Mid-century Soviet architecture provokes a binary reaction. There are those who find its modernism disgusting and inhumane, and then there are people like me who find it enticingly beautiful. The difference is whether you are looking at “Khrushchyovkas” – the low-cost housing developments – as buildings or as social tools.
Seen merely as a building, they are admittedly full of uniformly flat panels and dreary colours, with the same five-storey buildings dotted uniformly across Minsk and Vladivostok. But seen through the lens of a tool, these buildings were something much greater: they were the state’s apparatus for growing the economic pie that enriched Soviet people. Though small and ugly, they ended the many-families-under-one-roof curse in the most transformative rehousing programme in modern history. And it left pretty much everybody happy – why would people object to such an enormous housing project that made almost everyone better off?
The beauty in Soviet domestic architecture lies in its sheer scale. The government’s ability to industrialise urban development by building small towns – including schools, transport, healthcare facilities – to accommodate housing is what is beautiful. The Soviet government acknowledged that dignity wasn’t just in being housed, but in the community and lifestyle that could be created by having the facilities exactly where they are needed.
Fourteen hundred miles west of Minsk, and nearly 70 years later in Dunsink, Co Dublin, hundreds of people are objecting to a much more aesthetically pleasing version of a Government’s attempt to give 46,000 people the freedom to live in their own home, mostly in apartment blocks of up to 15 storeys tall.
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Now, I am the first to ferociously push back against the Nimbys – not-in-my-backyardistas – who would consign young families to live in pre-Khrushchyovka conditions, with couples falling atop each other in squalid conditions, if it meant protecting their kitchen view of Dublin’s endless sprawl in every direction.
The Old Testament suggests what might become of people who engage the deadly sin of greed. But there is another deadly sin at play here, and it is one which often goes unpunished: acedia, the deadly sin of slothfulness and failing to do the good that is yours to do. It is the neglect of your actual duty while busying yourself with other things. And this sin?
It belongs not to Nimbys, but to the Irish Government.
Looking at the plans for Dunsink, we can see a development of 18,500 homes on more than 1,000 acres situated among Finglas, Ashtown, Castleknock and Blanchardstown – which would create a new population of around 46,000 people. Putting it into perspective, this plan envisages more people than are currently living in each of Ireland’s largest towns of Drogheda, Dundalk or Navan being housed around the site of Dublin’s old dump, with no town to go along with it.
The tidal wave of planning objections, not surprisingly, reflects the reality that the Irish Government neglects to consider – that housing enormous numbers of people requires more than just houses.
[ Plan for new town at Dunsink ‘requires €7.3bn water investment’ to proceedOpens in new window ]
To deliver dignity and a quality of life to this number of people – as the Soviets knew too well – you need around a dozen primary schools and half that number of secondary schools if you don’t want to force residents into a more than 30 minute commute. Then there are the GP surgeries and primary care centres for the many flus, prescriptions and sprained ankles that will undoubtedly arise. Of course, you’ll want childcare, because the couples this development is targeting will hope to produce Ireland’s next generation faster than demographic statistics forecast. Shops, restaurants and pubs within walking distance are a must. What about playgrounds, GAA pitches and a library for those kids as they get older? And, of course, Ireland’s commitment to the two-car family means figuring out where they will all go.
If greed is wanting what is not yours to take, then acedia is holding back what is yours to give; and the Dunsink project is a phenomenal masterclass in dressing up the second sin as the first. Because while we blame the much-loathed Nimbys for obstructing this project – and in fairness, the people complaining about losing a golf course should politely do a runner – it is the Government’s total dismissal of the basics of urban development that is at the heart of the actual objection.
It emerged on Wednesday that Uisce Éireann has warned the council that the scheme can’t proceed beyond an initial 2,500 homes without the State’s two largest sewage- and water-supply schemes – a €6-billion project to pipe water from the river Shannon to Dublin and the €1.3-billion Greater Dublin Drainage Project – both of which have yet to be built.
How much of the non-housing town appears in the plans? As a list of “things that should be done”: all of it is there. As a list of “confirmed commitments”: next to none.
The schools are described as an “integral part” of the development by the council, but it’s not the council that builds the schools – it can only hope that the Department of Education someday will. The transport plan similarly draws cycle routes and cites road upgrades, while hoping that the National Transport Authority will enact the future Luas to Tyrrelstown; one that is not funded and not expected until after 2042, a decade after thousands of residents will be told to cram themselves on to a depressingly-full 39a bus route. Healthcare barely makes it into the plan at all, and it will be up to the HSE to wait until a chronic bottleneck already exists before it will even try to provide community services here.
So while the Soviets ensured that housing led to a rise in everyone’s standard of living, Ireland’s housing delivery subtracts facilities from those already living there.
None of what I’ve written excuses Nimbyism, which needs to be ripped from the Irish planning system like weeds from the soil. Letters suggesting “build the houses elsewhere” should be strongly decried. But pretending that all objections are the same just hands further permission to the State to avoid doing its job.
Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers recently announced that he wants to speed-run such objections and compress the process to take on more risk. But until the Government creates a unified delivery system that can build schools, GPs, transport and housing into a single plan – similar to what once existed in the Soviet Union – removing objections doesn’t magically build such outcomes. It merely gets us to the same expensive, delayed and disjointed outcomes faster – developments that lower the quality of life for everyone around them.
