Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi, Rick. I'm Tony Reddy. I'm a director of Reddy Architecture and Urbanism, an international firm headquartered in Dublin. We're 270 people and we work in pretty well all building sectors, but residential would be a particular area of interest.

Speaker 2: 0:16

Tony, thanks very much for coming on, and we've wanted to do this for a long time. I remember I don't know was it last year that I was in your office, Maybe it was the year before it's a bit more, I think yeah. Yeah, but I went to your office because you were at the forefront at the time of talking about this compact growth settlement. So that was more than it was more than two years ago.

Speaker 1: 0:38

No, it was introduced in January of 2024, but that was after quite a significant campaign.

Speaker 2: 0:45

So you were helping spearhead that as part of With a number of colleagues, particularly in the profession. Yeah, okay, so we've had architects on before. We've had one. Well, actually, technically, brian Morin's an architect, so he counts. So you're the third in that case, and John Dobbin was on here before, but it's a while ago. So for any new listeners, you might just explain what it is that you do, because you're you guys are not I want to build a bungalow out and you know, tim holey, I'm not coming to you for that. What is it? The things that you're that you're focused on now?

Speaker 1: 1:23

your career might have started with that, but the reality, designing an, designing an individual house is quite a personal journey and it takes a lot of time. So it's not something that's easily delegated to juniors. So over the years our practice has grown. We began to do groups of housing way back in 1982, small town housing, infill schemes. But as the years have gone on we grew and we've been involved in some very major regeneration projects in Temple Bar, in places like Patrick Street. In the early 90s we grew significantly and our projects grew significantly. And then we had the crash in 2008. At that point in time we had offices around Europe.

Speaker 1: 2:11

I actually decided, ironically, that our skill sets probably were best set in London, where I hadn't practiced previously. I practiced in New York but I actually felt we had certain particularly master planning and urban design skills and I was involved in the Academy of Urbanism in London. So at a time when there wasn't much happening, we set up a base there and it took a while. It took about a year, but gradually we began to get appointments. Year, but gradually we began to get appointments and I think what had happened the profession in in britain was it becomes so, uh, inflated that one particular client came to us that he had four architects in the job one to get planning permission, because the people knew the planners. Another to uh replan it to make it commercial. Another one then to do working drawings and finally an interior designer. So it was probably a good time to come to that. A lot of people had lost their skills. They were very specialists and the whole industry had been blown apart.

Speaker 2: 3:18

God, that's crazy that it would have ended up that way. So it was very fortunate, but we were very lucky.

Speaker 1: 3:25

We were lucky to work with Ballymore early on, then we won Barclay and now we work with Galliard, mount Anvil, barrett's, lots of UK very major PLCs and that kept us alive until what? 2015, when there was the slightest signal of growth occurring back home.

Speaker 2: 3:52

Yeah, and now would half of your business be outside Ireland.

Speaker 1: 3:58

About 40%, about 40%, and we've made a decision to make sure, even though now we're very busy in Ireland, we've actually made a decision to be international and actually it's been very good for the firm, because we find we've people in Portugal, in London, in other offices actually working on projects in Dublin and vice versa, and so we're building up a wider range of skills and you're bringing in different viewpoints.

Speaker 2: 4:25

Yeah, and that's something that we're going to ask you about in a little bit. So you've been at this a long time. You mentioned it that you practiced in New York. How did you end up? Did you always want to be an architect? How did that happen?

Speaker 1: 4:39

No one has asked me that for a long time, but I can remember deciding at about the age of 15, I really liked it.

Speaker 2: 4:45

Oh, at that young okay.

Speaker 1: 4:46

Yeah, and I was very single-minded. So I was very fortunate that I got a job with Scott Talon Walker the year I left school and Neil Scott, who's a very good friend of mine, gave me a job and I worked for a while in the office. But he actually gave me the best advice ever at that young age. He said look, you'll learn more on a billing site. So the RTE radio building was being built and he was the project architect and I was sent out there and the guys looked at me and said you're going to be useless on a billing site.

Speaker 1: 5:19

So they taught me how to survey and I could do it easily. So they kept me on even in my first year in university. So I learned a lot about buildings and I realized, and even I went back the following summer. So I learned a lot early in my career about building and that led me to a very unusual situation about building. And that led me to a very unusual situation when I did go to America.

Speaker 1: 5:48

I had actually included some drawings from the radio building that I'd worked on and the address was Donnybrook, dublin 4. And I wrote to all these very famous architects in New York it was kind of naive six months before I went there and ironically it was after the oil crisis they all offered me interviews. The people in San Francisco actually said, wrote me lovely letters back saying we love Ireland but do not come to San Francisco. It's disastrous for architects. But New York was beginning to just come out. So I got all these interviews. I mean, when I look back, in the present era architects would not get to talk to principals in an architectural firm, but they probably had time on their hands. And the reason I mentioned the Donnybrook drawing the architect John Johanson who designed the American Embassy.

