Abstract
This paper seeks to situate narratives of sustainable urban development within the wider context of political economic urban transformations shaping urban city regions. In drawing upon the development of a master-planned sustainable development called Adamstown, situated on the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland, the paper will unpack the relationship between ideals of urban and suburban sustainability within the context of Ireland’s recent economic boom and bust, along with its repackaging via national and international actors. The paper demonstrates the shortcomings of the ideal of sustainability in the context of neoliberal urban development dominated by private actors, and facilitated by state-led governance mechanisms. It argues that while the official invocation of urban sustainable communities attempts to highlight them as ‘different’ and ‘unique’, they remain inextricably intertwined with wider urban regional processes, which are themselves becoming increasingly internationalized in terms of reality.
Introduction
This paper aims to unpack the development and implementation of a sustainable new town within the framework of uneven urban regional development. This will be carried out through an analysis of the case study of Adamstown, Co Dublin, Ireland. Adamstown, a planned sustainable new town situated to the west of Dublin developed from the early 2000s onwards, was originally designated to be the location of 10,000 homes in a high-density mixed-use environment including essential services, such as schools, shops and community facilities, delivered predominantly via private investment and on privately owned land. In as much as it rejected the mono-functional and spatial dynamics of ‘traditional’ semi- detached housing that had predominated Irish suburbia for much of the 20th century, it was hailed for heralding a new and ‘sustainable approach’ to suburban development (National Economic and Social Council (NESC), 2004). However, in as much as its delivery can be situated within the wider political economy of private forms of housing and associated residential amenities in Ireland, it is indicative of the importance of contextualizing such developments within increasingly neoliberal approaches to urban governance. Thus, in the context of the ensuing economic crisis as became manifest in Ireland from 2008 onwards, the case study of Adamstown continues to demonstrate the frailties of market-led approaches to urban development. The paper argues that the example of Adamstown raises fundamental contradictions within embedded notions of urban and suburban sustainability. Following on from recent work by Hodson and Marvin (2010) and Mössner (2015), it is argued that the evocation of higher densities, walkability and rail connections provide for a form of ‘sustainability fix’ that largely fails to deal with the over-arching contradictions of market-led urban and suburban development. Although acknowledging that, in the Irish context at least, it promoted a number of features that had been lacking in previous suburban developments, such as schools, shops and other essential services, the fundamental delivery of the project remained grounded in an unchanged approach to capitalist urban regional transformation, which would lead to its unravelling in the wake of the economic crisis. Furthermore, the case of Adamstown demonstrates a form of decoupling of planning ideals from the reality of their production. As it was developed through a private-led approach to housing, Adamstown is firmly embedded within the political economy of the Dublin region. Thus, the perception of Adamstown as somewhat distinctive acts as a form of blind-spot within the sustainability agenda. From a critical perspective, the development of Adamstown must be viewed in the context of a widely divided and uneven approach to urban regional transformation (Gottdiener, 1994), with all the associated forms of competitive forces and fragmented governance structures.
The paper will be structured as follows. First, it seeks to draw out wider debates about urban and suburban processes. This will bring together literature on the political economy of urban transformation (Gottdiener, 1994) with that on uneven development (Smith, 1982) and more recent reflections with a particular focus on suburban governance (Hamel and Keil, 2015; Phelps and Wood, 2011) and sustainability (Mössner, 2015). This will be followed by a critical analysis of the evolution of Adamstown from the late 1990s onwards. Here, and in drawing upon relevant policy documentation and interviews with key actors, the paper will include a detailed analysis of the original development of Adamstown and the impact of the subsequent economic collapse. Finally, the paper will examine the current situation in Adamstown within the context of the current housing debates in Ireland. In so doing, the paper will demonstrate how Adamstown has been part of a wider re-articulation of neoliberal approaches to urban transformation in Ireland. In this regard, the findings reflect the perspectives of O’Callaghan et al. (2014: 123) whereby there has been a tendency to perceive Adamstown as a ‘… “particular”, rather than a “systemic”…’ problem. Moreover, and in a manner that expands on high-profile locations such as Dublin Docklands (Byrne, 2016), the findings demonstrate how deeply embedded suburban locations such as Adamstown are within increasingly financialized forms of urban restructuring.
