Future cities in Ireland

Leif Johnson

Does anyone think places like Dundalk or Ennis will become cities in the future?

Frynge

No and no.

green jay

Considering they down graded Kilkenny one of our oldest cities, i don't think so

fleet_admiral

Sligo may, imo

newmug

They should be making cities smaller and denser. We only have a finite amount of agricultural land, the amount of land wasted around Meath and Kildare to accommodate dublin during the boom is just scandalous. "Planners" me backside!

D Trent

Athlone definitely will

Subpopulus

The criteria distinguishing a city from a town in Ireland is essentially an administrative one. As far as I know there's no particular legal route that could be used to create a new city, presumably since there's never been any need to create new cities since the founding of the Free State and there was never any legislation created to do so.

So for a town to become a city there would have to be some good administrative reason - perhaps the town was too large to be properly run by the county council. But with the current system of uniting city and county councils I don't see how this might happen. You could also offer ceremonial city status, essentially a mark of prestige, and run the city as before, but again, there's no legal precedent and you'd need new legislation for that. None of that is insurmountable, but I'd wonder what conditions would need to be in place to require the government to legislate for the creation of new cities.

If you were looking at population as a gauge to a town becoming a city I'd imagine that they've have to be the size of Waterford for that to happen. Waterford has 50,000 people. In another twenty or thirty years perhaps Dundalk and Drogheda may be the same size that Waterford is now, but it will require adding about 10-15,000 people to the population of each. They both have about 38,000 people in each town. They're both fairly well placed to grow to that level - they're on the well-populated east coast and have good access to transport infrastructure. Swords also has ambitions for city status, but I can't really see that happening - it's really just a suburb of Dublin. I also remember some South Dublin County Councillors campaigning a few years back for Tallaght to be awarded city status, which was a bit mad.

I don't see too many other places that might become cities in the near future. Some people (mostly Sligo County Councillers) like to think of Sligo as a city, or at least aspire to becoming one. Ennis and Carlow I've also heard of having notions of gaining city status. You could of course just designate them as cities for the craic, like they do in the UK. Newry and Lisburn became cities in 2002 as part of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Liz, but they're not really cities in my mind. Lisburn is just a sprawling suburb of Belfast, and Newry is still a grey and dreary town.

Subpopulus

green jay wrote: »

Considering they down graded Kilkenny one of our oldest cities, i don't think so

It was hardly downgraded. It's not had a city council since the mid-nineteenth century and has been run like any other large town in Ireland ever since. It's still allowed to refer to itself as Kilkenny City, even if it doesn't have any of the legal trapping of city status.

dubhthach

Subpopulus wrote: »

The criteria distinguishing a city from a town in Ireland is essentially an administrative one. As far as I know there's no particular legal route that could be used to create a new city, presumably since there's never been any need to create new cities since the founding of the Free State and there was never any legislation created to do so.

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1937/en/act/prv/0003/print.html

Superceed by the conversion of Galway to County Borough in 1985
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1985/en/act/pub/0007/print.html

Galway in 1985, it had been upgraded from UDC to Borough in 1937 (though still described as a "Town")

dubhthach

Dún Laoghaire from it's formation in 1930 was for all intensive purposes a seperate city, even though it was regarded as just a "Borough"

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1930/en/act/pub/0027/print.html

Mr_Muffin

Waterford could easily be labelled a town and i don't think anyone would challenge it.

Subpopulus

dubhthach wrote: »

Galway in 1985, it had been upgraded from UDC to Borough in 1937 (though still described as a "Town")

Hmmm. So was 'borough' just another way of saying 'city' in Irish legal terms?

dubhthach

Subpopulus wrote: »

Hmmm. So was 'borough' just another way of saying 'city' in Irish legal terms?

Technically no, as a Borough such as Galway (post 1937) was still under control of the local county council. Galway thus only became legally a city with 1985 act when it became a county borough.

Dún Laoghaire in comparison basically was a corpus separatum as Dublin county council had no authority within the Borough boundary (which in 1991 had a population bigger than either Galway or Limerick).

Basically it was a "county Borough" in all but name.

househero

If we cut income & corporation tax in half. We could have a huge amount of cities and a population more suitable for our land mass. With more diversity.

Nobody lives here. Which is the main reason why no towns/cities will expload in population any time soon.

newmug

househero wrote: »

If we cut income & corporation tax in half. We could have a huge amount of cities and a population more suitable for our land mass. With more diversity.

