Membership of Type allows unlimited access to our online library. Join to support new research and writing on the design of the built environment.
You can read more about membership here.
Already a member? Login to your account to avail of unlimited downloads.
Membership of Type allows unlimited access to our online library.
Join to support new research and writing on the design of the built environment.
You can read more about membership here.
Individual Membership Fees
Individual membership is available on a monthly or annual basis.
The fee is €10/month or €99/year.
Planning systems tend to be better at preventing what they don’t want than enabling what they do want. The Planning and Development Bill is process-driven: it is to be hoped that its effects on the practice of architecture – on how we move between design stages – will be positive, but we shouldn’t look to it for design intent. Indeed, the component of the Bill that might most effect how we design is notable for its lack of detail. Urban Development Zones (UDZ) have the potential to change how and what we design. They define a mechanism by which the planned use of lands is specifically designated by local authorities with early public engagement to restrict what landowners can do with land within these zones, unless they accord with the designated intention. UDZs potentially move power back to public authorities to say what is developed; they could take Ireland toward much-envied Dutch or German models of development. Housing for All – the source of the UDZ concept and one of three docments that arguably most influence what we design [2] – limits its concerns to only one sector of the built environment: housing. For a broader demonstration of planning intent, we need to look to the National Planning Framework: Ireland 2040 (NPF) and the Climate Action Plan.
The Climate Action Plan – across its 2019, 2021 and 2023 iterations – is clear in its intent. An urgent response to the climate crisis is required. Across various sectors it describes change needed and pathways to achieving this change. Spanning from the level of the building in its development of performance standards and its promotion of low-carbon construction, to the level of the settlement level in its creation of pathfinder decarbonising zones, the Climate Action Plan’s implications for design are huge – a root and branch reassessment of the energy we use, not just to heat, cool, and light our buildings, but in the production and transport of construction materials, construction processes, maintenance, repair, and disposal of buildings and infrastructure. Notwithstanding this, spatial planning, design, and architecture are only a small part of the Climate Action Plan’s concerns.
Planning in Ireland is based on the principle of subsidiarity – decisions should be made at the level closest to their effect. To understand the effects and intentions of planning toward design, we need to start at the top of the spatial planning hierarchy with the National Planning Framework ‘Ireland 2040’ and follow its vision down to the local level. The NPF describes intentions at the national level for how and where we design: a compact growth model of higher densities mostly within existing urban footprints; the growth of Dublin to be equalled by the combined growth of other cities; the combined growth of all Irish cities to be equalled by development directed towards key towns across the country. The Ministerial Guidelines that followed the NPF described in more detail what this compact growth model should look like in terms of densities related to transport connectivity, and what this might mean for forms of development. Having filtered down through the Regional Assemblies to work out the numbers, these national intentions find expression at the local level where their effects will be experienced as described by County or City Development Plan.
The final document referenced here, Places for People: The National Policy on Architecture, makes important commitments to fostering a culture of architecture Ireland. It recognises how crucial design’s role will be in achieving the aims of the National Planning Framework and the Climate Action Plan in an equitable way across Irish society. Places for People reaffirms why architecture is important; Ireland 2040 tells us where and how it will be located.
This returns us to Sorkin’s maxim. Architecture sometimes is participatory to varying levels, but it is not required to be. Design has no inherent analogue to planning’s subsidiarity. The statutory processes of planning are the mechanism by which concerns regarding the common good are brought to bear on the potentially individualised practice of architecture. Proposals are approved or rejected based on their compliance with local development plans which, for at least twenty years, have been placing increased emphasis on describing their intended built environment – not just development standards, but urban structure, quality design, healthy place making, and sustainable neighbourhoods. The effects of architecture, in other words, as described by Places for People.
If together this demonstrates that encoded within the suite of documents the NPF oversees are a set of intentions toward architecture and design, can anything be said of its effects? No, not yet. The NPF has yet to reach its first review; the first generation of development plans that follow it have only recently been agreed. Instead, it may be more beneficial at this stage to push farther into the question of intentions. Since architectural quality largely remains absent from development management functions of the Irish planning system, how can a degree of design control be provided, responsive to the needs of the common good, as exemplified by the principle of subsidiarity?
