Making sense of public spaces

URBAN PLANNING:Ireland's public spaces could be so much better. We should look to the French city of Lyon for guidance, writes FRANK McDONALD

PUBLIC SPACE – DO we even know what it is, never mind how to treat it with care and respect? Too many of us show nothing but contempt for it by casually littering streets and squares, daubing anything upright with graffiti and using nooks and crannies as handy pissoirs (men only, mostly).

Our local authorities don’t seem to know how to make good public spaces, or what to do with them. Take Navan, for example. The town council spent more than €5 million creating a “civic space” opposite the shopping centre on Kennedy Road, designed by Paul Keogh Architects.

Previously a surface car park, it was turned into a plaza paved in granite and limestone, with architectural light fittings, trees, stone seats, park benches, sculpture and limited parking. Shockingly, not long after all this was done, it became a parking zone for more than 120 cars.

What’s happening in Dublin’s Smithfield is another poor advertisement for civic design. This great public space was likened in the past to Rome’s Piazza Navona, but this was true only in terms of its dimensions. Otherwise, it bears no relationship, and latest works will make it worse.

The gas braziers atop 12 chunky galvanised steel masts are being retained, although they haven’t been lit for years. Green areas have been introduced, disrupting the broad expanse of street setts, as well as spherical bollards, trees in tubs and other obstacles to the controversial horse fair. It’s a mess.

High standards of design and finish were achieved in both Henry and O’Connell Streets. Now Grafton Street desperately needs to be re-done, to get rid of the tacky combination of dyed red concrete bricks, narrow strips of granite and ceramic tiles, all of which are in disrepair.

Dublin City Council plans to replace them with new paving “drawn in the main from a palette of grey and pink granite”. The granite has not yet been sourced “but given the quantities required, it is likely that a supplier outside Ireland will need to be identified”, a spokeswoman said.

Recently, the short stretch of Fade Street in Dublin 2 was re-ordered in bargain-basement fashion for €115,000. Apart from attractive new lamp standards topped by finials of blue light, the scheme has no coherence. Widened footpaths are done in a resin-bonded aggregate, with granite kerbstones left in the middle. It features hornbeam trees in giant planters, a plethora of stainless steel bollards, randomly placed cubes of polished limestone aggregate, “designer” bicycle stands (what was wrong with using the standard stainless-steel version?) and concrete drains and kerbs.

Described by the city council as “a pilot improvement scheme designed to improve the pedestrian environment”, it maintains access to traffic on a carriageway that’s been remade as a chicane – a highly incongruous feature in a part of the city characterised by its largely rectilinear grid of streets.

The overall standard of this “pilot project” is so poor that it calls into question the council’s commitment to “develop a standard of public realm benefiting our capital city make the most of every opportunity to ensure quality is delivered,” in the words of city manager John Tierney.

Its Public Realm Strategy notes that “there has been a proliferation of street furniture, signage and other forms of street clutter in recent years [which has] negatively affected the accessibility of spaces and their visual quality”, and says this clutter should be removed. The same could be said about Fade Street.

If Dublin City Council, or any of the other local authorities, want to see what great public spaces are like, they should go to Lyon. France’s second-largest city has not only emulated Paris in improving its public realm, but even surpassed the capital in the quality of what’s been achieved.

Take Place des Célestins. Right in front of the Garnier Opera-like Théâtre des Célestins, it is “paved” in slatted timber and fringed by railed areas containing shrubs, trees and stone-flagged paths. And, like every other square in Lyon, its re-ordering included the installation of an underground car park.

The car park goes to a depth of seven storeys, arranged around a cylindrical void you can peer into from a periscope on the surface. From here you see a giant rotating mirror at the base that disperses light. No wonder it’s been ranked as one of the world’s 10 coolest car parks.

Place de la République, a mid-19th century creation obviously inspired by Baron Haussmann’s remaking of Paris, has a vast underground car park, where cars are restricted to a single narrow lane flanked by steel bollards. Its centrepiece is a long rectangular pool with multiple water jets.

People sit languidly around the pool on sunny days, to the soothing sound of gushing water. And, unlike the very few fountains we have in Dublin, notably the one in College Green in front of Edward Delaney’s leaden statue of Thomas Davis, there is no sign of anyone dumping washing-up liquid in the water to make suds.

College Green, of course, “retains a magnetic attraction and claims a major role in our most important civic occasions”, as Dublin City Council’s Public Realm Strategy says, adding that consideration of future proposals for this premier civic space “must include a range of more appropriate uses for the Bank of Ireland”.

The seat of the Irish Parliament during Dublin’s 18th-century golden age, this is one of the few historic buildings in the city that’s well lit – the others being Custom House and the Four Courts. The floodlighting of Trinity College is harshly white and its façade is partially obscured by a clump of plane trees.

Here, again, we could learn lessons from Lyon. Whether it’s the Fourvière basilica, perched on a hill above the River Saône; the Hôtel de Ville on largely pedestrianised Place des Terreaux; or the palatial university buildings along the Rhône, Lyon has a reputation for the illumination of its buildings and statues.

The most successful floodlighting of a statue in Dublin is Edward Delaney’s Wolfe Tone at the northeast corner of St Stephen’s Green, against the backdrop of standing stones (hence its nickname of “Tonehenge”).

Seen at night, the statue casts shadows on the granite monoliths, giving it an eerie quality that should captivate passersby.

As for the Bank of Ireland in College Green, Minister for Arts and Heritage Jimmy Deenihan is considering possible uses – on the assumption that the bank will agree to cede this immensely important historic building to the State, in return for having been bailed out by Irish taxpayers. After all, it once belonged to the State.

Labour Party TD Aodhán Ó Ríordáin said it would make an ideal location for Dublin City Library, currently holed up in the Ilac Shopping Centre. “The fact that the city of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Stoker and Wilde does not have an iconic site for a city library is a matter of shame,” he says. Such a proposal needs to be pursued in tandem with plans to re-establish College Green as the truly great civic space it once was, rather than merely a through-route for traffic.

In Lyon, by the way, the municipal authorities agreed to move a huge fountain from the middle of Place des Terreaux to one side, when the square was redesigned by architect Christian Drevet in 1994, to accommodate another underground car park and 69 water jets.

Anything is possible with a clear vision and the will to achieve it. As former mayor of Barcelona Pasqual Maragall once said, his own city “sought her future by improvement of her urban quality. The trick was quality first and quality second – a network of plazas, parks and buildings was the cause of our success.”