Speaker 1: 6:39

He gave me an interview. He had no work but he was interested in meeting someone from Ireland because he told me the whole story of the American Embassy Project. But he said the name Donnybrook brought back so many memories that he just wanted to meet someone from Ireland. But he took the list. He asked me who I was being interviewed by and he went through the list of six people and he actually gave me a rating on each of them.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Like I got an interview with Skidmore, owings and Merrill, with the principal, gordon Bunshaft, and he had a tough guy to work. But he went through them all. But eventually he came to Paul Rudolph who had been the professor at Yale. He said Yale, he had been in college, in Harvard with Rudolph. He said if Rudolph offered up, that's the one go for that and I. Then I went to Kevin Roach of Roach, dinkloo and Irish American and he had had a bad experience with Irish staff and the time I came there they were doing competition. So he was quite grumpy. He'd agreed to the interview some months before but he said look, he gave me a lecture about Irish people expecting a job when they came to his office Because he was Irish yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:54

And he said look, not only do I not have a job, but I wanted to see the office, because it was a famous office where they worked in model form. They had this fantastic workshop and he said he can't show you because we're in a competition and there's an NDA. We're not allowed anyone in here. It was for the American Federal Reserve Bank. They were doing the competition at the time. Did they win? They did win, but the project never. It was a very famous building down in the tip of Manhattan, but it never got built in the end. It actually influenced, ironically, the tip of Manhattan, but it never got built in the end. But it actually influenced, ironically, sam Stevenson's building in the central bank. Okay, the idea was it floated over all the other buildings, okay. So, anyway, what happened was I went to Rudolph, I got the job and all I can say is it was a great experience. And, ironically, then Rudolph androach and another very famous actor who was also on the list, philip Johnson, the three of them.

Speaker 1: 8:53

One day Rudolf came and said to some of the senior people in the office it was quite a small office at the time, it was only 25 people said he was going to MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art and he said they're talking about a book. So he was being invited by Arthur Drexler, the chairman of the MoMA. So in the afternoon he came back to the office and all of the senior people were saying how was it, mr Rudolph, how was it? And he said it was amazing. It was like they're going to do this book on American architecture. We've been chosen as one of the architects and they're going to do this book on American architecture. We've been chosen as one of the architects. And he said I met some interesting people there Philip Johnson there but I'd never met Kevin Roach before. And I told him I had one of his fellow countrymen there and he turned around to me and said and he said tell Tony that I was asking for him and if ever he wants to drop into the office, drop in. So it was quite a change. So I stayed in Rulos.

Speaker 1: 9:48

But I contacted Kevin some months later and he was very chatty and said come into the office anytime you want. I'm sorry you couldn't see the model shop, so come up. So I went up and he told me his life story the second time around. He said where I was living in New York was where he had lived and he told me he was down and out, having worked on the UN building. But anyway, he said I'm glad you didn't get the job on me. But he said now I'm prepared to give you a job You've made your way in. So that's a long answer to your initial question Did you take the job?

Speaker 2: 10:23

I did take the job, okay. So how long did you stay in New York then?

Speaker 1: 10:26

overall, they were two separate terms.

Speaker 2: 10:28

Okay.

Speaker 1: 10:28

I went back to university and then I came back. Oh, so these were summer, yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:32

Okay, all right. Wow, new York, a very different place then.

Speaker 1: 10:36

It was a very dangerous place then yeah, there was a murder in Wow okay, yeah. And people you'd walk along the street. It was near Harlem. I lived on the Upper West Side. People would walk close to the building line because there were a lot of instances of people being killed with things being just dropped on them. Wow, yeah, gosh, it was. It was. Yeah, it's a totally different area.

Speaker 2: 11:01

Now, yeah, harlem has become like gentrified and it's starting to be a million dollars for an apartment there now. It wasn't then, no doubt.

Speaker 1: 11:12

And then I came back and worked with a Canadian company in Ireland, then with Sam Stevenson. Okay, oh, so you worked with Sam Stevenson. Oh, I did For four years.

Speaker 2: 11:20

I was lucky enough to meet him when I was a kid, because my I don't know dad knew him through somebody and I was actually at his funeral for some reason. I can't exactly remember why that was, but that was up at the back of Manchuria Square, wasn't it?

Speaker 1: 11:36

yes, it was that church I'm trying to think of the name I can't remember just off George George. I'm trying to think of the name I can't remember. Really beautiful church Just off George Street. Just off George Street.

Speaker 2: 11:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, so that's a while ago now too, of course, yeah, yeah, 2006 or 2007. Okay, so then you came back here. Did you set up on your own?

