Statistics and climate action have a difficult relationship. Sometimes the statistics presented are not easily relatable, appearing abstract and therefore impersonal. Other times they can be presented at such a large scale, they seem to overwhelm our ability to act on the climate emergency. On this occasion, statistics were a starting point for Demolition Take Down, a research project initiated by two architects.

Let’s begin with the headline number of nine million tonnes of construction and demolition (C&D) waste produced in Ireland in 2021 as calculated by the Environmental Protection Agency [1]. This amounts to a staggering 48% of all waste produced in Ireland that same year [2]. In 2022, the Central Statistics Office estimated that the construction industry accounted for roughly 6% of the employed population in Ireland [3]. These three statistics are not absolutes, they fluctuate year on year [4]. It is the disproportionate relationship between the size of the waste production relative to the size of the producer that is the principal concern. This sparked a year-long project to understand why a small percentage of people had helped to produce such a large percentage of our nation’s waste. The gains from a potential change in attitudes and behaviour within this 6% club seemed a hopeful outcome to aim for.

This project was conducted in three parts. Part one gathered information primarily from a series of in-depth interviews with professionals operating in the construction industry on the back of an industry sentiment survey. Part two focused on an inter-disciplinary learning environment between students of architecture and of property economics. Part three was about dissemination and raising public awareness about the issue through a large-scale installation and supporting events, hosted by IMMA during September 2024.

In the beginning, care was taken to remain neutral in order to act as a go-between for various stakeholders in the industry. We appreciated a nuanced approach was required. The project departed from solely analysing statistical facts towards collating anecdotal evidence. It therefore painted a clearer picture of tensions between the economic mindsets of vested interests and the aspirational gumption of activists and academics.

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One area that this writer was focused on was the decision-making prior to buildings being demolished. The temptation to point towards the circular economy as the solution to C&D waste was resisted. While it is acknowledged that circularity is to be encouraged, it tends to make the unsustainable sustainable if relied upon. A lack of resources, imagination, skills, and knowledge is affecting top-down and bottom-up decisions, leading to the total removal of buildings from the built environment they each helped to shape. An engineer in a local authority put it rather gloomily “The only way C&D waste will reduce in this country is if there is another economic recession! It is unlikely that C&D waste will be reduced for the right reasons” [5]. This is not a future to wish for.

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The theme for this series of articles, "Future Reference", is apt because, in some instances, the total removal of a building or neighbourhood can make our future points of reference more uncertain. If you keep taking pieces of neighbourhood away incrementally, there is a chance that some people will later grieve for what is gone. They might walk through their neighbourhood where a building was demolished, replaced, or left as an empty site primed for future investment. Even if they can’t pinpoint what used to be there, they might feel a sense of loss. Some argue a reliance on demolition as the political tool of regeneration is leading us towards a nowhere place. In solving present problems, and searching for a better future, do we really need to erase the past?

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Public attitudes are the life and death of a building. Let us pause for a moment to consider problematic human behaviours like pursuing the path of least resistance through urban sprawl or the deliberate decline of parts of our cities and towns. Perhaps this momentary pause might take us from a top-down view – that in order to regenerate we must obliterate the past – towards a bottom-up approach: that sometimes the answer may be selective demolition, or even none at all. Whether empowering citizens to have more agency over their local development plans through delegated power would result in less waste is debatable; it would require an Irish construction industry that has the skill set and knowledge required to adapt existing buildings for new uses in a viable manner.

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Ultimately it will be our shared cultural and social values that will allow us to reduce carbon emissions and retain embodied carbon within our existing buildings. The challenge will be how to unlock the power of culture to get things moving in the direction of adaptive reuse. It is this writer’s hope that the Demolition Take Down project can build upon our research to date and find like-minded practitioners within the 6% club who are interested in rethinking the value system currently associated with our existing buildings.

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To encourage positive change, we intend to keep questioning and pushing back against current methods of practice and policy in Ireland. By working together, stitching new within old, we will ultimately make no "newer or greater contravention" [6] to the quality of our built environment.