Uneven development: Fragmented urban regions
The uneven nature of urban and suburban transformation has been well documented within the urban and regional studies literature. Critical scholars writing in the 1970s and 1980s paid particular attention to the unevenness of capitalist urbanization at the urban regional scale. This body of literature, much of which drew upon a Marxist political economy perspective, focused on the relationship between private forces and the state. For authors such as Harvey (1978), uneven metropolitan development could be perceived as an illustration of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism’s need to destroy its own physical landscape for its perpetuation. Following on from this, a common rendering of suburbanization of the mid-20th century is that which occurs at the expense of a hollowed out and abandoned central core (Smith, 1982), which itself would re-emerge as a focal point of capital accumulation at a later phase via gentrification (Smith, 1982) and the rehabilitation of defunct waterfronts for leisure, office and residential functions (Harvey, 1989a). Furthermore, and in a manner that departs from Harvey’s (1978) work, research by authors such as Scott (1980), Storper and Scott (2015) and Gottdiener (1994) have demonstrated the complexity of competing interests across the urban region. Here, it is argued that competing interests operating across the urban region produce uneven spatial development that is chaotic or ‘anarchic’ in nature (Gottdiener, 1994; Scott, 1980). Thus, as is argued by Gottdiener (1994), while mainstream economic approaches may assume that the interconnection between the state and private interests will provide the best possible outcomes in terms of capital accumulation, the chaotic and uneven manner in which the delivery of infrastructure (as an example) is delivered may actually run against further rounds of capital accumulation. Further, as is argued by Gottdiener (1994: 102), this is exacerbated by each capitalist protecting their own interest over and above the wider interests of capitalist accumulation: ‘Phenomena such as blight, speculation, property booms and busts, pollution, the differential spatial patterns of residential areas, and so on are produced by the capitalist land development process itself, because that process is uncoordinated and anarchical’. The forms of suburban development of the mid to late 20th century can therefore be seen as producing a variegated and fragmented landscape across the urban regional scale.
When combined, the forces of class differentiation (Harvey, 1989b), obsolescence of older industrial locations (Harvey, 1978) and competing land interests (Gottdiener, 1994) produced a highly fragmented and uneven form of urban regional development, which is further illustrated via its internalized contradictions of congestion, urban and suburban decline, and segregation. In recent decades, this highly uneven reality of urban regional development has been further produced and reproduced through the emergence and evolution of neoliberalization. The relationship between neoliberalization and the urban have been well documented within urban studies, and it can be identified through a reading of multiple socio-spatial topologies, ranging from creative city strategies (Peck, 2005) to largely deregulated forms of suburban development (Peck, 2011). Indeed, with an intensification of market-led urban development, heightened forms of inter- and intra-city competition, and deregulated forms of governance (Brenner, 2003; Peck, 2011), the forces of neoliberalization are fully intertwined with and constituted through metropolitan urban development (Peck et al, 2013). Moreover, in as much as neoliberalization works through already existing social and political arrangements, it serves to produce and reproduce highly uneven social and spatial realities, with significant disparities between localities throughout urban regions being further exacerbated through neoliberal forces. As highlighted by Peck et al. (2013: 1093): ‘Consequently, the unevenly developed geographies of neoliberalization are not mere variations around an emergent norm, but are inscribed into this form of social rule’. Unevenness is thus inscribed in the very geographies of neoliberal urban transformation, with the urban region becoming a focal point of such processes.
A recent body of work has sought to demonstrate the complexity of suburban and metropolitan transformation. Whether it is through the theorizing of changes through the notion of ‘post-suburbia’ (Phelps et al., 2011) or the evocation of the increasingly complex web of actors at the metropolitan scale (Hamel and Keil, 2015), this literature has sought to disrupt inherited norms about suburbs and suburbanization. This has entailed a number of key elements, including a break away from the assumptions inherited from suburbanization in North America and an analysis of the complex social make-up of suburbs on an international scale (Ekers et al., 2012; Hamel and Keil, 2015; Walks, 2013). Furthermore, recent literature has also demonstrated the actually existing suburban realities and the unevenness of experience, ranging from affluence to the commodification of community (Cheshire et al., 2013), to foreclosures and poverty (Schafran, 2013). Moreover, within policy discourses, recent decades have seen the coming to dominance of ideals of ‘sustainability’, with cities taking an increasingly central role both in terms of perceived causes and potential solutions to a wide set of environmental and societal problems and challenges (Hodson and Marvin, 2010). Increasingly, it is the suburbs, with a focus on car-based transit and the continued expansion, that have come under scrutiny. Here, ideals of higher densities and walkability along with the development of ecologically oriented practices have become widely accepted norms of future urban imaginaries. Indeed, the ideal of eco-cities has become the urban model of choice amongst policy makers at various different scales, ranging from local models such as the Freiburg Charter (Mössner, 2015) to the Bristol Accord and Cities of Tomorrow approach at the level of the European Union.