Speaker 1: 11:55

No, no, I worked with two firms Murray, a Canadian Irish firm, and then with Sam Stevenson. And then I joined a college friend of mine whose father had died, his father-in-law had died, and we practiced under the name Hope Cuff for about 18 months, but then, because of a lot of legal complications, we set up a new company. Okay, it was called Fitzgerald Ready and that existed for some time. Okay. So you've been self-employed for a long time, since 1981. 1981.

Speaker 2: 12:29

43 years. Wow 44 years. Yeah, it's a long time. A lot of mouths to feed during that time over the years.

Speaker 1: 12:36

Yeah, it's been quite a well like. I think any architectural career it's up and down, like in the nature of it's like the house building yeah, it's cyclical right. Yeah, it is um any favorite projects over the years that come to mind oh, I think one project that I particularly enjoyed doing I know it kind of represented also stepping up was temple bar. West end temple bar project had been very successful, but the the west end was where the residential sector was to be yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 13:03

And we were appointed, there had been a number of firms engaged to try and make it work and they simply hadn't managed to make it be viable. So we were brought in to both do a master plan and prove that it was viable before they would then appoint other architects. So that was really we had done some mastering. But that took us to another level. We looked at a lot of it, gave us an opportunity to really go and study in detail contemporary European models. Then we would have gone to Germany, particularly to Barcelona, where the late David Mackey, who was with MBM, gave us a lot of help with methodology on how to take that ambition.

Speaker 1: 13:54

It hadn't been done in Ireland before of doing a master plan, for I think there were five architectural firms. So we kind of designed a scheme that worked. We set part of it at height et cetera. But then, knowing that that brief worked, our brief was then divided up and a number of firms were commissioned for pieces of it and then two firms were executive architects for the entire and it was very successful. It won a lot of international awards, yeah, particularly for sustainability. It uses a lot of excess energy from the civic offices and it's a great pity, we don't do that more.

Speaker 2: 14:38

And it's a pity too that actually Tempobar nowadays is just associated with drinking and excess. Bar nowadays is just associated with drinking and excess, and it's an article in the newspaper the other day about people who live there saying that they don't feel like it's very livable anymore. But actually, what was there before? Of course, people don't remember what that replaced, which was pretty grim. Yeah well, there was some there were.

Speaker 1: 15:03

I think it was part of the plan for CIE to have a massive bus station and knock the whole area down. But ironically the short term leases that. There were a lot of very interesting bohemian businesses there. But the odd thing about Temple Bar West End I just saw recently they're going to pedestrianised Parliament Street. The residents of West End. It's much quieter. You know it has a lot of active shops but the partying doesn't go on down there. No, it doesn't really cross that one street right.

Speaker 2: 15:30

No, it doesn't cross.

Speaker 1: 15:31

But the residents I noticed were expressing concern that the effect of it might move over.

Speaker 2: 15:35

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:41

But I suppose, in answer to your question, that was like we've had many really interesting projects going on. I'm not going to. I thought that was. I had hoped it would be more of a, it would show the way for more, yeah, but it hasn't happened. But it did affect our work and it helped us win work in other areas, like particularly down in Docklands. We would have done a very major scheme in Mare Square and that in turn led us to winning many projects abroad, particularly in London, yeah, and so just, Brian, it brings us neatly to really what we're here to talk about.

Speaker 2: 16:19

So you got very good at master planning. We're not, as a country, very good at master planning, not just with housing, but with anything we come up with, sometimes lofty, very broad-based plans. Following through on them has been a bit of a challenge for us. I'm not going to go on a big lecture about housing. We all, anyone who listens to this, anyone who gets out of their own house in the morning, will know the situation that we're in. One of the complaints that's frequently aired is about the planning system, about how slow it is, how fraught with risk it is. Out of this and start having very detailed, wide scale plans put in place that dictates dictates, maybe the wrong word that sets out what the capacity of an area is, what building height should be, what the mix of things should be somewhat beyond zoning. Is that right?

Speaker 1: 17:26

Very much so I'd actually, rather than use the word, I would say we should have a vision of what our future city or neighborhoods would be, and I often say in advocating this, britain and Ireland are outliers in Europe in this regard. The Romans, the Greeks, the signories of the Italian Renaissance towns, our own White Streets, commissioners, haussmann in Paris, cerda in Barcelona, all of those cities, all of those places were planned and it's an irony that we've ended up again. I mentioned previously that Ireland and Britain were regarded in the early part of the 20th century as leaders in the new profession of town planning. But after the war, ironically, the Labour government in 1947 brought in what was called a New Towns Act and that was under some threat. Towards the end of their term, towards the 1950s, they anticipated losing power to the Tories and the moderate Tories. Moderate Labourites actually had a pact and the pact was this that the New Towns legislation would not be repealed, which was a real threat from the right wing of the Tory party. But the quid pro quo would be there'd be a discretionary planning system, which meant effectively a laissez-faire planning system, and ironically, in 50s and 60s Britain that worked and we copied it in 60s Ireland, because Ireland didn't really have a desire for planning.