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Arguably one of the most novel features of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) is its inclusion of ‘beauty’ as a core value. In tying the concept of beauty to sustainability and problem-solving, the NEB is appealing for a new sensitivity in the built environment. This will have a significant impact on how we think about architecture. Few lament the late Hawkins House in Dublin, however, the loss of its predecessor: the art-deco Theatre Royal, is mourned to the present day. Beauty matters, and retaining old buildings will require a re-evaluation of their beauty, while new-builds embodying the NEB concept of beauty might encounter fewer calls for their demolition and replacement.

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The climate crisis has been addressed by the European Commission with the launch of the European Green Deal in 2019, an ambitious legislative agenda to create the world’s first carbon-neutral continent by 2050. This was followed by the NEB in 2020, a cultural programme intended to engender connections between citizens and the goals of the Green Deal and enable the scaling up of effective local actions taking place across the EU.

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The NEB is structured around three core values: sustainability, inclusion, and beauty, arguing that combining a deep consideration of each of these values generates the maximum social and environmental benefit from any deployment of resources. The NEB promotes a revolution in mindsets, envisaging greater sensitivity to limiting resource use while achieving social justice, thereby ensuring a desirable, sustainable future for citizens.

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By centring the plan around beauty, the NEB recognises that part of communicating a more hopeful future is to offer a more beautiful alternative vision. The NEB does not advocate for any specific architectural aesthetic. While borrowing the name of the historical Bauhaus school, it does not endorse the modernist style associated with the movement. The name instead echoes the aims of the historical Bauhaus: to address the pressing crises of the times through design and innovative thinking. The NEB defines beauty as a rich emotional and sensual experience, brought about by the application of “sensitivity, intelligence, and competences” into the fashioning of satisfying experiences for people [1].

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The NEB offers guidance for those designing projects (including building projects/services/ products/community events etc.) on how to evoke the quality of beauty as understood by the initiative. It defines three levels of ambition, paraphrased here from the NEB Compass document [1]. First, projects should aspire to (re)activate the qualities of a site/context while promoting physical and mental well-being. Second, projects should seek to offer opportunities for connection between people, places, and the non-human world, fostering “a sense of belonging through meaningful collective experiences”. Finally, the highest ambition involves offering opportunities for new creative, social, and cultural currents to emerge/coalesce through the project. By considering each of these factors in relation to a project and tying them in with the values of sustainability and inclusion described elsewhere by the NEB, actors can optimise the benefits of their project and demonstrate the desirability of an NEB-aligned future.

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Since the advent of modernism, beauty has often been side-lined as an aspiration in architectural design, viewed with suspicion as a reactionary bourgeois value [2], or a relic of the clash of historical styles of the nineteenth century [3]. Modernists like Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer embraced functionalism, a rational approach to form and expression, denying the role of “art” in construction [4]. Functionalism found favour as an inexpensive and ideologically credible approach to building, which in less talented hands has resulted in an aesthetically impoverished built environment. The technical limitations of modernism for much of its history have resulted in a legacy of inefficient buildings, which has led to wholesale demolition in Dublin and elsewhere. The aesthetic and energy limitations of modern architecture have gained pertinence through the reconsideration of these buildings in terms of their embodied carbon and the consequent necessity to retain them.  

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The nature of architecture as a public art, with an involuntary relationship between the public and their exposure to architectural designs, has been argued to place an ethical duty on architects to strive for beauty in their work [5]. In a world where the demolition of buildings will become increasingly rare and perhaps exceptional, this ethical consideration becomes heightened. The lifespan of buildings and building envelopes will inevitably expand as carbon budgets shrink. The public acceptance of the retention of buildings can be influenced by the perceived presence of beauty. The NEB argues that public buy-in for a resource-restricted future will depend on selling it as a lifestyle improvement on the status quo. If buildings are to be retained indefinitely, they should embody the qualities the NEB seeks to imbue: a sensitive, intelligent reading of physical and social context, a compassionate appeal to our senses and emotional well-being, and the opportunity for connection and new social dynamics through thoughtful design. Whether the current crop of speculative developments achieves these goals is questionable; however, with the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis, building in the absence of these values may soon become unjustifiable.