The failures of past models of urbanism need hardly be rehearsed here. Suffice to say that should architects, urban designers, and planners ever feel the urge to act as boosters for good intentions (over their failure’s very real social effects), they ought to keep a copy of poet Caleb Femi’s collection Poor to hand. A reflection on a childhood spent on the notorious and now demolished North Peckham Estate – described by Jonathan Glancy as the Athens Charter built ‘too quickly, too cheaply, too brutally and without the necessary skills’ [5] – Femi’s ‘A Designer Talks of Home/A Resident Talks of Home’ [6] should make even the most ardent evangelic formalist pause.
Can we perceive within the foregoing an intention to limit architecture’s ability to experiment at scale? Probably yes, and not unreasonably: credit effects, not intentions. But experiments at scale gave us Barcelona’s Eixample, wherein a new model for urban expansion has provided near limitless variation at the level of the building plot, the urban block, and now the superblock.
What is the effect, if in our intentions toward architecture we are ‘too suspicious of formal experiment and overly sanguine about the dispensability of architecture as an artistic practice?’ [7]. We avoid Femi’s North Peckham estate, sure, but we also miss out on Cerda’s Eixample.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
In 2024, Coastal Register received the SOM Foundation European Research Prize [1], an architectural research-for-practice project at the coast of Mulranny in County Mayo - a national Decarbonising Zone (DZ) with an objective of reducing carbon emissions by 51% by 2030 [2]. Across three phases - framework, fieldwork, groundwork - the project engages with the community, stakeholders, cross-disciplinary researchers and practitioners, and politicians. An emphasis emerged on data collection as a method of bridging consultation and capital funding, underpinning protective / restorative landscape-based design interventions, and linking research and practice with policymaking.
Within this context, it is a timely moment to focus on policymaking - not because the coast has suddenly become unstable, but because its instability is becoming impossible to ignore. Writing in April, after a winter of storms, the aftermath is now visible: collapsing paths, retreating edges, failing infrastructure. At the same time, this is the point in the year when reports are published, priorities set, and funding decisions made. It is a moment suspended between damage and response - when policymaking becomes most consequential. In this context, Mulranny DZ is acting as a test-site for examining whether existing research, practice and policy frameworks are equipped to address complex coastal challenges.
In its basic sense, the coastline is the boundary between terrestrial and marine environments - where land meets sea. However, the coast is not a permanent line drawn on a map, but a dynamic system in which land and sea are constantly eroding and accreting in response to natural and human time-scales [3]. Historically, the response to coastal erosion is to build structures for resistance, ensuring this boundary remains fixed. This is done under the assumption that the coastline has always been in its current position and must never be allowed to change. However, coastal processes operate on a parts-to-a-whole relationship. For example, building a sea wall in front of an eroding cliff may stop that area from eroding, but it also stops sediment from that eroding cliff from entering the coastal sediment budget. If this sediment is supplying beaches down drift, these beaches would erode. Hence, solving one erosion problem has created another, embedding a cycle in which each intervention necessitates another [4]. Over time, this defensive logic has been institutionalised through engineering standards, planning systems, and funding mechanisms which prioritise site-based resistance over system-scale processes [5].
This assumption is now being questioned, with research proving the effectiveness of ‘soft’ nature-based solutions over traditional ‘hard’ infrastructure. NATURESCAPES demonstrates how saltmarshes attenuate wave energy and function as adaptive coastal protection infrastructures [6], while SLOWATERS builds agricultural land through water retention measures [7]. Studies in the Maharees [8] and Grattan Beach [9] examine dune systems as socio-ecological landscapes shaped by governance. BLUE C positions wetlands as carbon-sequestering systems [10], while SWAMP investigates measures to improve water quality in peatlands [11]. Taken together, their work makes clear that the issue is not a lack of knowledge, but the absence of policy frameworks capable of acting on that knowledge at the large-scale at which coastal systems operate.
.jpg)
At Mulranny, data collection has become a design practice rather than a preliminary step, operating as a mechanism for both design and policy action. Rather than introducing infrastructure to control natural processes, at this stage the project proposes light-touch infrastructure for recording cultural, ecological, and legislative conditions through drawing, mapping, and photography - such as plinths that direct repeat photography towards calibrated viewpoints. This is producing an evidence base that can support both design decisions and the buy-in, risk, need, and impact required for capital funding. By involving the community as citizen scientists, the project also raises awareness of coastal change. In doing so, it aims to reduce reliance on reactive interventions and support the saltmarsh as primary infrastructure - a first, rather than last, line of defence.