It is of significant importance to note that ideals of urban sustainability have not gone uncontested. Guy and Marvin (1999), for example, outline a critique of linear approaches towards the development of sustainable cities. As they outline: ‘Sustainable-cities research often appears to be underpinned by a tacit assumption that a single desirable sustainable city can be pre-defined, and that the purpose of policy and research is to facilitate the development of that city’. Thus, as they continue, there is a notion of a sustainable city as a ‘single end state’ to be aspired to and this can be achieved through the promotion of technical fixes, which are believed to embody the outcome of a sustainable future. Ideals of sustainability, and the way in which they are embedded within planning and development practice, remain largely pursued as though standing outside the wider political and economic forces in which they are embedded. In following from Swyngedouw’s (2010) treatise on the post-politics of climate change discussion and, indeed, his discussion of wider urban politics (2009), urban sustainability discourse remains largely driven through the promotion of technical fixes that are carried out without any regard to wider structural societal challenges. As is commented by Swyngedouw (2010: 228): ‘Much of the sustainability argument has evacuated the politics of the possible, the radical contestation of alternative future socio-environmental possibilities and socio-natural arrangements, and has silenced the antagonisms and conflicts that are constitutive of our socio-natural orders by externalizing conflict’. Here, Swyngedouw (2010) highlights how the apocalyptic representation of future scenarios invokes the need to act in ways that promote post-political forms of dialogue and consensus (see also, Swyngedouw, 2009). In response to the possibility of a dystopian future, the dominant discourse around retrofitting and building the sustainable cities of the future is decidedly utopian in terms of the imaginary evoked. Where there remain continued overlaps is the manner in which sustainable cities or districts are promoted as bounded units where ‘sustainability’ is made to seem as though it will emerge outside any shifts or adjustments in the prevailing capitalist system itself (Brenner and Schmidt, 2014). Indeed, as is argued by Mössner (2015) in reference to the oft-cited sustainable city of Frieburg, sustainable practices are often pitted as an alternative to neoliberal urbanism, yet they are increasingly a direct part of its apparatus, and are used as a means of justifying, if not normalizing, its continuation. Similarly, Béal (2011) outlines how, while seemingly contradictory, sustainability practices uphold and further wider strategies of urban entrepreneurialism and competition. To a large extent, sustainable urban developments are presented as forms of ‘sustainability fixes’, whereby social action is reduced to, for example, modes of transport that differ from the car; urban form, such as higher density living; and ecological improvements, such as improved water conservation practices. Little, in the context of wider neoliberal approaches to urbanization, is transformed. In following from Mössner (2015), there is nothing neutral about sustainable urban strategies. They must be viewed within the context of the prevailing economic, social and political contexts in which they are situated. It can therefore be identified that there has emerged a more general framework of urban and suburban sustainability that is often delivered through high-profile, elite-led, and very often large-scale forms of development that can be read as what Béal (2011: 406), in following from Peck and Tickell (2002), refers to as exemplifying ‘roll-out environmentalism’. This argument is pushed further by Hodson and Marvin (2010), who in drawing upon the high-profile example of Masdar city in Abu Dhabi, demonstrate the manner in which eco-cities are tied up within the wider political economy of real estate development, with sustainability being wholly embedded within the search for profit. Furthermore, and as highlighted by Mössner and Miller (2015), with direct reference to the aforementioned example of Freiburg, there are significant limitations to approaches to sustainability that remain isolated or bounded, without due reference to the various scales in which it is embedded, ranging from the regional to the global (Brenner and Schmidt, 2015). Furthermore, at their most extreme, sustainability fixes become rolled out within enclosed or gated eco-city enclaves, thus exacerbating the challenges of social exclusion and inequalities (Hodson and Marvin, 2010; Raco and Lin, 2012).
In building upon the above debates, the paper now turns to the example of Adamstown, a ‘new town’ located to the west of Dublin, Ireland. The paper will first situate Adamstown within prevailing urban and suburban discourses in Ireland. Subsequently, the case study of Adamstown is used as a means of elucidating how the contradictions between ideals of urban sustainability play out in the context of privatized neoliberal investment. Thus, particular attention is paid to the contradictions between an officiated approach towards ‘sustainability’ and wider dynamics operating at the urban regional and national scale. The paper concludes with a call for further work analysing and understanding the lived dynamics of Adamstown. This, it is argued, would allow for a much greater level of understanding of the relationships between official ideals of sustainability and everyday practices.
Urban and suburban governance: Dublin in the international context
The neoliberal transformation of Dublin
A predominant focus of previous research on suburban Dublin has been on the interaction between the state and private interests in the transformation of Dublin during the 20th century. Research by MacManus (2002) has detailed the expansion of Dublin during the first half of the 20th century, demonstrating both the role of the state and private actors in early processes of suburbanization. Work by MacLaran and Punch (2004) outlined the westward expansion of Dublin and the development of the new town of Tallaght from the 1960s onwards, illustrating the shortcomings of the state in the provision of services and the attendant challenges around inequalities and social segregation. Similarly, Bartley and Saris (1999) have highlighted the challenges of social exclusion within the Cherry Orchard area of Dublin, a suburban housing estate built between the mid-1970s and late 1980s. With a greater focus on more recently developed suburbs, Corcoran et al. (2010: 84) draw upon the notion of the ‘pastoral ideology’ in dealing with the complexity of the relationship between attachment to place and a lack of quality of infrastructural services, a factor that has come to demarcate Dublin regional transformation in recent decades. Overall, this set of literature has given a backdrop to the gradual evolution of Dublin as a highly suburbanized and low-density city, with a highly divided social structure. Recent work, and particularly that focused upon the economic boom and subsequent bust, has focused upon the neoliberal urban transformation of Dublin. This work has been particularly focused upon the connection between the state, urban renewal and the property sector (MacLaran and Kelly, 2014). Here, a significant amount of attention has been paid to high-profile tax-incentivized forms of development projects, such as the Dublin Docklands (MacLaran and Kelly, 2014), state-led urban regeneration projects, such as Temple Bar (Lawton and Punch, 2014), and the gentrification of working class parts of the city (Kelly, 2014). Predominantly, this work has demonstrated the highly imbalanced and unequal nature of such approaches to urban transformation, with a particular focus upon city centre locations.
