DUBLIN'S inner city will never reach its full potential unless the problems of economic deprivation and social exclusion among the existing community are tackled, a conference on the city's future heard at the weekend.
Organised by the Dublin City Centre Business Association (DCCBA) and the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Trinity College, the Dublin 2020: Vision conference was designed to begin charting a future for the inner city over the next 25 years.
Dr Andrew MacLaran, of Trinity College, said the current policy of urban renewal tax incentives was encouraging gentrification, but it had "very little relevance to the key economic problem of inner city long term structural unemployment and poverty".
He pointed out that more than 5,400 new dwellings had been developed in the inner city over the past seven years, with a further 2,250 in the pipeline. This had created a residential population which, on average, spent £38 per week in local shops.
But a high proportion of the new residents had "little commitment to community", MacLaran said. Their ultimate long term residential destination was a house in suburban Dublin, at least in part because of "the undesirability of the central city for bringing up children".
The return to the city centre as a residential location needed to be supported by making the area more environmentally attractive by traffic reduction, eliminating cross city traffic flows and giving priority to buses and pedestrians.
Dr Ray Byrne, of CIE, said what was already happening in other European cities provided a clue to how Dublin might be in 2020. "There's one main street in Grenoble, for example, which used to have 175 buses an hour going through it, and now it has none. Cities without such traffic were more civilised, he added.
Mr Dick Gleeson, Dublin Corporation's deputy chief planning officer, said the city needed to be broken down into "biteable chunks". He cited the example of Trinity College, with its well maintained historic buildings and striking contemporary architecture and said it should be possible to achieve this with other parts of the city.
Mr Daithi Downey, of Thresh old, said "state led gentrification" had produced too many apartment blocks which seemed to replicate early 1970s system building. If these blocks were not maintained, they could the "future slums", resulting in a radical movement of people out of the city.
Mr Tony Gregory TD (Ind, Dublin Central) said 10 years of urban renewal had made "no impact on the indigenous communities in the city centre", who were still powerless and ignored. "If partnership is to have any meaning, it must include a strategy to deal with deprivation," he added.
Ms Frances Fitzgerald TD (FG," Dublin South East), complained about the "fragmentation" among Dublin deputies over the proposed light, rail system, Luas, by contrast with the united front of rural deputies when agriculture was at stake. "We need to make the political system more responsive to Dublin's needs," she said.
Dr Michael Bannon of UCD warned there were signs that the Greater Dublin area was developing on the North American model "of a doughnut style "edge city". Calling for a regional land use strategy, he said no vision of the future could be implemented "unless government agencies are stitched into it".
Mr John Henry, director of the Dublin Transportation Office said the population projections for the Dublin area, and the spread of housing to serve it, were "all very frightening". The future could not be "delivered" by focusing on individual projects such as Luas, but by asking what kind of city Dubliners wanted.
Mr Bill Nowlan, who chaired the session, said vast sums were being spent on the M50 "C-ring" motorway, yet its capacity was likely to be taken up by motorists driving to and from the shopping centres along its route. However, he detected a "positive anxiety" among people to put Dublin on the right track.
Dr Tony Parker, of UCD, said huge changes had taken place since 1971 and there was every, reason to think that changes over the next 25 years would be more dramatic. Over the next two years, the city would acquire an extra two million square feet of retail space, adding to the 3.6 million built over the previous 30 years.
Mr Tom Coffey, chief executive of the DCCBA, said the dominance of large retail organisations was growing, with the introduction of the EU single market. In Dublin, 80 per cent of high street shops went out of business every 10 years, and now they were threatened with "virtual reality" shopping.
"In 1995, almost 50 million computers were connected to Internet posts," he said. "Cyberspace is like a frontier town, a land of opportunity and tremendous risks. As a result of technology, the link between property, location and retailing be broken and cannot any longer be taken for granted.
