their broader context. And so it's not that they were necessarily set up to fail, but that they were put in place at the same time as allowing other developments to continue. And that's a that's a governance issue. And the problem there is, is that because private actors, private market has been so dominant, that therefore, from the perspective of our existing political structure, it's almost impossible for that not to happen. There's almost an assumption or an expectation that the private market is what's going to deliver predominantly
And in the private market will dominate.
Exactly. But the problem with that is, is that in the context of our governance structure, in the context of a very weak regional governance structure, that's almost an impossibility. It can't happen. And so what? From a politics perspective, I would argue a policy perspective more precisely. There should be a much stronger remit in terms of regional governments where the four local authorities, for starters, are brought together, where other surrounding counties are brought in together as well, and that there is a really strong understanding of what is happening, where and why it should be happening within that location. And so whilst Cherrywood is happening at the moment and you have Adamstown coming back on stream that these are at face value, very, very good developments. The problem is, is what's happening elsewhere. At the same time,
they're not connected.
No, not connected. Exactly. So in terms of Adamstown, you know, just to be clear, when you go to Adamstown and it is the types of development that have actually been built, there are very high quality. And, you know, it's it's a mix of different densities. It has really good green spaces, really good play facilities. So the problem with Adamstown is its mode of delivery. And so when a planner kind of pushed back against me a few years ago at a at a conference where I was critiquing it, and he said, well, these things will be delivered. My reply to that is, well, it's not good enough to watch children go through 10 years or so and that they're doing their running races on an on a piece of road beside the train station. If we make these plans, we have to find mechanisms in which they can actually be delivered and we have to reflect and try to understand. But these can't be and this is not individual developers' faults. This is this is the bigger thing. This is the processes that are at work. And this is allowing these types of processes to become the way in which we supposedly implement our plans.
So, Philip, I've been asking everyone I talked to if they had the ear of the minister of local authorities, if they had the opportunity to give someone a short shopping list and say what they need to see happen. What would you say
The the big thing for me is as a regional governance structure, a proper, decent regional governance structure that has proper control over various different dimensions of the development of the Dublin urban region and other.
I should also emphasize other urban regions as well. And so to control and to regulate these sprawling environments in a way that makes them much more livable. And if you control that macro scale, that larger regional scale, and you actually then have greater joined up thinking between different bodies throughout the region, a different sub scales, you will find that you would have and you would not quickly. But, you know, over a number of years, you would start to see real progress being made in terms of actually balanced regional development. So that would be my key thing I think.
And that's Dr. Philip Lawton of Trinity College, Dublin, making the case for connected regional thinking and planning in our cities. As an aside, Philip likes to use film when he's teaching students about the politics of place. So movies like The Commitments can give a 20 year old today a sense of where Dublin's come from. Thanks for listening to This is where we live. If you like the idea of what we're doing, then do share the podcasts. Take a minute to write and review us online and go to our Web site. This is where we lived at IYI and check out some of the resources there. We'd love if you consider to become a supporter of the series were independent. We need your support. So click on the supporters button on the website. And if you'd like to get in touch and tell us your story, use the contact us button on the site. We'd love to hear from you. Talk to you soon.