The relationship between property development and the economic crisis of 2008 in Ireland has been stark, with the social and physical implications leaving an ongoing legacy. As outlined by Kitchin et al. (2014), in 2011 there were 2876 unfinished housing estates in Ireland. Perhaps more strikingly, and moving beyond the ghost estate, there were a total of 230,056 units out of a total housing stock of 1,994,845 recorded as vacant in the 2011 census. Housing vacancy thus became one of the major symbols of the fall-out from the global financial crisis in Ireland. Thus, the economic boom and subsequent bust of the Irish economy has left a highly negative legacy for the built environment of the city and its surroundings. As a means of dealing with the overhang in the property market, in 2009, the Irish Government established the National Assets Management Agency (NAMA) (Kitchin et al., 2014). NAMA was enabled to purchase toxic loans from Irish banks at a reduced price with a view to either managing the loans or selling them on (Mercille and Murphy, 2015). This has had a significant influence on recent developments in Dublin. In particular, and as will be returned to later, this has allowed for a new set of actors, largely international in profile, to enter the Irish real estate market in recent years, thus serving to repackage urban metropolitan development in Dublin in a manner that extends and intensifies its neoliberal transformation (Byrne, 2016).
A significant amount of research focusing upon outer suburban and peripheral locations has focused upon the phenomenon of the ‘ghost estate’ – half- or partially built housing estates as a legacy of over-investment in the built environment (O’Callaghan et al., 2014). The phenomenon of the ‘ghost estate’ is indicative of the extent to which, from a spatial perspective, the contradictions of neoliberal development in Ireland took on urban, suburban and rural dimensions. Indeed, that such developments were dispersed throughout the country is testimony to the impact of a combination of the low-regulation, tax-incentive fuelled economic boom happening in the context of a fragmented governance structure (O’Callaghan et al., 2014). The depiction of the unfinished or ‘ghost’ estate has therefore become one of the dominant symbols of the economic crisis, to the point where it became reduced to a symbol of ‘excess’, deemed largely separate from any systemic failings (O’Callaghan et al., 2014).
In summary, from a metropolitan perspective, Dublin can be seen as manifesting the myriad problems of fragmented governance structures combined with an increasingly neoliberal approach to urban development. As summarized by Williams and Redmond (2014: 116): ‘In spatial planning terms, the current housing market has resulted in a development-led urban growth pattern which contributed to a dispersed settlement pattern with problems of oversupply’. Thus, neoliberal approaches to urban transformation have served to both produce and reinforce widely uneven processes and outcomes in the Dublin region.
In the context of the period of sustained economic growth in the late 1990s to c.2007, official discourses of planning became increasingly focused on promoting a form of sustainability fix to the challenges of urban sprawl and a largely unfettered approach to both urban and rural transformation (Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government (DoEHLG), 2007, 2008; DoE, 1997; NESC, 2004). The desire to promote sustainable approaches to urban development emerged through a belief that investment in the built environment could be channelled in a manner that was perceived as being more acceptable from the perspective of sustainable planning goals (see Lawton and Punch, 2014). As such, through the publication of a number of key documents, the then government sought to promote the development of ‘sustainable communities’. While broad in remit, the predominant focus of such documents can be viewed as ‘design-led’, with a focus on street patterns, landmarks and higher residential densities (DoEHLG, 2007, 2008). Furthermore, embedded within these approaches was a desire to promote a form of social mix. The ideal was thus to create new communities with a mix of tenures and a mixture of different uses within a locality. Thus, although ecological challenges such as climate change can be identified within Irish government policies on sustainable communities (DoEHLG, 2007, 2008), such factors remain more implicit than explicit. The overall focus can be summarized as developing an approach that revolves around the relationship between people and their social environment with urban design and associated assumptions around ‘place’ foregrounded.