Speaker 1: 19:08

De Valera famously said that the luxury of planning was something rural Ireland couldn't afford. But what has happened? As society has got more complex and as the appeal system has grown and we've moved on to judicial review, we've simply got to a point where any project of any significance, and sometimes even of minor significance, is a battleground and that does not lead to good city planning. What we really have, and really I would argue that our planning system has actually ended up in being a manifesto for sprawl, that our planners as the British planners, they write policy. The average citizen might realize. Very few Irish or British planners actually physically design and plan and indeed there will be. An element of the planning profession believes that there's no need to do that. But I think there is a growing recognition that that kind of laissez-faire attitude, taken to extremes, leads to a city that is basically determined by its road structure and not much else, and the idea of placemaking and scale and height and relationships between building is lost.

Speaker 2: 20:29

Yeah, which is really a pity, because if you do look at those other European cities, that's not how that went right. In Barcelona, they cleared away large swathes of the way it was to make it what it is now One of the, I think, nicest cities in Europe to live in, as long as you can afford it and affordability is a different, a different story. But, yeah, that is something that's poorly understood. We we hear planning department, and what that actually means is controlling plans that are made by other people right on the right side. So developers like me will hire architects like you and we'll say here, tony, here's this piece, this field or this site we want. What can we do here? And you've got to come up with a plan Correct.

Speaker 2: 21:18

We've got to spend a lot of time, a lot of money coming up with this, to go into city officials who listen I'm not criticizing them but they may have a different opinion as to what should go there, but we don't know that until we've spent all the money and time, and so this sort of back and forth ensues. That's a very good description. It is a back and forth. It's a back and forth. It's like tennis and it it's both informal and formal. When I started um work in this, when I got into development, we used to think as a rule of thumb to take, you know, six to nine months to get planning permission. The assumption now is two to three years, and getting worse actually.

Speaker 1: 22:03

And we're following British footsteps. Britain now, it can be three to four years. Yeah, there's kind of an acceptance of this.

Speaker 2: 22:09

Yeah, we were talking about that before we started recording that it people are that's just how it is right. So you build it into your model. But that's no way to be, because the world changes quicker than that. And see if you, if you're going to do things in a three or four year, planning time on your construction then takes two to three years. No matter what it is that you're building, that's the better part of a decade, and the whole world might be completely different by the time you get from one end of that process to another. So that's Ireland and the UK. That's how we do things. Talk to me about Europe. What's the difference?

Speaker 1: 22:43

Well, the big difference is that they do plan and it's pretty well all over Europe, whether it's Spain, barcelona, madrid or Lisbon, whether it's Helsinki, copenhagen, stockholm, oslo, all of those cities. The city planning department consists of urbanists, architects, planners, engineers, collectively working in teams to plan the city, and I mentioned before we began that I'm in my role as chair of the Academy of Urbanism. We were in Copenhagen and Aarhus the second city of Denmark a few years ago and we were presented with the city plan and the various parties. The political parties were all at the meeting and there were 13 of them from the ultra right to the ultra left, and we were amazed that they all considered that plan, the model, their city, and they answered us in that way. They said they were unified in the vision of the city prepared by their planners and their debate was how they ran the city. Yeah, but there was a unified vision about the physical form of the city and that didn't mean that someone couldn't have an idea that a taller building here or a different type of building there, that had to go to an alternative system, but it could happen. Yeah, that had to go to an alternative system, but it could happen. But there was a consistency for the average house builder, the average developer or perhaps the average citizen about what they had to do and there was absolute certainty. And that's consistent across Europe.

Speaker 1: 24:22

And I think what has happened in Britain and Ireland is I think we're now seeing it's ironic that we have a Planning and Development Act of 900 pages. Britain looks like the Labour government look like they're talking about abandoning their entire planning system. It's that flawed and I'm not proposing we start again with our planning system because I don't think anyone could endure another bout. But there are elements of the new Planning and Development Act which I have hope that, while they didn't take on board everything we said, the one thing they did do is they took on board the notion of urban development zones and that may, if it's taken advantage of and enacted more widely, that could be subsidiary to the development plan and give a vision for the neighborhoods. I just make a point on development plans the irony of the city we're in.

Speaker 1: 25:18

In Dublin we've a 1200 page development plan. It's entirely in text. There's a couple of maps in it but I can truly say I almost never read it except the pages that relate to a site I'm doing. I almost never read it, except the pages that relate to a site I'm doing. One can go online now to Copenhagen, to Stockholm, to Oslo, to Rotterdam, to Madrid, to Barcelona, and you can and most of them would have it in English. You can actually go to a relatively short document 100 pages that will give you a very clear idea, graphic idea, of what is planned for that city, where the new neighborhoods are going to be, where the new transportation is going to be, and it's an informative process. Ours is actually complex beyond belief and there is no attempt made to make it user-friendly.

