In terms of a small inner city neighbourhood there can be few potentially prettier places than Shandon on the north side of Cork city. A patchwork of steep, small streets and lanes, with buildings dating back to the 18th century, congregate at the impressive Butter Market. At the summit lies the exquisitely delicate St Anne’s Church and its famous Shandon Belltower, built over 300 years ago in 1722. It doesn’t take much to imagine how, with a bit of love and care, this mixture of Victorian and Georgian architecture could be transformed into an urban renewal gem.
Sitting outside the Myo Café on Pope’s Quay, overlooking the Lee on a warm autumnal morning, the possibility of Cork city emulating other vibrant, liveable European cities such as Bilbao is so obvious. In terms of size and institutional capacity, Cork has everything and yet the city feels somewhat unloved, a little bit down-at-heel – but nothing that a concerted effort couldn’t transform.
[ Cork city retail investment at €22m offers buyer 9.1% net initial yieldOpens in new window ]
Last week, this column focused on the potential of Limerick and Galway as counterweights to Dublin, but the obvious candidate is a Cork, Limerick and Galway axis anchored by an interlinked and overlapping transport, communication, residential, cultural and commercial regional plan. On an all-island basis, the prospect of unity, no matter when it becomes a reality, will be an eastern affair, reinforcing the dominance of the two major conurbations, Dublin and Belfast. To rebalance a new country, Cork must not just step up but lead, something that generations of Corkonians believe is their destiny. (I speak as the sole Jackeen cousin of a large Cork family, so I know a thing or two about Cork’s manifest destiny!)
From an exclusively economic perspective, Cork has lots going for it. The latest figures show that the jurisdiction’s second-largest and fastest-growing city has a population of 210,000, rising to 305,000 in the broader metro area. The county contributes 19 per cent of national gross domestic product and has the fourth-highest disposable income per capita in the country. In terms of an advanced industrial base, there are 194 multinational firms (including Apple, Boston Scientific and Janssen) operating in Cork, which employ almost 44,000 people, a figure that has nearly doubled in the past decade or so. There’s also a thriving pharma sector and Cork accounts for close to half of the State’s employment in the pharma field, and the city is home to seven of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world and manufactures six of the top 10 blockbuster drugs, each selling more than $1 billion each year.
Bilbao shows urban renewal and regeneration is very doable. Cork, like other Irish cities, can sometimes feel unloved, shabby, scarred by dereliction
As I witnessed the other night, the place is full of students – some 36,000 students in its third-level institutions. Cork has also been voted the number one small European city for economic potential, and number four for “business friendliness” in the Financial Times’ European Cities of the Future Awards. But potential isn’t reality and an overwhelming majority (82 per cent) of Cork Chamber members believe that the city is not receiving the necessary investment to achieve targets outlined in Project Ireland 2040. The city needs a complete transport overhaul, as it compares poorly to other small to medium-sized European cities for local and international connections, ranking 73rd out of some 95 cities. But there are examples of cities that have transformed themselves in recent decades. Bilbao is the exemplar, and could be a model for Cork.
Focused on successful urban regeneration, Bilbao’s transformation from industrial backwater to being the number one city for quality of life in Spain centred on architecture and in particular, the iconic Guggenheim Museum. While architectural innovation and cultural investment went hand in hand, the city’s transformation was backed by an efficient public transport and metro system. Today it tops Spain’s quality of life survey across five of the pillars considered (education; mobility; health services; culture-sport-leisure; cleaning and waste management), and ranks number two in terms of employment and third in the environment category. Bilbao has a relatively diverse population with 15 per cent of its residents foreign-born, slightly more than the 12 per cent in Cork City. It has also relocated its port and redeveloped vacated riverside dock land. Bilbao is a predominantly service economy, with a municipal GDP per capita of €35,841 and an average disposable income of just €19,405. As of 2021, the city would appear to be marginally poorer than Cork on paper – which enjoys an average disposable income of about €23,856 (2020).
[ US cybersecurity firm to create 150 jobs at new Cork facilityOpens in new window ]
Bilbao shows that urban renewal and regeneration is very doable. There just need to be the right incentives and the best place to start renewing a city is with the property owners themselves. Cork, like other Irish cities, can sometimes feel unloved, shabby, scarred by dereliction. At the last official count, there were some 705 vacant and derelict properties across the city and the derelict sites register recorded a 50 per cent increase over the past year. How do you encourage property owners to show more respect for their properties and the city in general? This column has argued many times that dereliction and vacancy are vandalism, the ultimate in anti-social behaviour by property owners.
The way to change this is by changing the incentive structures. People respond to incentives, the bigger the better. A concept called “Epics” (Extreme Positive Incentives for Change) has been coined by the Irish economist Eric Lonergan to describe bold, transformative interventions that can catalyse significant, positive change. An extreme positive incentive to change and renew could be a €1 million prize for the best example of small-scale property renewal, refurbishment and rebuild.
The reason the incentive has to be a huge, life-changing amount is that it has to be a sit-up-and-pay-attention amount, like the lotto. It’s the cash-prize-on-the-radio approach to urban love. If you thought you were in the running for a €1 million tax-free cash prize for doing up your shabby, derelict property, what would you do? You would get out your paint brushes, scaffolds and toolbox. Like the radio station approach where the cost of the individual text to the station aggerated over thousands of hopefuls more than covers the payout, the cost of this scheme would be more than paid for from the VAT and tax raised by the additional construction activity.
But, like the radio station, the council wouldn’t have to admit this to the players. It would spin it as a magnanimous prize for the best corporate citizen, bestowed by a benign State. Quite apart from the money, the status of being the most forward-looking, civically minded property owner, should not be underestimated. Bragging rights are never inconsequential, in Cork as much as anywhere else.
Of course, the State, via the councils, could do this in every city that is suffering the blight of dereliction. But why not kick it off in Cork? Initially, we could use the interest on the Apple deposit to pay for the first prize. The interest accruing on the Apple money alone is about €520 million. What about taking €5 million of this to initially fund this scheme over five cities, kick-starting a frenzy of building and refurbishment which would more than cover the cash in extra tax generated. The prize would be national news; after all, a €1 million tax-free bundle to a small business is transformative. The judges could be like Michelin-star judges, secretive, exacting and unimpeachable. The huge incentive would galvanise the shabby streets of Ireland’s cities, pitting punters against each other in trying to out-do, out-renovate and out-think each other. We are talking a type of Tidy Towns on steroids, backed by real cash. Imagine Shandon’s streets and lanes, a palette of bright colours, spruced up, led by locals all in the pot for a €1 million payout?
With this sort of extreme positive incentive accompanying real, large-scale investment in infrastructure (operated and undertaken by the same Spanish companies that built the Bilbao metro on time and on budget), urban Ireland could be transformed in no time, and led – naturally – by Cork.