Adamstown
While much of the previous focus within the literature on neoliberal urban transformation in Ireland has been either focused upon central locations in Dublin or peripheral ‘ghost estates’ (Kitchin et al., 2014; O’Callaghan et al., 2014), the economic crisis had a significant impact upon locations throughout the urban metropolitan region of Dublin. Through an analysis of the new town of Adamstown, County Dublin, this paper turns its attention to analysing the relationship between wider metropolitan urban change and sustainability discourses as they have played out within the context of the economic boom and subsequent bust. Adamstown is a new town development situated to the west of Dublin. It is situated within the administrative boundaries of South Dublin County Council, one of four local authorities in which Dublin is located. In a similar manner to previous forms of suburban development in Ireland, Adamstown was rezoned from agricultural land under the 1998 South Dublin County Development Plan. This entailed rezoning 214 hectares (500 acres) of privately owned lands. 1 In total, in its original guise, the area of Adamstown was made up of three land-holdings: Castlethorn Construction (approximately 125 hectares), Maplewood Homes (approximately 52 hectares) and Tierra Construction (20 hectares). 2 Pointedly, Adamstown is the first example of a Strategic Development Zone (SDZ), which was introduced in 2001 under the Planning and Development Act of 2000 and which allows for the ‘fast track’ planning of a location deemed to be of strategic importance (Murphy et al., 2014). The SDZ model is thus reflective of wider trends in Europe towards the development of new territorial entities as a means of delivering urban projects (Haughton et al., 2013). Under the SDZ legislation, the right of appeal against planning decisions is removed and local authorities are given the right of compulsory purchase within the boundaries of the SDZ (Haughton et al., 2013). As argued by Murphy et al. (Haughton et al., 2013), the SDZ model ‘… facilitates private interests to secure local economic investment and property development by creating what can only be described as an inherently pro-development planning environment’. Moreover, as also outlined by Murphy et al. (2014), it is also of note that the inclusion of residential developments within the legislation was a later addition. It is thus by a curious twist that the largely residential development of Adamstown became the first example of a SDZ delivered in Ireland. Thus, while the credentials of Adamstown were specifically about sustainability, enshrined in the SDZ model was a mode of delivery that avoided any form of democratic engagement at the local level, bar a public engagement exercise that invited public submissions from the local area. 3 This reflects Béal’s (2011) viewpoint on the manner in which the sustainability rhetoric can be mobilized in a way that removes rather than promotes inclusive forms of decision-making.
In terms of delivery, Adamstown was developed from the early 2000s onwards with the explicit aim of becoming a ‘sustainable urban community’. Originally, it was planned to accommodate 10,000 housing units, which equates roughly to a population of 25,000 people. In line with the as then recently introduced planning act of 2000, this also included 15% social and affordable housing as a means of promoting a level of ‘social mix’. 4 However, in official planning circles, the ideal of Adamstown revolved predominantly around the desire to get away from the dominance of car-oriented transit. Adamstown was developed in the context of low-density suburban housing estates that have predominated Dublin’s development from the post-war period up until and including the ‘Celtic tiger’ period of the 1990s and 2000s. It is with such a frame of reference that it was desired that Adamstown become a ‘sustainable urban community’ that differed in all aspects to its surroundings and promoted a more integrated approach to suburban living, revolving around walkability, density and public transport. Adamstown can thus be seen as an attempt by the state to deal with the emerging contradiction of a suburban form of development that produces and reproduces ever-increasing amounts of traffic congestion. Furthermore, whereas historically the more actively state-led forms of suburban transformation in Dublin were focused on the delivery of social housing programmes (MacLaran and Punch, 2004), in the case of Adamstown, the state merely facilitated the private sector through the delivery of a planning framework via the SDZ model. Thus, similar to the formation of special development vehicles, such as identified in the Dublin Docklands (MacLaran and Kelly, 2014), the designation of Adamstown as a SDZ can be perceived as an example of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002).
In as much as it was the first SDZ and the first development to promote ideals of sustainability, Adamstown can be seen as a prototypical example of sustainable approaches in an Irish context. With a focus on mixing a variety of functions and the promotion of higher densities and walkability, Adamstown exemplifies sustainability in the Irish context (DoEHLG, 2007, 2008). The model incorporated a number of elements that might delineate it as being eco-friendly, such as more sustainable approaches to transport, energy, waste and water. It should be noted that in as much as such concerns are marginal within the development, it falls short of being definable as an ‘eco-city’ (Hodson and Marvin, 2010). Nevertheless, in keeping with the limitations of approaches to sustainable urban development, as outlined by Hodson and Marvin (2010), Adamstown was to be delivered as a stand-alone project largely distinct from its surrounding environment. However, it is important to note that from the perspective of promoting a more sustainable future in Ireland, this was an explicit aim of the development of Adamstown. In short, Adamstown was to be a form of demonstration project that was to set the future benchmark for sustainable urban development in Ireland (NESC, 2004). Critically, in the case of Adamstown there is a form of double contradiction at work. While situated and represented as an ‘alternative’ to predominant forms of suburban development, it was still to be delivered by means of private developers on rezoned agricultural land at the edge of the city. Thus, Adamstown remained firmly situated within the political economy of regional urban transformation and its associated contradictions of intra-urban competition and largely and fragmented governance structures. As such, from the outset, the approach in Adamstown, through assumptions about design, layout and its overall sustainability ideals, was seen as sitting outside its mode of delivery.