Speaker 2: 26:10

Like you, say you wouldn't have read it. How would you have read the entire thing? And there is no attempt made to make it user-friendly. Like you say you wouldn't have read it. How would you have read the entire thing? For me, when I go on to the development plan, similarly, we're looking at some project and I've been at this a while. It's not that straightforward to read through it. No, it's referencing another map sheet and then you have to go find that, and then it's this tiny little colored thing, the gis, which is meant to have all the development plans online for every county, hasn't, um? So what hope does the average?

Speaker 2: 26:40

yeah what hope do they have? They're not going to go and read through looking at sd policy, sd1, sd4, and I'll refer to map sheet 7b. But what?

Speaker 1: 26:51

will happen is if they're involved in appeal, and this is what's happening now SD1, SD4, and I'll refer to map sheet 7B. But what will happen is if they're involved in appeal, and this is what's happening now because the system is so unsatisfactory. Lawyers end up reading this minute and finding consistencies in the plan that are completely irreconcilable, and that has led to this growth of our judicial review cases, yeah, and that's turned into an industry which we've talked about a lot here.

Speaker 2: 27:17

So UDZs they are an element of the new Planning and Development Act and they are similar to the old strategic development zones.

Speaker 1: 27:28

They are similar, but the legislation has improved it somewhat in that it's more flexible. The other thing is, which is different from the SDZs, is that it deals not just with planning, it deals with infrastructure. Okay, so my hope would be and this is a hope there's provision as well for other forms of communication. It's not mandatory, but I would be recommending to the government and to local authorities that they should take that third option in the legislation, which is that they use other means of communication, and specifically I mean CGI, three-dimensional planning. Three-dimensional planning Because I think a lot of, I think I've certainly been involved in very major urban development projects in our various Irish cities, north and south, and in the UK and in Europe, and I think one can engage much better with neighbours when one sees the totality of the project and it's no longer just flat drawings. You're seeing the actual thing?

Speaker 2: 28:30

Yeah, because flat drawings are hard to read. Even for us they're hard to read. For somebody that's not used to them, they're impossible to read. The technology has existed for a long time. Every single thing should be done in 3D.

Speaker 1: 28:41

Yeah, we had advocated in the RSC group that it'd be mandatory. Yeah, my hope would be that through the UDZs which will be for large neighbourhoods, initially for large scale areas of the city, but my hope would be you'd get down to maybe units of four or five hundred would be planned that way, yeah, and would be available then online.

Speaker 2: 29:05

So how this is going to work. Somebody's got to designate an area.

Speaker 1: 29:09

Well, the legislation has been provided for pleasantly and it wasn't on the agenda early in the year. The government has announced the minister has actually asked the local authorities to nominate their sites for UDZs. So that was a letter sent out two or three weeks ago. He's given them four months to come back with those schemes and that's quite a radical change. There's not been too much publicity about it, but I'm ever the optimist about these things. The process is that ultimately the government will determine the sites or the neighbourhoods that will be UDZs Interesting enough as a Okay, so that's an important point.

Speaker 2: 29:47

So the local authorities are asked to nominate them, but actually it's going to be the minister that picks them.

Speaker 1: 29:51

The minister will ultimately pick them, is my understanding and that will include, by the way, ida lands that the IDA campuses are covered by this Right so it's not just housing. It's not just housing, but the next phase is having designated the UDZs. The local authority then prepares, or may prepare, a master plan. That legislation is not fully clear yet and there are guidelines to come out. My sincere hope for our country's urban future would be that all of those are planned in 3D master plans.

Speaker 2: 30:27

Yeah, it would be great to do that, and I guess one of the things that's probably going to come up is the local authorities are not going to have the in-house skill sets to do some of this work. You were talking about being in Helsinki recently, and Helsinki is one of these places that is effectively planned within UDZ. They're maybe not called an UDZ, but that's how they do it, and you were telling me that the planning department over there were explaining to you that they were under a lot of pressure because they were planning for 2030. Correct?

Speaker 1: 31:08

But it was both in Helsinki and Copenhagen, which are both very similar in size to Dublin, and the first thing they told us was they had 50 UDZ equivalent plans on the go at any one time.

Speaker 1: 31:22

So they were constantly planning areas, but I was familiar. I've been there many times, but I hadn't spent a day with them. Myself and a colleague from the Our Cities group and another colleague from our practice were there. We spent a day with them, and what was fascinating was they were working on a piece of city that didn't yet exist.

Speaker 2: 31:44

It was sand, nothing was there, so this is in Helsinki, helsinki, okay, but the same story applies to Plot.