If research and practice are aligning, why does implementation remain so slow? With Paul Lawless, I posed parliamentary questions and found that Ireland’s policy context is fragmented.
A key challenge was simply identifying who is responsible for managing the coast. The answer is not one particular Government department – rather, at least nine departments have jurisdiction over the coast, alongside layers of commonage and private ownership [12]. It is also problematic that approximately twenty public bodies with a remit in this area have their own governance structures and policy objectives and never the twain shall meet.
This fragmentation extends to the data that underpins investment. Baseline infrastructural and ecological recording is incomplete. There is no national inventory of coastal infrastructure [13], meaning we lack an understanding of what exists, requires maintenance, and who is responsible. A national survey of saltmarshes was carried out in 1998 [14], and the Saltmarsh Monitoring Project was then setup between 2006–2008 [15], with limited partial revisits in 2016–2017 [16] and no subsequent monitoring programme since - leaving gaps of over a decade between site observations.
Even ownership of the coast is not straightforward. While the Foreshore Act 1933 / Maritime Area Planning Act 2021 presumes the foreshore to be state-owned, this presumption is not absolute, and the spatial extent of state- and privately-owned foreshore has not been comprehensively delineated [17]. This is further complicated by coastal change and historic reclamation, where legal boundaries do not consistently align with physical landscapes [18]. In practice, licences may be issued for areas the State is assumed to own, despite the absence of a clearly defined spatial or legal framework [19]. This creates uncertainty in decision-making and presents practical barriers for communities and local authorities.
These issues are compounded by the absence of an overarching policy framework. Despite thirty years of discussion documents and legislative proposals, Ireland remains the only island nation without a national coastal management strategy [20 a, b], with only a report outlining how one might be prepared [21 a, b]. The National Landscape Strategy has lapsed without replacement [22]. The committee drafting Ireland’s Nature Restoration Plan raised concerns over the absence of funding for nature within the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund under the National Development Plan [23]. This exposes a clear contradiction between Ireland’s funding framework and its legal environmental obligations. Binding European Union requirements oblige Ireland to restore at least 20% of its land and sea areas by 2030, yet the State’s principal investment framework extending to 2035 does not provide adequate support for achieving these targets. Instead, most of the fund has been allocated to MetroLink. Ireland is also already falling significantly short of its emissions reduction targets, highlighting a widening gap between policy commitments and implementation [24]. Indeed, Ireland’s record for implementing EU Directives that provide protection for coastal environments has mostly been reactive in response to infraction proceedings [25].
In Ireland’s policymaking context, the absence of a coherent framework is not simply an administrative problem; it shapes what can be known, measured, and ultimately acted upon at the coast. Where policy remains fragmented and data incomplete, decision-making will be necessarily partial and contradictory (26 a, b). At Mulranny, data collection has become a means of addressing this condition: a way of aligning lived experience, environmental processes, and design-thinking, while making these legible to policy. But evidence on its own does not lead to implementation. What is required is a department for the coast and a national coastal management strategy with funding attached, cross-departmental governance that aligns responsibility, and nature-based solutions treated as primary infrastructure rather than optional strategy. Without this, fragmentation persists, decisions remain inconsistent, and the cycle of damage and response continues.
The coast is not a fixed line; it is a dynamic, shifting environment shaped by erosion, accretion, tidal rhythms, and human intervention. However, while the coast moves, our policies remain static.
Read
Our present unequal urban structure is not accidental, but by design [2, 7, 13]. It emerges from systemic failure to acknowledge the needs of women and other genders that do not conform to the heteronormative, able-bodied white male default. This is evident in the restricted mobility of women in the city, the scheduling of the workday that often interferes with caring responsibilities and the threat of Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) [1] that exerts control over women’s bodies and how they inhabit space. Darkness alters perception, diminishes passive surveillance, and reshapes social dynamics, often concentrating alcohol-fuelled economies and male-dominated activities in specific zones. After dark, streets feel dangerous, spaces of refuge are inaccessible, and mobility options are more complex. The mental map of the city shifts according to the geographies of fear and perceived unsafety. [2, 3]
Women’s mobility becomes constrained not only by physical design but also by cultural expectations, risk calculations, and the burden of self-protection, the all-too-familiar and emotionally exhausting ‘safety work’, such as altering routes to get home safe, keys in the pocket, private taxis at night to avoid public transport, and journey-tracking text messages. Feminist scholars have described this as a temporal injustice: access to the city is structured not only by where one can go, but when and under what conditions [4, 5]. The “right to the night” thus extends Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city into the temporal domain, asserting that equitable urban citizenship must include a safe and meaningful presence after dark [6]. Lefebvre imagined the city as a process, not finite, which aligns with Doreen Massey’s consideration of urban space as dynamic “never finished, never closed…as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.