One of the more striking elements of the original Adamstown SDZ scheme (South Dublin County Council, 2003) is the extent to which the principles are presented in an almost matter of fact manner, and without recourse to where they come from or why they are important. It is instead presented as implicitly ‘better’ and in a manner that decouples itself from its mode of delivery, with the principles of sustainable development being outlined on the basis of factors such as design, ecology, scale and energy efficiency. Indeed, to a large extent, in the case of Adamstown, the ideals of sustainability revolved predominantly around the incorporation of infrastructural elements, which were seen to have implied social impacts. This was outlined by a respondent involved in the development of the original Adamstown SDZ plan as follows:
And when I talk about sustainable communities I don’t mean it in a social engineering sense of bringing in mixed-class type neighbourhoods or even mixed-income type neighbourhoods, I talk about, or at least in this document we talked about sustainability primarily in the form of the delivery of physical infrastructure to serve the people who live in the locality, and the entire focus of the document and everything to do with it was tied in with that infrastructure delivery. (Former Planner, Local Government involved in Adamstown)
It is thus made quite explicit that the as it was rolled out, the notion of ‘sustainability’ was specifically focused on catering for a specific set of criteria, all of which were tied in with different elements of infrastructure. The key aim within Adamstown was thus to deliver the physical elements of development. In this regard, the notion of sustainability was reduced to a bounded notion of social life, where the ability to walk to nearby shops was somehow separated from the wider social practice, and the manner of delivery was deemed wholly separate. The incorporation of sustainability practices was therefore not aimed at challenging the status quo in terms of the mode of delivery, or, indeed, the wider political economic practices of urban development in Ireland. Instead, the development of a ‘new town’ on a rail-line was perceived as a revelation compared to the inherited norms of planning in Ireland (NESC, 2004). Here, the design-led notion of sustainability came to the fore, whereby the railway station would become the focal point of the main services in the town, with a mix of functions surrounded by residences of mixed densities. This was emphasized in the press release for the development, which boasted the manner in which Adamstown would take shape in the coming years:
The plan was created over a three year period by ‘
Here, the mantra of higher densities, including a mix of apartments, terraced housing and town houses, fronting onto interconnected streets oriented around pedestrian and bike use was pushed as being the answer to wider issues of sustainability. While architects involved in the project discussed the influence of US notions of ‘transit-based planning’, the predominant frame of reference was that of a ‘European model’. Throughout the interviews, respondents highlighted how influences drew explicitly upon a ‘European’ frame of reference, including countries such as The Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden:
The Danes have done a couple of beautiful suburban new towns which are really, really attractive and so on – but they’re quite suburban, they feel low density. Skarpnäck [Stockholm, Sweden] is more like a village street and it is a suburb but it’s more on that sort of higher density feel to it, and they got the idea of creating housing right up to the edges of streets, street scales that tier down, but a high street feel, side street feels, laneways and mews and then back into a slightly lower density. … And sitting in the middle of the main street is an underground station, there’re churches and so on, there’s green spaces and parks and whatever. So, we kind of felt that that was a very nice model, and it’s one that we tried to replicate… (Architect, local government, involved in Adamstown)
Thus, the aim of Adamstown was to have a mix of densities, beginning with higher densities oriented towards main streets and gradually moving towards lower densities within smaller streets and laneways. The ‘European’ frame of reference is of note in as much as it coincided with a wider shift in attitudes amongst planning and design professionals, and heralded a more acceptable frame of reference for future urban development in Ireland (See Lawton and Punch, 2014). While such an approach differed vastly from that of ‘neo-traditionalist’, or ‘New Urbanist’ approaches (MacLeod, 2013), there was a notion that the European frame of reference was something inherently better and as an almost fixed and undisputed point of reference. Moreover, as is evidenced within the above quote, there was a notion that particular policy ideals could be taken and replicated within an Irish context. In reality, this was based predominantly upon an interpretation of the design and infrastructural elements alone. As in other contexts, policy was thus perceived as mobile and amenable to the particularities to which it was now being situated (see McCann and Ward, 2010).
Adamstown was designated to be delivered on a gradual basis. While not unusual in its own right, this quirk, which was controversial at its time of introduction (Murphy et al., 2014), is perhaps demonstrative of the unstable nature of the wider arena of housing development then taking place in Dublin. In short, while Adamstown was officially designated as a SDZ, the reality was that the first phase of Adamstown took place in a highly competitive environment between property developers operating across the metropolitan region. In the case of Adamstown, it was the notion of continued growth that was set to become a driver of the delivery of infrastructure and services. Indeed, one respondent directly involved in the delivery of the project highlighted how the various services would be leveraged in the context of private land ownership:
… and then the mechanism for the release of it was that land and property were beginning to go up, and up, and up, famously dangerously as we now know, but at the time, we owned no land up there but the model for how we were leveraging the facilities and the things as they came along was the release of equity through increasing land values. (Architect, local government, involved in Adamstown).
Thus, as the same respondent went on to explain, the notion was that with the constant rise in land values, the developer would be able to make a profit, while also allowing the local authority to leverage necessary community facilities, such as parks and schools, via development levies. In a manner that demonstrated the constraints of Ireland’s embedded path-dependent reliance upon the property development sector, the key factors in Adamstown that were perceived as a breakthrough were the ability to get the landowners to cooperate with each other, the manoeuvring away from the semi-detached housing typology and the incorporation of alternative modes of transportation, such as the aforementioned rail-based approach. Given how deeply embedded private modes of delivery are within the Irish context, it was simply never questioned. Thus, the main ‘success’ of Adamstown was that it provided a form of ‘governance fix’ for spatially manifest problems of urban sprawl and car dependency.