Speaker 1: 31:50

Yeah, okay, yeah, they were planning a cross section of a street, the buildings they'd already worked out the height they wanted for the buildings around us. But they were actually planning the crossover of services on that junction for the year 2030. And it was quite embarrassing when they turned to us and said you know, we're under real pressure, we're going to have to outsource to meet our program for 2030. And they turned to us and said you know, we're under real pressure, we're going to have to outsource to meet our program for 2030. And they said by the way, what year are you on? And we looked at each other and one of my colleagues said about 1900.

Speaker 1: 32:21

Yeah, God, wow.

Speaker 2: 32:23

So they're going to that level of detail. They plan cross, services, everything. So then, when that plan is adopted, presumably by a vote by local government, I'm not quite.

Speaker 1: 32:33

it's definitely adopted by a similar system to our own and, as I said to you, there doesn't seem to be the political division about it.

Speaker 1: 32:42

It's like the city planners have planned it. And one thing that's very apparent in this the reality for and you'll be familiar as well, rick most sites have unpredictable problems yes, the reality of the city as the kind of honest arbiter making a decision, you resolve all these issues, whether to keep a protected structure, whether to, you know, to make sure that the transportation works, that the drainage works, of resolving all those issues, to come up with a coherent vision, and I keep using that word coherent vision. The great cities of Europe, both past and present, including the heart of our city in Dublin, were planned in that way and that's why they're successful.

Speaker 2: 33:25

Yeah, because the other idea that you do it on a field by field or building by building basis. There can be no coherence. I mean, how could there, could there be right, unless the one person was doing all of it? Um, but that's fascinating.

Speaker 1: 33:37

So they're planning now for 2030 and then and planning, like the commitment to delivery yeah is is is very different. It's sad commentary that one doesn't have that sense of commitment to program. No, In our country or in Britain I'd say Our problem is we follow the British system slavishly. My message is we need to break away from it more.

Speaker 2: 34:03

Yeah, because it's not working there at all Okay, so they're going to plan that. So then Mr Builder comes along after that plan has been adopted, or Mrs Builder, as it may be, or they builder and the piece of land that they're going to look at to buy. They know what height the building can be, how many square feet it can be, what kind of uses can go into it, so they're able to very accurately then make their bid for the land or come up with their construction budget. And if they say, oh, actually, actually, you know, I wonder if we could get another floor onto that building because we wanted to have this much of a residential and we wanted to have a restaurant or something on the roof, they can still go to the council and say they have to go back to a process.

Speaker 2: 34:43

Yeah, Similar to our basic planning process.

Speaker 1: 34:48

An interesting story occurs to me as we talk about this, about human nature. Many years ago we had a German client who owned land in Sandiford. At the time Sandiford wasn't what was essentially an industrial estate, but we were asked to do an appraisal for this German client. They had architects and planners in Munich and we, as most architects do and as you'll be familiar with Rick we showed three options low, medium and high, because that's the way one typically does an appraisal. They were quite irritated. In correspondence they wanted a straight answer. They said in Germany we could tell precisely what the plot ratio would be, precisely what the height will be.

Speaker 2: 35:32

And we said we've no idea until we go talk to the planner.

Speaker 1: 35:35

So they insisted then to come to see the planner and it was quite a fascinating meeting. They gave the same lecture to the planner and he looked at our appraisal and said well, I agree with Tony's appraisal here. It can be this and this and this. They wanted to know the rationale for the high and he said well, I agree with Tony's appraisal here. It can be this and this and this. They wanted to know the rationale for the high and he said well, it's very simple. If you were to stay there they were kind of in a business that would be very desirable to keep there who's in manufacturing and research? He said he'd give them the highest possible plot ratio. It was something like at the time, I think four. And they were astounded. And a funny thing happened during the meeting that the phone rang and the planner had to go out, but while he was out the junior planner was with him.

Speaker 1: 36:24

The Germans were complaining about the lack of precision in the Irish planning system and the junior planner said yes, in Sandford the plan is that there is no plan. So the Germans were horrified by this. But anyway, he came back into the room and they said so, if we do this, we will get the highest amount. And this was the interesting thing about the human condition. These are the good Germans law-abiding precision, et cetera. They queried them and the managing director was German, was with us. We left the meeting then with that confirmation that if they stayed, they would get the maximum plot ratio. We went and had a coffee afterwards and the managing director, the German manager, said well, that was a very satisfactory meeting. And the three Germans who had come from Munich it was quite amazing. They looked at each other and they said it was satisfactory to an extent, but given that there was no plan, why did you stop at your maximum figure, at four, in other words?

Speaker 1: 37:25

the human condition is, they were like any other developer in a free-for-all. That's the human condition.

Speaker 2: 37:32

And I think you've actually summed it up really well there. That's what is wrong with our entire industry is that we don't know. So we go in to buy a piece of land and we say, oh, we think we could get here. So now it's about what? Can we get beyond that? Correct, because that's where the profit lies. Yeah, I mean, and that's just casino stuff and that's what's been going wrong. It's getting harder and harder to figure it out and it puts higher values on land because of that.