As I watched the incredible spectacle of the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris this summer, a city that has been at the forefront of traffic reduction, I wondered whether we in Ireland would have the courage and the sense of pride in our capital city to put it on display to the world like that.

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Considering cities like Paris’ transformative ambition for traffic reduction, the initial stages of the Dublin City Transport Plan have experienced disproportionate media coverage relative to their gentle impact on the everyday lives of citizens. While I acknowledge that this article contributes to that volume of coverage, I think it is worth looking at the issue with a wider lens.

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In his recent book, The City of Today is a Dying Thing, Des Fitzgerald comes to the realisation that the consistent objective of town and city planning in the twentieth century, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin was “not really an attempt to transform urban space. Rather, it was an attempt to do away with the lively, messy, unpredictable city altogether” [1]. The title of Fitzgerald’s book comes from Le Corbusier’s 1929 work Urbanisme, which was feted on its publication as a solution to the “problem of the city” [2].

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This idea of cities as problems to be solved may explain some of the attitudes towards progress in our own capital city. In his seminal book on transport in Dublin, James Wickham reports that one of the reasons that people use cars in cities is to protect themselves from threats of violence, real or perceived, coming from outside the car [3]. In this context there is an obvious attraction to being able to drive from your safe, leafy suburb into a city-centre multi-storey car park, from where you can directly access the shops you wish to visit. You can be in the city without ever having to engage with the city.

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And perhaps there is good reason to view Dublin as a dangerous place, best avoided. The riots in Dublin city late last year and attacks on tourists have fed a narrative that the city centre is in decline and that people don’t want to go there. This narrative is not borne out by the reality.

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People still want to visit Dublin city and to spend their money there. Dublin City Council’s most recent Canal Cordon Count, from 2022, records that close to 180,000 people enter the city centre each day at the morning peak period. Of those entering the city only 28% do so by private car [4]. The latest report from the Dublin Economic Monitor records a continuing upward trajectory in retail spending going back to 2018. Even the impact of the Covid lockdown, which saw a dip in retail spending for quarter two of 2020, saw a return to the upward trajectory by quarter four of the same year. The biggest increases in spending have been in overseas visitors and in the entertainment sector [5].

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Therefore, the predicted negative impacts of the reduction in private cars in the city centre appear to be at best, exaggerated, while the benefits have perhaps been undersold. Recent supportive commentary on the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan has focussed on the need to reduce congestion and improve reliability of the bus network, the benefits of which are self-evident. Separately, the recent publication of a Noise Action Plan for Dublin has identified the Transport Plan as an important measure to “provide significant indirect noise reduction benefits” for the city centre [6]. The memory of the idyllic, quieter urban environment that prevailed during Covid lockdown still lingers, but we now know that reducing noise pollution is as much a public health issue as it is an aesthetic consideration [7].

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Amid the recent debates about the alarming increase in road deaths there has been little discussion about the direct relationship between the number of vehicles on the road and the number of traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. Reducing car traffic will make our cities safer for all, including car drivers.

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But perhaps the least discussed and the most important benefit that can accrue from a reduction in cars is the impact it has on social cohesion and community wellbeing. It is over fifty years since Don Appleyard first drew the connection between how heavily trafficked a street is and how well people know their neighbours [8]. He found that the isolation caused by heavy traffic was particularly acute for children and older people. This lack of a sense of community on heavily trafficked streets, he found, was tolerated by those who treated the street as a transient residence. Those who found it intolerable, especially families with children, moved elsewhere if they could. Those who were too poor to move, or too old, were left living in conditions they found intolerable. This is evidently not a good recipe for a strong and resilient urban community [9].

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A recent study found that Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe [10]. Ireland also has the second highest level of car-dependency in Europe [11]. This is no coincidence – the correlation between car-dependency and social isolation is well documented.

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Two and half weeks after the Olympic games first put Paris on display, we saw 20,000 people gather on the magnificent urban stage that is O’Connell Street in Dublin, to welcome home our Olympian heroes. Seeing this spectacle of young and old celebrating on the street gives me hope. perhaps we can learn to love the “lively, messy, unpredictable city” that is our capital, and that we can have the courage to make the decisions that will deliver a healthier, more attractive, and more liveable city.