The economic crisis of 2008 has had a significant impact upon Adamstown. In a similar manner to other newly built or half-built developments throughout the country (Kitchin et al., 2014), development in Adamstown stalled in the wake of the economic crisis. This left approximately 1250 of the 10,000 originally planned housing units developed and large tracts awaiting future development, along with empty roadways and half-finished infrastructure. However, whereas much of the symbolism around the ‘ghost estate’ depicted ‘un-planned’ and poorly designed housing schemes (Kitchin et al., 2014), the stalling of the Adamstown development was perhaps more stark for the underlying ‘sustainability’ credentials it had to its name.
There are a number of noteworthy elements with regards to the transformation of post-crash Adamstown. First, in a similar vein to other approaches throughout the country, in the wake of the economic crash, a significant number of vacant dwellings were taken up via the launch of the Social Housing Leasing Initiative. This has meant that vacant properties were occupied by Housing Associations, such as Tuath and Cluid. As such, the proportion originally envisaged as social housing in Adamstown has risen. Secondly, while the years after the economic crisis were dominated by an overhang in housing, more recently, and in a manner that emphasizes the deep contradictions of market-led housing provision in Ireland, there has emerged a severe shortage in housing, a factor that has predominated political discussion in Ireland over the last two years. There are a number of strands to this, many of which go beyond the scope of this paper. However, the crisis is marked by a number of factors. These include an average rental increase of 45% since the bottom of the crash in 2011, 6 and 140,000 people on a waiting list for social housing. While the Irish Government is publicly seeking to promote policies addressing this shortage, such endeavours have been severely questioned by social commentators (Hearne, 2017). 7
To a large extent, the predominant narrative around Adamstown departed significantly from that of the ‘ghost estate’ (O’Callaghan et al., 2014). For example, the fact that Adamstown was a planned community led to a certain level of shock as to how it had not succeeded, both amongst interviewees and within various media. 8 However, in a similar vein to the ‘ghost estate’ phenomenon, the tendency has been to see the economic crash as a brief shock, rather than being indicative of a wider systemic problem (O’Callaghan et al., 2014). Indeed, recent policy changes and debates in Adamstown give further illustration to the manner in which the Irish model of neoliberal housing provision is currently being repackaged. First, and in keeping with wider trends in Dublin’s property market (Byrne, 2016), in 2015, the loan portfolio of one of the development companies, Maplewood Homes, was sold to another Irish-based developer, Cairn Homes. While this illustrates the continued role of local actors within the development sector, Cairn has the backing of an international equity firm, Lone Star. 9 Thus, as with the wider repackaging of urban space in Dublin in recent years, via, for example, the aforementioned bad bank, NAMA (Byrne, 2016), Adamstown is now subject to an increasingly internationalized funding model. Secondly, recently, South Dublin County Council has sought to amend the Adamstown SDZ as a means of reflecting the changed economic and social context of the post-crash era (South Dublin County Council, 2013). During the review stage of the SDZ, there was an explicit focus on what it was perceived could be delivered in terms of housing densities in the context of the prevailing market. This was summarized by South Dublin County Council (2013: 24) as follows: ‘The review of the planning and economic context underpinning the Scheme indicated that the residential densities set out under the approved Scheme exceed those achievable in the housing market for the foreseeable future’. Thus, the local authority sought to act in a manner that they perceived as facilitating the private landowners to restart development in Adamstown. However, it is important to note that in the review of the Planning board, An Bord Pleanala, this request was rejected, with the original densities retained. 10 This final factor is indicative of the notion, both originally contained in Adamstown but becoming more common-place in the context of the post-crisis recovery, that privatized development can be made more ‘sustainable’ through regulation – which itself is heavily resisted by private actors.
Finally, during the SDZ review phase, landowners outlined their concerns about the delivery of infrastructure in Adamstown. Here, developers were concerned with what they saw as unfair costs in terms of levies and similar contributions within the framework of a SDZ compared to non-SDZ locations.
11
This was reflected within ongoing debates around the future of stalled developments in Ireland at the time. For example, one respondent working in national government outlined fears around what might happen if such factors are not addressed:
If you’re not proactive, you know, the market will go round you. It’s like water; it’ll find its own course. If there’s demand there it’ll find its own course and it’ll end up being in the wrong damn place. So, you either dig in and find a way to unravel those STZ problems or you can kiss your plan goodbye, sustainable communities, all that lovely stuff. (Urban planner, central government)
There was thus a fear at various levels of governance that unless measures were taken to assist in, for example, the delivery of infrastructure, Adamstown would remain undeveloped. In response to such, recently South Dublin County Council has applied for a funding of 80 million Euro to invest in Adamstown and the nearby SDZ development at Clonburris. Moreover, the Irish Government has also put forward a plan for the delivery of 30,000 housing units on what have been termed ‘Major Urban Housing Sites’, of which Adamstown is designated to play a significant role. 12 The realities of promoting ‘sustainable urban development’ in the context of a private-led development industry thus raise a significant contradiction. While, on the one hand, there is a reluctance to be seen to assist the property industry, on the other hand there is also an embedded desire to ensure that locations like Adamstown succeed, with the private actors seen as essential for such to become a reality.
