Appraising infrastructure for new towns in Ireland

Copyright © 2013 ICE Publishing Ltd. Permission is granted by ICE Publishing to print one copy for personal use. Any other use of these PDF files is subject to reprint fees.Over a 20 year period 1996–2016, a new 223 ha town is being developed 10 miles west of Dublin's city centre on the south side of Lucan, County Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland (ROI). This €4 billion ‘Adamstown’ development is the first of four planning schemes in ROI to be approved as a strategic development zone – an integrated planning framework deemed suitable for creating sustainable neighbourhoods in sites of strategic economic or social importance to the state. The creation of sustainable neighbourhoods in ROI is facilitated through the implementation of a checklist of 60 indicators. This paper critically examines the attempts being made to consider sustainability within the development's overall infrastructure plan, specifically: transport, energy and water services, information technology and waste. Inadequacies in the existing development are linked to shortfalls in the sustainability checklist, by way of a comparison of infrastructure-related indicators from the ROI checklist with those derived for the UK and exemplar European projects (i.e. Bedzed, UK and Freiberg, Germany). The subsequent legacy for future residents of Adamstown is then considered in the context of ‘what if’ scenarios

Regeneration for sustainable communities? Barriers to implementing sustainable housing in urban areas

This article outlines the key characteristics of sustainable housing, including environmental, economic and social dimensions. It uses these characteristics to assess housing and regeneration in Dublin since the early 1980s. While regeneration has improved some areas, there are a number of causes for concern. Barriers to achieving sustainable housing include the lack of a shared vision of sustainable housing, inadequate building regulations and non-compliance with existing regulations, limited knowledge and expertise in green building methods, negative perceptions of higher density housing, poor quality designs, negative attitudes to social mix, an emphasis on demolition, a failure to recognize the need for social regeneration and limited resources. The article concludes that it is essential to target resources at enforcing building regulations, providing sufficient social and affordable housing as well as the social infrastructure required for sustainable communities, adequate management and maintenance, and retrofitting the unsustainable housing constructed in the past. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.sustainable development , urban regeneration , housing , housing and the environment , environmental policy , Dublin ,

The Utilisation of Environmental Knowledge in Land-Use Planning: Drawing Lessons for an Ecosystem Services Approach

Proponents of ecosystem services approaches to assessment claim that it will ensure the environment is ‘properly valued’ in decision making. Analysts seeking to understand the likelihood of this could usefully reexamine previous attempts to deploy novel assessment processes in land-use planning and how they affect decisions. This paper draws insights from a meta-analysis of three case studies: environmental capital, ecological footprinting, and green infrastructure. Concepts from science and technology studies are used to interpret how credibility for each new assessment process was assembled, and the ways by which the status of knowledge produced becomes negotiable or prescriptive. The influence of these processes on planning decisions is shown to be uneven, and depends on a combination of institutional setting and problem framing, not simply knowledge content. The analysis shows how actively cultivating wide stakeholder buy-in to new assessment approaches may secure wider support, but not necessarily translate into major influence on decisions