Getting their act together - to make cities work better

You can call it 'spatial organisation', 'urban design' or just designing better cities: the best way to do it right is to get architects, planners, surveyors and engineers working together, Alan Mee tells Emma Cullinan

WHEN French transport executives came to Ireland some years ago to discuss the proposed Luas, they were surprised at the consultation process here, remembers architect Alan Mee. "They'd say: 'Okay, first we go and meet the planning officer in one building. Then we go over to the other side of the city and meet the guy who runs the big fat trains.

"Then we go to the office where we meet the guys who run the wee trains. Then we've got to go and meet the roads authority because they control bits of the road, although not other bits. Then we've got to go to meet the Minister of Transport.'

"They asked, 'how can we possibly be expected, in the three days we are spending in Dublin per week, to get through all these people who all think they're running the thing?'," says Mee, who is the director of the Urban Design Masters programme at University College Dublin.

Mee, who runs an architect's practice, is passionate about urban design or, as he prefers "spatial organisation", and his mission is to gather people together to improve the situation in Ireland.

With this aim, he has set up Urban Design Ireland with four others: Aine Ryan, principal planner and urban designer at Cunnane Stratton Reynolds Land Planning and Design; Dave O'Connor, senior transport planner at ILTP Consulting; Eoghan Ryan, head of planning and urban design at the National Building Agency; and Martin Colreavy, architectural and urban design advisor at the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government.

The group envisages various types of gatherings, from interested parties from all walks of life to carefully chosen groups of professionals making crucial decisions on town planning.

Planners, architects, engineers and others all need to solve problems and make decisions together as to how a neighbourhood is designed, right down to the sewerage system, says UDI (a coincidence that it also stands for unilateral declaration of independence?)

Urban design involves economic, social and political factors, says Mee. In many European countries, a project such as the Luas would be discussed in the mayor's office and he or she would make decisions on it.

"Directly elected executive mayors can encapsulate what an urban place needs," says Mee. "In a sense they are anti-administration and they know that they have to perform to get re-elected."

Urban Design Ireland is a web-based organisation that aims to gather information and share it. "We work as a crossroads," says Mee. "The most urgent agenda is for a forum for communication between anybody involved in urban design." UDI has liaised with Irish urban designers from Hong Kong to Donegal through its website and has gathered people together to discuss urban planning.

"People need to be able to log on in Japan and Donegal and ask, what are the important issues relating to urban design in Ireland now?" As UDI expands, it hopes to publish crucial papers online in the hopes that those building in Ireland, such as developers, will print them off for their team to work with.

Dave O'Connor says that there are predictions that 50 per cent of the global population will soon be urbanised and Ireland is probably doing this at a faster rate than any other country in Europe: "When I was studying geography and planning at college in the early 1990s there was still a rural agenda. No one could foresee the explosion in urban development that would take place in Ireland."

"We're on a trajectory from farms to tower blocks with no stop in between," says Mee.

Mistakes have been made, he says, despite the fact that there are very talented people about: they just need to be got together and politicians need to be persuaded of the important of spatial planning. UDI is heartened by the fact that Fingal has just appointed an architect as a county manager (also called David O'Connor) - and points to the fact that politicians Ruari Quinn and Ciaran Cuffe are both architects.

But, even though architectural training is one of the most multi-disciplined courses - involving planning, design, sociology and economics - architects can't solve urban planning on their own.

"Everybody can remember the days when engineers in a local authority were put at a desk and told, 'you are the county planner'. Bad decisions were made because local authority officials were put in positions it wasn't fair to put them in, because they didn't have that competence. They were engineers who had been trained to deal with turning circles and water pumps. Everyone who can design has met planners who could barely read a drawing," says Mee.

"Obviously someone has to make a decision in the end but primarily, in this country, it is done by the road engineer on their own, or the county manager on their own, the planner on their own or the developer on their own."

Mee's vision of a group of talented professionals working together to plan towns and cities is played out in microcosm on the Urban Design Masters Programme at UCD. In a class of 14, there will be planners, architects, one or two landscape architects, engineers and surveyors.

"It is extraordinary how they change over the first year: the planners might never have been in a working relationship with an architect - ever," says Mee. "We get them together and give them design projects and other projects which they have to work together on, to solve a problem.

"On the course, we are inventing a way to work and it's bizarre that is has not been done before." Mee's eyes were opened when he lived in Spain and saw spatial design being carried out in a political context. "You always knew that a master plan would happen and that it would involve a lot of people, including transport engineers and planners."

The other people the process needs to involve is the wider community. Mee remembers doing an urban design workshop in the copiously-glazed Urbis Building in Manchester. The workshop was run by professionals but was open to all comers. As architects drew concepts on glass walls with coloured felt-tip pens "mothers, babies and grannies would come in to see what was going on".

We have all the expertise we need in this country, say David and Alan, it's a matter of putting the issue on the agenda and co-ordinating the right people. "Urban design is almost a subversive concept at the moment," says David. "The design solutions are there but it's a question of how to get all of these people working together effectively.

www.udi.ie