Conclusion
The example of Adamstown illustrates the importance of situating the dynamics of sustainable urban communities within the context of wider urban processes. From the perspective of its design and layout, Adamstown stands as an outlier from much of its surroundings. It stands opposed to the embedded approach to suburban development in Ireland and instead attempts to impose, at least spatially, an ideal of urban development based on density, permeability and walkability. Yet, its reality has to be viewed in the dominance of market forces within housing and the associated property-led boom and bust of the early 2000s. While, as is pointed out by the work of O’Callaghan et al. (2014), the image of the ‘ghost estate’ is one of half-built housing estates dotted amidst rural fields, the collapse of the Irish property market also had a significant impact upon what was mooted as a ‘sustainable urban community’. The internal contradictions to capitalist forms of urban regional transformation are thus brought fully into view in the context of Adamstown (Gottdiener, 1994; MacLeod, 2011). In this case it becomes even more striking in terms of the assumption around ‘sustainability’ embedded within the Adamstown plan.
In drawing upon post-political debates, the work of O’Callaghan et al. (2014) has demonstrated how the Irish ‘ghost estate’ acted as a form of ‘empty signifier’. In the case of Adamstown, this narrative differed slightly. Indeed, the predominant narrative around Adamstown was about its potential, with debates focusing upon how to achieve a form of balance between its development and the market. In a manner that reflects Swyngedouw’s (2010) reflections upon sustainability, in the case of Adamstown, sustainable urban development was invoked in a thoroughly institutionalized and neoliberalized manner, with the state providing the means for a fast tracking of privatized development. Moreover, throughout the interviews, a certain amount of surprise was registered as to how Adamstown ran into problems. While the interviewees were accepting of the wider systemic issues related to the economic bust, there emerged a tendency to focus upon the ‘plan’ as opposed to any questioning of the wider political–economic mode of delivery. From the perspective of post-political theory, the example of Adamstown is thus reflective of how notions of ‘sustainability’ are packaged in such a manner as to eschew wider rethinking of alternative models of delivery (Raco and Lin, 2012). Indeed, and in a manner that serves to highlight the internal contradictions of Adamstown, it is perceived that the development can only occur in the context of prevailing market conditions, with pressure coming to bear from development interests in recent years to alter the plan in a manner that is in their interests. Adamstown thus fits neatly within Swyngedouw’s (2009: 611) notion that within much contemporary urban politics: ‘Disagreement is allowed, but only with respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organizational fixes, the detail of managerial adjustments and the urgency of their timing and implementation’. The notion of ‘sustainability’ in the case of Adamstown is thus projected almost solely on the basis of ideals of density, walkability and transport connections, with the possibility of alternative models of delivery never even being discussed, and a reduced capacity at both the local and national levels to promote alternative approaches to housing delivery.
Following on from the work of Raco and Lin (2012), the foregoing is illustrative of a wider tendency to return to a ‘business as usual’ approach embedded within a wider discourse of private delivery and economic competitiveness. Such a reality raises serious questions about current modes of urban governance, particularly around how the imaginary of ‘sustainability’ in Adamstown has come to dominate narratives of housing provision at the exclusion of other possible urban futures. Indeed, while recent literature has perceived the development of designated development zones as ‘soft spaces’ (Haughton et al., 2013), it is worth noting the very real and ‘hard’ outcomes of such in the Adamstown case. Arguably, the adoption of the image of sustainability – and particularly the focus on widely accepted ideals of density and walkability – has served as a cloak to a much wider set of neoliberal processes, whereby there is an embedded assumption that the continuity of the plan is best served through private interests (Lawton and Punch, 2014). When situated within the realities of uneven development at the scale of the urban region, the case study of Adamstown raises questions about wider issues of housing inclusion, affordability and practices of ‘sustainability’.
Future work could seek to understand the everyday life of Adamstown in the context of its surroundings and in terms of the wider urban region in which it is situated. Previous work has demonstrated the tendency for eco-cities to become gated or enclave spaces for elites (Hodson and Marvin, 2010). However, it is important to note that Adamstown was never set out to be a space purely for elites, nor is it in anyway gated. Indeed, there is a need for further work to analyse and understand the wider dynamics at work within the context of social life in Adamstown. Future work might, for example, seek to understand the degree to which residents in Adamstown engage actively in what could be perceived as ‘sustainable practices’ and, indeed, the degree to which the daily practices of Adamstown differ from those of its surroundings and wider region. Following on from the work of Cheshire et al. (2013), it might seek to engage in understanding in what ways everyday life actually might differ in such a space compared with other ‘less planned’ spaces. 13 In evoking the work of MacLeod (2011), we are witnessing new and more complex forms of urban metropolitan restructuring throughout the urban regions of the world. One of the tasks of urban scholarship must be to understand how these spaces are interconnected across the urban and suburban realm, both in terms of structural dynamics and everyday life.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This paper was originally presented at the 2015 RC21 Conference ‘The Ideal City: Between Myth and Reality’, held in Urbino Italy, in August 2015. The author would like to thank Linda Cheshire for feedback on an earlier version of this paper, as well as the anonymous reviews and editors of European Urban and Regional Studies for their helpful comments during the review stage. The research for the paper was conducted through the support of the National Economic and Social Council, Ireland.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.