Nobody lives here. Which is the main reason why no towns/cities will expload in population any time soon.

Good! Ireland is too small to have cities. We only have 4 million people, there are "towns" in other countries with bigger populations. We only have room for 1 major city, that is enough.

jd

newmug wrote: »

They should be making cities smaller and denser. We only have a finite amount of agricultural land, the amount of land wasted around Meath and Kildare to accommodate dublin during the boom is just scandalous. "Planners" me backside!

It's politicians that do the zoning - it's a reserved function!

Fiskar

newmug wrote: »

Good! Ireland is too small to have cities. We only have 4 million people, there are "towns" in other countries with bigger populations. We only have room for 1 major city, that is enough.

Think you need to check your figures

http://www.cso.ie/multiquicktables/quickTables.aspx?id=cna13

given the next census will be 2016 we are probably at 5 million and growing fast. Add to that the imigrant population over the next 30 years away from desert areas we will probably be at 8 million

Rock of Gibraltar

newmug wrote: »

Good! Ireland is too small to have cities. We only have 4 million people, there are "towns" in other countries with bigger populations. We only have room for 1 major city, that is enough.

I think you've got to take an all island view on these things which puts us at 6.4m as of the last census, its reasonable to think that the population will be above 9m and maybe close to 10m by 2030.

In my view we should be trying to build up the towns in the Dublin-Belfast belt to make things a bit more Randstad-y, a conurbation, a improving the transport links to achieve that.
Similarly in the south centred on Cork.

monument

newmug wrote: »

Good! Ireland is too small to have cities. We only have 4 million people, there are "towns" in other countries with bigger populations. We only have room for 1 major city, that is enough.

Country/area | Area size | Population
Republic of Ireland | 70,273 km2 | ~4,609,600 people
Randstad (total), Netherlands | 8,287 km2 | 7,100,000
Randstad (urban), Netherlands | 4,300 km2 | 6,600,000
Netherlands | 41,543 km2 | ~16,912,640 people

Top ten Dutch cities:
Amsterdam 741,636
Rotterdam 598,199
The Hague 474,292
Utrecht 290,529
Eindhoven 209,620
Tilburg 199,613
Groningen 181,194
Almere 176,432
Breda 167,673
Nijmegen 158,732

* Some of these cities have larger metro populations, just as Dublin City is not the full population of Dublin etc, does not take conurbation into account ect

Gonzo

newmug wrote: »

Good! Ireland is too small to have cities. We only have 4 million people, there are "towns" in other countries with bigger populations. We only have room for 1 major city, that is enough.

I kinda agree with this, while our population is growing very slowly Dublin is the only real city in the country in terms of population and size. Places like Galway, Limerick, Cork and Sligo are only equivalent to medium/large towns in other European countries. Belfast would be the second largest city on the island but is still a small city and not part of the Republic so doesn't really count.

If we were to develop a second major city I would choose Athlone as it's in the center of the country, only an hour from Dublin by motorway and rail, as well as quick to get to from most parts of the country.

Darkest Horse

dubhthach wrote: »

intensive purposes

Sorry, I don't like to do this, especially to a mod, but it has to be pointed out. It's:

'intents and purposes'

Aard

If we're talking about administrative cities, that's a hugely complicated argument about economies of scale and regional governance.

The other definition of city (i.e. a large settlement) is independent of its administrative boundaries. There have been many theses written on Ireland's projected spatial development. In very general terms, the north east of the country is likely to see the greatest rate of population increase. Dundalk, Drogheda, Navan, Dunshaughlin, Ashbourne, Swords, Balbriggan, Malahide, Maynooth, Naas, Newbridge, Kildare, Bray, Greystones. These places will see their populations grow much faster than the roughly 1% per annum that the rest of the country sees. Proximity to the global market (in other words, Dublin) and good transport links will facilitate this growth.

Ireland is missing a middle tier of cities in the 200k-500k region. Since Cork isn't gonna fill that void any time soon, population growth will concentrate in the well-connected Leinster towns. Maybe the first few to break the 50k threshold will be Dundalk, Drogheda, Navan, Swords, Sallins/Naas, and Bray.

KCAccidental

Aard wrote: »

If we're talking about administrative cities, that's a hugely complicated argument about economies of scale and regional governance.


Ireland is missing a middle tier of cities in the 200k-500k region. Since Cork isn't gonna fill that void any time soon

it will if the boundary is changed.