Caroline Criado Perez exposes the pervasive gender data gap, which perpetuates the gender inequalities and promotes a neoliberal agenda which seeks to protect male supremacy [7]. She argues the lack of sex-disaggregated data results in a world designed by and for men, effectively rendering women invisible and creating significant, often dangerous, inequalities. Architecture, urban design, and planning have historically privileged male norms of movement, visibility, and occupation, resulting in nighttime landscapes that intensify vulnerability for some and enable freedom for others. Can we play a role in addressing this inequity of freedom by reflecting on the status quo and challenging the lived reality that restricts women at night?
Through a radical feminist lens [8], which understands intersectionality [9] and seeks to dismantle patriarchy as the social system of women’s oppression, we can reframe our approach to designing public spaces to promote greater social justice. Emerging feminist research positions co-design as a gender-responsive architectural method that can translate lived experiences into spatial change.
Rather than treating participation as a procedural requirement, these examples advance co-design as a supportive knowledge-producing practice that can challenge the male-normative assumptions embedded in briefs, standards, and spatial typologies. Feminist urbanism has long argued that everyday experience - particularly the embodied, emotional, and temporal dimensions of navigating the city - constitutes a form of expertise [8]. Women’s diverse narratives of fear, avoidance, and adaptation are spatial data that reveal how environments function in practice. This data then emboldens architects and urban designers to act with purpose, respectful of the needs of those the public space will serve.
What methodologies might we employ to understand lived experience at night? One such critical framework is Doreen Massey’s theory of Power Geometry [10]. Massey argued that space is constituted through relations of power that enable some groups to move freely while constraining others. Applied to night-time urbanism, Power Geometry reveals how the ability to inhabit darkness is itself a privilege. Men, particularly those aligned with dominant social groups, often move through nighttime space with relative autonomy. In contrast, women, girls, and other marginalised groups experience heightened surveillance of their own behaviour and curtailed spatial freedom.
Co-design, a participatory design approach, when informed by feminist principles seeks to redress gender inequality and elevate lived experience as design expertise, redistributing epistemic and spatial power. When women and girls participate in defining problems and generating solutions, they expose the micro-geographies of safety and danger that conventional planning overlooks: poorlylit desire lines, bus stops without escape routes, dead frontages that eliminate refuge, or thresholds where harassment routinely occurs. Translating these insights into architectural parameters can reshape environments in ways that support presence rather than avoidance. Importantly, such changes are not limited to token gestures like brighter lighting, increased surveillance or police presence. Feminist design emphasises relational safety: the presence of other people, diversity of activities, and spaces that support care, waiting, and rest.
Massey’s framework also cautions that co-design does not automatically equal empowerment. Power relations persist within participatory processes themselves. Whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is deemed credible, and who ultimately controls implementation remain critical questions. For co-design to translate into spatial change, it must occur early enough to influence briefs, budgets, and land-use decisions, and must be supported by institutions capable of acting on its outcomes. Otherwise, participation risks becoming symbolic, leaving the underlying geometry of power intact. State systems must support the opportunity for meaningful engagement and the dynamism that is required for context-specific approaches to emerge, led by the community [11].
Architecture has the capacity to materialise social relations. Nighttime environments are not neutral backdrops but active agents shaping behaviour and perception. By treating women’s diverse lived experiences as architectural knowledge, designers can move beyond security-driven responses, applying defensible architecture strategies [12], such as Safety by Design, toward supportive environments that promote inclusivity. Democratic planning processes in the form of gender-responsive co-design do not simply act as a tool for consultation but a mechanism for producing new forms of space - spaces where the right to the night is not aspirational but meaningfully constructed. Co-design then becomes an architectural practice of spatial justice, promoting equitable access to the city after dark.
