Dublin’s O’Connell Street has just one resident left. What the area lacks most is not guards, it is people

The only people doing great business in Dublin’s north inner city these days are the fellas selling metal shopfront shutters. Dublin, particularly off the main streets, feels like the set of a post-apocalypse film – almost every premises is shuttered. A city on a wet Wednesday afternoon should be lively and restless; if not buzzing with energy, it should at least show signals of a commercial and residential pulse. Not so most of Dublin city. There are tourists, and a few shops and bars are trading, but vibrant cities need people, not just shoppers or day trippers.

Nearly a year after riots focused attention on the city centre, it is clear that what Dublin city lacks most is not gardaí, it is residents. People make cities and Dublin city doesn’t have enough citizens. Boost the population and we will transform the city.

The great American urbanist Jane Jacobs stressed that cities operate like delicate ecosystems in which every part is interdependent. Her writing focused on how cities actually work rather than how they ought to work and, as such, she was more of an anthropologist than a planner. Walking around our shabby capital the other day, it struck me that Dublin’s proposed rejuvenation could do with a bit of Jane Jacobs-style thinking. For Jacobs, the four principles of vibrant, enjoyable cities are:

• Permeability – roads and pedestrian pathways should be highly interconnected, offering an efficient and varied way of traversing the neighbourhood, and focused on improving walkability, without dead ends or culs-de-sac.

• Mixed use – a diversity of use (residential, commercial and retail) is essential for creating a sense of community and identity in an area, rather than having one homogenous zone.

• Density – cities should be crammed. Residential and commercial should be interlinked tightly.

• Natural surveillance – emphasis on building on a human scale (up to six-eight storeys) means residents with a stake in the place police their own streets better than guards. The more residents and business owners, the fewer guards you need.

If we enmesh these principles into our thinking, there is no reason why Dublin’s city centre couldn’t become one of Europe’s most happening addresses in a reasonably short space of time. Cities revitalise quickly and unexpectedly. For example, in the late 1980s, I remember visiting both Berlin and Paris, specifically two areas which then were regarded as edgy, verging on dangerous, Kreuzberg and Belleville.

Kreuzberg was West Berlin’s poorest area, home to a large Turkish population, smack up against the Wall. Every now and then the likes of David Bowie, Brian Eno or Iggy Pop might hang out for a while giving the place a vibe, but for most West Berliners, Kreuzberg wasn’t a place you wanted to live. Today it is transformed. Similarly, Belleville 30 years ago was widely seen as unsafe and a bit threatening. Today it is full of artists, street culture and economic energy. We see the same revitalisation story in Hackney in East London. In all cases, lower rents and cheaper property, associated with dereliction, dilapidation and vacancy, laid the foundations for rebirth. But policy changed, too.

Dublin 1 is the heart of the city, home to most of Dublin’s finest Georgian streets. We forget that once it was the poshest part of the city. Today it is a byword for urban decline. It should, according to the Jane Jacobs bible of planning, be diverse, offering a mix of residential, commercial and retail. The main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, is zoned exclusively retail. Once the shops close, everything is closed. This means it is dead at night. Dead streets are dangerous streets. Ironically the reason O’Connell Street is zoned retail is because the council was concerned about the proliferation of late-night fast food joints some years back. But surely there’s a more imaginative way of handling the capital’s main street than blanket retail zoning?

Did you know that there is only one resident left on O’Connell Street? Imagine O’Connell Street with a population of 1,000 or even 2,000? This could be a reality if the State were to buy the Hammerson plot of 5.5 acres between O’Connell Street and Moore Street (which has just been granted commercial planning permission for yet more shops. Once acquired, it could be rezoned residential and tendered for builders to build mixed developments of social and private homes. With the right urban density, O’Connell Street could be home to thousands of people. The Government taskforce’s suggestion that RTÉ move back to the GPO isn’t a bad idea at all, literally putting O’Connell Street back into the national conversation. And while O’Connell Street could be transformed into a living street by big State-backed moves, smaller adjacent moves might also be hugely effective.

For example, many small derelict sites and vacant premises all over Dublin 1 could be brought into use by what is described as “meanwhile use” in planning. This essentially means that the planners look the other way and allow the temporary use of vacant buildings or sites for a socially beneficial purpose until such time that the sites can realise their full long-term potential. It is a way to unlock underused spaces quickly. The concept first emerged in Europe in the 1970s, when deindustrialisation left hundreds of buildings empty in cities across the Continent. Some of the outside spaces, chairs and tables that were created during the pandemic, which are still used today, were created under “meanwhile use”.

London is the city that has most successfully capitalised on the value of temporary land-use, but why couldn’t inner city Dublin follow suit? Imagine how many small spaces, today derelict and vacant, could be brought into use? “Meanwhile use” is about getting good things done rather than waiting for perfection. And once things are done – a cafe opened, a market constructed or an artists’ collective housed – they become part of the furniture and the temporary becomes permanent. For everyone, most landlords included, occupancy is always better than vacancy.

“Meanwhile use” planning sees the city and city developments as a messy, work in progress rather than some perfect over-arching plan which covers every eventuality. Building by building, site by site, street by street, the city gradually comes back to life. Mixed residential, commercial and retail zoning, with a bias towards residential zoning, needs to become Dublin’s norm.

Critically, the State must lead and the State must spend. Inner city Dublin requires love, affection and kindness. This means small things like litter wardens, loads of them, and caretakers in old blocks of corpo flats, again lots of them. More gardaí, obviously. What about “essential workers” being given access to subsidised homes in Dublin 1, housing for teachers, gardaí and nurses who work in the area? These are all doable, because we have the cash.

Revitalising Dublin, like doing up your home, requires money. The council must be given a huge budget to buy big sites and make them available to builders immediately. A figure of €1 billion would not be outrageous. That’s just on the capital side. The city will need hundreds of new workers who must be paid and its current budget will also have to increase to cover this. But this is what it takes.

The State has the money. Spend it and watch the city bloom.