SpaceTime

KCAccidental wrote: »

it will if the boundary is changed.

Cork's 'metro area' is about 250,000 - 399,000 depending where you decide to draw the line.

You've basically got metropolitan areas of :

Dublin >1.27m (527,612 official city) - Boundary tight - excludes many suburban areas.
Cork 300,000 (119,230 official city) - Boundary very tight - excludes huge % of suburban areas.
Limerick 108,000 (95,854 official city) - Looser boundary
Galway about 80,000 (75,529 official city) - Looser boundary
Waterford 68,000 (46 732 official city) - Fairly tight boundary that excludes suburban growth.

(Those are the only official cities, Sligo etc, are towns and are significantly smaller than any of those)

Most Irish commentators grossly overestimate the size of Dublin by including the widest possible definition of metropolitan area while only taking in the official city pops of the other cities.

Part of the reason for this is some people will just take the entire population of Dublin City and what was Dublin County as "Dublin"

There are some utterly ludicrous comparisons done between Dublin and London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona etc all of which have metro areas >5m and London and Paris over 10m.

It's comparable to Glasgow, Manchester, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, etc... Not huge cities like the above.

Cork in particular is very definitely in need of boundary extensions.

Dublin itself needs them too. The Dublin City Council area should take in about 1m people.

The treatment of the cities other than Dublin as comparable to small towns in the way people discuss things here is completely ridiculous. It causes massive problems with planning and infrastructural development in those cities. They should be treated as major regional hubs.

Aard

KCAccidental wrote: »

it will if the boundary is changed.

No - you refer to administrative boundaries as a definition of city. Urban Cork has about 200,000. No imaginary line is going to change that.

al22

Australia announced 5 million working visas in 2015 with a permanent residency option. It would be easier and cheaper to make Ireland a desert.

Darkest Horse

al22 wrote: »

Australia announced 5 million working visas in 2015 with a permanent residency option. It would be easier and cheaper to make Ireland a desert.

I thought all of your kind had already left for that overrated country. If you prefer it there, why not seek out one of those visas.

dubhthach

Technically speaking Belfast falls into the 200-500k category (well or perhaps 200-700k would be better!)

The current all-Ireland population is approx 6.4million, there's some debate that we will be looking at a population of between 8 and 10 million by 2050 on current predictions. I'd be very surprised if the vast majority of this population growth wasn't in urban areas.

al22

My opinion - only a small parts of Dublin are really looking as a city, the rest is a big countryside called a Great Dublin area.

Aard

dubhthach wrote: »

Technically speaking Belfast falls into the 200-500k category (well or perhaps 200-700k would be better!)

Yep - a very interesting situation. Research by Brian Hughes has looked at this particular anomaly. Zipf's Law can be related to settlement size hierarchies, and some of the gaps in the Republic's settlement hierarchy can be filled by taking an all-island perspective. Namely the inclusion of Belfast and Derry.

KCAccidental

Aard wrote: »

No - you refer to administrative boundaries as a definition of city. Urban Cork has about 200,000. No imaginary line is going to change that.

That is how Dublin's population is recorded.

Aard

KCAccidental wrote: »

That is how Dublin's population is recorded.

Nope - the CSO releases data on "Settlements". These are not restricted to admin boundaries. "Dublin City" has about 500k population, while "Dublin" as defined by the CSO (which obviously changes every census due to the expansion of the urban area) has about 1.1m population.

mg1982

Aard wrote: »

Yep - a very interesting situation. Research by Brian Hughes has looked at this particular anomaly. Zipf's Law can be related to settlement size hierarchies, and some of the gaps in the Republic's settlement hierarchy can be filled by taking an all-island perspective. Namely the inclusion of Belfast and Derry.

Belfast and Derry are in a different country effectively so we wont have any say in how they develop. There was talk many years ago of building a city in the west but nothing came of that. Maybe try and develop Galway which has a rapidly growing population and large towns like Sligo and Athlone.

KCAccidental

Aard wrote: »

Nope - the CSO releases data on "Settlements". These are not restricted to admin boundaries. "Dublin City" has about 500k population, while "Dublin" as defined by the CSO (which obviously changes every census due to the expansion of the urban area) has about 1.1m population.

So Dublin's population is defined differently to Cork's? All references to Cork City's population come from the administrative boundary.