The design of our cities stems from long-standing patriarchal power systems that govern urban development, influence financial allocation, compound social inequality, and subjugate women. These inequalities are further amplified at nighttime. Within a patriarchal planning system, how can we design safe, inclusive and accessible urban spaces which remain agile to the demands of all genders?
Read
Although scattered voices have raised concerns over the years, debate within the field on the problems associated with architectural renderings have remained scarce. The heightened visibility and public concern surrounding renderings would seem to warrant greater scrutiny; yet, broadly speaking, this has not yet materialised [1].
Instances of public critique and backlash against renderings continue to surface in public discourse. Earlier this year, an Instagram reel depicting the contrast between early renderings and photos of realised public constructs in Copenhagen received over 2.7 million views and thousands of comments [2]. Also recently viral was AntiRender, a website allowing users to upload a rendering and, in return, receive a bleak, ‘realistic’ reinterpretation of it, stripped of ‘happy families’ and ‘impossibly green trees’ [3]. In the past decade or two, more consequential cases have emerged, including instances in which renderings became central to an organised community protest[4], a pre-emptive project closure and resignation [5], and even the unlawful replication of a project [6].
A reason for the passivity towards the responsibilities of renderings may lie in the tendency to frame present concerns through a ‘this-has-always-existed’ lens. A recent news article on manipulative images, amid widespread anxiety over the harmful spread of AI deepfakes, illustrates how concern is raised only to be quickly shut down [7]. Its central takeaway is that manipulated images are nothing new: the author alleges such images have long existed. Attempts to discuss renderings, whose current debates on imagery deception and societal harm are not too distant from those surrounding deepfakes, are similarly curtailed by this reflex.
This appeal to a limited interpretation of tradition is problematic. While it is sensible to situate contemporary concerns within their histories, it is specious to use historical resemblance to trivialise and undermine present problems. By assimilating current issues to past instances, the view risks turning a blind eye to key differences, such as scale and access, that may significantly alter their impact.
More importantly, this tendency assumes that direct continuity or lineage can be traced among imaging technologies; for example, that renderings today are essentially the same as those referred to in the past as renderings. Yet, as John May argues, imaging technologies have undergone foundational transformations such that they may share ‘virtually nothing in common’ with earlier iterations of the same technology beyond name and resemblance [8]. However, making sense of what has changed, and how, is complicated. Architecture, he suggests, has struggled with this confusion [9].
Susan Piedmont-Palladino similarly notes foundational shifts in the evolution of architectural renderings and how such shifts altered and obscured their understanding [10]. In earlier eras, she observes, architectural renderings were ‘more akin to paintings,’ but later they were more closely aligned with photography. These categories carry widely diverging public associations, with the former tending toward imaginative connotations and the latter toward associations with truth. Renderings’ sly movement between these fields has led to what Piedmont-Palladino describes as an ‘almost exquisite confusion between real and unreal.’
Renderings became entangled in interpretive ambiguity not only through visual changes, but also through their increasing alignment with data-driven simulation. This trajectory persists today, as rendering practices rely on increasingly sophisticated digital models, environmental data, and physics-based simulations. Previous literature indicates that improvements in accuracy were often presented as a means of mitigating renderings’ ethical implications [11]. However, the realisation of such aspirations has, in many ways, had the opposite effect. By incorporating greater fact-resemblance, renderings have reshaped how seriously their imagery are perceived. This has and continues to intensify public expectations of trust and validity, raising the stakes of their representations.
These technological and associative developments affect public judgment and understanding. There remains significant confusion regarding how architectural visualisations should be framed and how their truth-values versus their imaginative status ought to be assessed, despite their ubiquitous presence in decision-making processes. This evolving ambiguity should not be overlooked. However, ethical concerns and questions of trust surrounding renderings have become so entrenched that the topic is often treated as settled, and new calls for attention are readily dismissed. Much like the cautionary tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, concerns regarding renderings are discounted because they resemble earlier alarmism. Yet it is worth recalling that, in the tale, despite the town’s seemingly justified dismissal, in the end the wolf was dangerously real.
In professional discussions around architecture today, renderings are the elephant in the room. They are a principal means of communicating large-scale project proposals and frequently face widespread criticism on their accuracy and ethics. As a general subject, however, they remain marginally studied. Are attacks on their realism merely hysterics, or a cause for concern?
Read
Website by Good as Gold.