A leading urban planner who gained notoriety last year when he described Galway city as looking “like mouth full of broken teeth” has returned, and his dental diagnosis is not good.
The former architect behind the celebrated urban revival of Freiburg in Germany, Professor Wulf Daseking, used scathing language to describe Galway city where “nothing has changed since I last visited; even the same broken boats are sitting in the same places in the Claddagh,” he told attendees at a two-day urban planning conference held in the city last week.
The London-based Academy of Urbanism (AoU ) partnered with the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland (RIAI ) to stage an event called ‘The Lifelong Neighbourhood: Planning, Designing and Delivering the 21st Century Neighbourhood’ attended by hundreds of urban experts.
Daseking saved his harshest criticism for Woodquay, a city centre neighbourhood which featured prominently at the gathering of civic experts, and an historic victim of urban sprawl as central neighbourhoods were hollowed out to populate new suburbs.
“Woodquay is a place where people park cars, even though it is the ‘face’ of your city. You use a former market place for people to park their cars in who left the city to live outside it, to now come and visit it?” Daseking suggested a shuttlebus would eliminate this carpark eyesore immediately.
“Stop sprawling outside your city, it will bring you more problems than you can imagine,” said the urban planner who illustrated his talk with a slide that read: ‘The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten’.
Daseking praised Galway city council staff who helped facilitate the urban planning event, and described local authority planning as “like swimming in a basin of sharks”. However he said elected mayors for Irish cities need strong executive powers in relation to long-term city development to overcome vestiges of the old British imperial system as embodied by local authority chief executives.
Another ‘rock star’ of European urban design speaking at the event was civil engineer Professor Wout van der Toorn Vrijthoff of Delf University. He calculated that an investment of €2bn drawn down from available European funds to plan and build a dense development of hundreds of 45sqm apartments, each with a monthly rent of €650, could solve a huge proportion of the city’s housing crisis for younger people.
Galway City Council senior executive architect Emmet Humphreys raised housing for the elderly. He quoted an analysis of Dublin where over 90 per cent of over 65-year-olds live in ‘under occupied’ homes. He advised against ‘down sizing’ or ‘right sizing’, instead arguing for specifically designed “quality alternatives”.