Speaker 1: 38:01

Yeah, it does Potential yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:03

Which may not be real, Because that's it. Land is valued on potential and if we knew what the basis of it was, it wouldn't be. It would just be value for what it is rent or X. So that's how much square footage you can build and that's the end of it.

Speaker 1: 38:15

I think there was a time when I was a young architect where there was a sense that, you know, we were beginning to build more densely, so there was a sense of an uplift. But the human condition is that we have a kind of a free for all now and, as I said, the term discretionary planning means that you have notional plans but they're almost there to be broken. And I think what's interesting is many experienced developers now would prefer a greater degree of certainty and I think local communities would definitely.

Speaker 2: 38:48

Yeah, it's better for everybody. Ok, so we'll make on certain things we'll make less money, but actually we'll have a sustainable business, Because right now, it's famine or feast, but you won't hopefully have paid too much for it to begin with.

Speaker 2: 39:00

But this is what I mean. We either end up winning the lottery or we end up losing our shirts. Those are the two. It's fairly binary, and development is a black box. It's a complete mystery and people think that we know, or people want to hold themselves out there as knowing. Reality is nobody knows right what the planning outcome is going to be, Because the planners don't know themselves. How could anyone else know? So you're an optimistic guy. You think the UDZs are going to be a big help.

Speaker 2: 39:26

You were showing me some figures earlier about how quickly potentially this could lead to.

Speaker 1: 39:33

I'm no economist and I know and it's almost, the debate is over for the next five years, government has set a course to get 300,000 houses built by 2030. Many commentators, many economists, are saying the number is too low. I tend to believe them. Many commentators, many economists are saying the number is too low. I tend to believe them. I've been making the case recently that the UDZs are our one hope of at least solving one part of our housing problem, and that is that we have plans for it. But the reality is we need economists are saying the figure is between 1.2, 1.5 million homes by 2040. It's a shocking figure. That's only 15 years away. It's only 15 years away, but that's what we need. So what that's telling us is we need we definitely need a different system to help us deliver the adoption of UDZs and doing them the way I'm suggesting of maybe where's the Irish Cities Group?

Speaker 1: 40:28

The RAI and other bodies are now saying we should be doing begin with 20 and move up to getting to the European norm of about 50 on the go.

Speaker 1: 40:36

We need 50 clumberses on the go at present to meet our targets Across the country and I know from talking to senior civil servants they're shocked at that, the only way I see us being able to do that. We won't do it if we're to the notion of expanding our existing planning departments with the types of planners we have at present, who are good people but they're essentially development controllers we're recommending and I know some of my colleagues in our profession here disagree. The scale of the challenge is so great we need to. There are a very small number of firms in this country and in Britain. It's not enough to meet the needs of Ireland. We need to hire a group of major master planners from Ireland, britain and Europe to help initially the local authorities do their plans, but then also to mentor the younger people in those planning departments to be the future planners of our cities for the rest of the 21st century, because we this is a crisis has to be gotten over, you know, as a crisis, any crisis does.

Speaker 2: 41:39

But we're all thinking about 2030 and 2040, but what about 2100,? You know 2100? What about you know all of the things that happened in Paris and Barcelona, all these places? This was all done a very, very long time ago and maybe at the time that it was being done, it probably wasn't necessary. But actually having that vision, to say, having the vision we need to build a culture of planning here at the ground.

Speaker 1: 42:05

Well, you're absolutely right. We hadn't, really I hadn't thought about this, but the thought occurs to me now that big picture planning doesn't occur in Ireland Like. I'll give you some examples. I've written recently about this in the Irish Cities book. We know that Dublin Port has advised that in 2040 it's reached its capacity. Yeah, but it is the engine for the Irish economy. We should be planning now to move Dublin Port to wherever. It doesn't really matter where it goes. We should be making that decision and that decision is probably right now a government decision.

Speaker 1: 42:40

There is no process for the Irish Port and Docks Company to do it. We're looking in Cork. We work with the Port of Cork. They own lots of land so they can move land around. Dublin Port and Docks Company doesn't have that facility and this is not anti-government port, it's allowing them to plan a future. But that would give one could have an eco community there that just extend the Lewis into it. No one would need a car. You could actually plan, like Copenhagen or like Helsinki or like Stockholm, a new piece of city that accommodates 100, 150,000 people. It would be an incredible place to live. I could go on. There are many other big picture moves that one could make when you got into that high level of thinking. I give it merely as an example, but our planning system at present does not into that high level of thinking. I give it merely as an example, but our planning system at present does not facilitate that kind of lateral thinking big picture thinking no, and that is going to be a huge, a huge.

