Rethinking the Irish street

“Space does not reflect society, it expresses it. It is a fundamental dimension of society, inseparable from the overall process of social organisation and social change.” 1 Over the past twenty years, affordable cars, improved roads and relaxed planning decisions among other factors have led to an unprecedented growth of suburban sprawl outside of Ireland’s urban centres. With the car, people can travel freely when and where they want, meaning that proximity of home, workplace and other regular destinations no longer matters. A lack of adequate public transport infrastructure anywhere outside of Dublin has led to a complete dependance on the car, to the detriment of busses, bicycles and cars themselves, through massive increases in traffic. Ireland now faces a situation where its population, sprawled across the country cannot be effectively provided for in terms of public transport or facilities. In embracing the car, we have abandoned the walkable neighbourhood. In taking advantage of its benefits, we have become completely bound by it. We have replaced the street with the housing estate, where cars take precedence over all other users. Our cities, hundreds of years old, find it difficult to cope with a volume of traffic they were never designed to take. This has taken its toll on the streets of Ireland’s cities and towns. Stagnant traffic, noise and fumes have made them undesirable as places to inhabit, further feeding the hunger for more sprawl. A product of this massive growth in car use is that the distinction between road and street has largely been lost. Roads and streets both shape spaces and exist in many forms and scales. They are both infrastructural, yet behave very differently to one another and serve different functions. The primary function of the road is that of transport: the movement of a vehicle to its destination. The street is a destination in itself. It is both passage and place. In some cases, urban Irish streets are designated as national roads. This condition is most evident in Limerick, where O’Connell St, the city’s main street, is also designated the ‘N20’ National Primary Road. In actual fact almost half of the population live outside the city boundaries. In a situation where a road and a street are apparently interchangeable, I believe some meaning has been lost. We no longer have a true understanding of the function of the street and what it can offer us. We need to take a step back, examine our streets, their uses, what they are to us and what we want them to be.