Speaker 2: 43:40

Well, actually we're paying the price for it now. Really, let's be honest, that's why we're here. You know, people will come up with all sorts of excuses or the financial crash, or it's because we, you know, didn't do, I had underinvestment. But actually it's because we didn't have any plan. And as late as 10 years ago, we were being told that there were ghost estates and there was no one ever going to live in them. There was these thousands of houses. They were never needed.

Speaker 1: 44:03

Well, there was a truth to that in that we did again because of bad planning.

Speaker 2: 44:13

We built estates in places that were in the wrong place, and I'm not trying to excuse where those places were built, but I'm really pointing out that an idea that there would ever be too many houses for a population that was growing was, you know, severely lacking, and that was the common wisdom up until relatively recently, and so we need to move on from this way of thinking.

Speaker 1: 44:34

We very definitely need to move on, yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:36

Normally I ask people about the magic wand. I don't know if you've had a, so this is where you get to. You get a magic wand, you get to change one thing and it's like there's no one can question you. Okay, I haven't thought about this.

Speaker 1: 44:49

But I give the straight answer I would give If I could do one thing now for our country, it would actually be to change our planning system, get rid of discretionary planning and actually have a system that followed the methodologies of the Romans, the Greeks, and plan neighborhoods, plan cities properly, and for Ireland to become a nation of cities. I mean, it was interesting that Sean Mulrhyan recently put forward the notion of a new city and a new loan and we should have that ability to have that sort of vision.

Speaker 2: 45:21

Okay, so you would upend the whole thing. I know it's probably not feasible, but pull it right back, get rid of it altogether and say, okay, from now on we're going to have plans put in place for every single urban centre and that plan is going to be 15 years and it's going to be renewed every five years. It's going on a rolling basis forever and our planners would be planning, yeah, and then you'd have development control officers and then focus on creating beautiful places, beautiful streets, beautiful squares, beautiful parks.

Speaker 2: 45:50

Yeah, if you've read a book recently that you like, that you care to recommend.

Speaker 1: 45:54

Yeah, interesting enough, I happened to reread two books recently Jane Jacobs, the Life and Death of Great American Cities. I hadn't read it for about 30 years.

Speaker 2: 46:05

Okay. And it's a great read, I mean it's like if you're passionate about, so your bookshelf is heavily focused on.

Speaker 1: 46:13

My wife points out to me my bookshelf is too heavily focused on cities.

Speaker 2: 46:19

The life and death of the American city. Yeah, the life and death of the great American city. The great American city. I was going to put that on my list because I recently read a book called the Wilderness Most Immense and it was about the Louisiana purchase agreement. It's absolutely fascinating Because when I had grown up with the Louisiana purchase I would have thought it's like the state of Louisiana, but in fact it was half the continental United States that was purchased for the equivalent of about three cents an acre when France needed money, and it's an absolutely brilliant book.

Speaker 2: 46:49

It's out of print but you can get secondhand copies some places. I must get that, yeah.

Speaker 1: 46:54

I'll get you a copy of it, tony because it's a wild story. I was in New Orleans earlier this year actually, yeah, and it's a part of America that kind of is forgotten now very much, yeah, and there's a city, actually, because American cities are notorious, but New Orleans is planned, very planned, yeah, the centre, the old part of the city is very planned and very beautiful.

Speaker 2: 47:17

That's a fantastic place.

Speaker 1: 47:18

Some of the suburbs are quite planned, which I didn't know until this year.

Speaker 2: 47:21

I found it amazing being around there, you hear some people speaking French still in New Orleans, which is a wild with a very heavy Southern accent, but still French it is. So well, listen, tony, I really appreciate that. You've taught me a lot in today just about about UDZs, and I think a reason to be hopeful that the government will take this opportunity, because it is probably a generational chance that exists now to get rid of what people often criticize as developer-led planning, something that developers are actually no real interest in doing but are forced into doing because of the nature of the planning system and, like you say, to make, make beautiful places that people can live. And you know you start doing that. You start reducing cost.

Speaker 2: 48:05

Everyone's talking about cost. A lot of the cost is time wasted and uncertainty and that cost going away. That's going to make things cheaper, drive greater competition for everybody. So I think it's a very beneficial thing and I want to thank you and your colleagues for the work that you've been doing and lobbying for these changes to be made, because they're overwhelmingly positive for the industry. They're overwhelmingly positive for the citizens and people often don't get thanked for these things. So I just want to say thank you, because if it wasn't for people like you, we would be absolutely and utterly screwed. So now we have a little glimmer of hope and something that I'm Thank you.

Speaker 1: 48:43

I think I share this view with my colleagues. I think most architects are positive and we're positive for our city and we're forever trying to make it better. Yeah, you definitely are. It's a privilege to have the opportunities I've had. Well, that's great, okay, thanks.

Speaker 2: 48:57

Thanks. The Build is produced by Carrie Fernandez and me, Rick Larkin. Music is by Cass.