Aard

KCAccidental wrote: »

So Dublin's population is defined differently to Cork's? All references to Cork City's population come from the administrative boundary.

Settlement populations have been added to Wikipedia here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland_by_population

The full list from the CSO contains all settlements with a population of 1,500 or more.

KCAccidental

Aard wrote: »

Settlement populations have been added to Wikipedia here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland_by_population

The full list from the CSO contains all settlements with a population of 1,500 or more.

that figure is never used for Cork though, always the administrative number. It's a strange disparity

Aard

When you say never used -- by whom? It really depends on context. There are a few different population figures one can cite: administrative boundary, urban area, “metropolitan” area, MUA, FUA...... Whichever one suits one's argument best. That's why I like using the CSO defined settlement figures. There's a standardised measurement for all settlements in Ireland, so comparisons are made much easier and the anomalies of admin boundaries are avoided.

dubhthach

mg1982 wrote: »

Belfast and Derry are in a different country effectively so we wont have any say in how they develop. There was talk many years ago of building a city in the west but nothing came of that. Maybe try and develop Galway which has a rapidly growing population and large towns like Sligo and Athlone.

Rather partitionist attitude to have, they might be in a different state but they are still in Ireland.

As it is we are probably gonna see increased sharing of services across the border, for example Derry providing hospital services to Donegal etc. which would reflect the historic situation pre-partition when Derry was the main urban area in the North-west.

Aard

International planning cooperation is commonplace in mainland Europe. No reason why it can't take place between Ireland and the UK (or part thereof). Indeed it already does to a certain extent.

Development between Dublin and Belfast will outpace the rest of the country. This can happen in a planned strategic fashion between the two states, or haphazardly leading to economic drag.

mg1982

Whether it a partitionist attitude or not its a reality. There are two different states with two completely different types of economies, one which is heavily reliant on the public sector and two different currencies. My own belief is there should be geographical spread of future infastructure developments in this country with more emphasis on the regions. Dublin is already under massive pressure as it is for a city of its size which is not big by international standards.

D.L.R.

mg1982 wrote: »

Whether it a partitionist attitude or not its a reality. There are two different states with two completely different types of economies, one which is heavily reliant on the public sector and two different currencies. My own belief is there should be geographical spread of future infastructure developments in this country with more emphasis on the regions. Dublin is already under massive pressure as it is for a city of its size which is not big by international standards.

Dublin is under pressure because of failure to invest in key infrastructure in Dublin. Developing the regions won't fix that.

The only thing that will improve Dublin is to build the infrastructure that Dublin needs.

KCAccidental

Aard wrote: »

When you say never used -- by whom? It really depends on context. There are a few different population figures one can cite: administrative boundary, urban area, “metropolitan” area, MUA, FUA...... Whichever one suits one's argument best. That's why I like using the CSO defined settlement figures. There's a standardised measurement for all settlements in Ireland, so comparisons are made much easier and the anomalies of admin boundaries are avoided.

The media, geography textbooks etc. Just give it google and see which population is cited the most.

Aard

Ah don't trust most media sources when they give population numbers!! The CSO is yer only man for that. I've seen Dublin figures given as anywhere from 500k to 2m. With the author clearly having no idea which figure was appropriate.

People will also select figures to bolster their own arguments. (For example by giving population densities of the Greater Dublin Area -- a planning term covering Dublin and surrounding counties -- instead of the urban area. Makes Dublin appear to have the population density of Alaska! Useful for the “Dublin is low density” argument, but completely disingenuous.)

SpaceTime

In general population figures given in Ireland are totally misleading.

I've had to use them for commercial purposes and if you took some at their word, you'd overlook quite large population centres.

The two cities most frequently underestimated are Cork and Derry.

dubhthach

Census 2011:

Dublin (City and County) Total: 1,273,069
Broken down as following:

Dublin City: 527,612 (obviously the boundaries of city do not reflect urban area)
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown: 206,261
South Dublin: 265,205
Fingal: 273,991

The contigous urban population according to following CSO document is:
1,110,627

see map on page 9:
http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/census2011vol1andprofile1/Profile1_Town_and_Country_Entire_doc.pdf

This excludes population of nearby areas such as Swords, Bray, Leixlip, Malahide and Maynooth.

KCAccidental

Aard wrote: »

Ah don't trust most media sources when they give population numbers!! The CSO is yer only man for that. I've seen Dublin figures given as anywhere from 500k to 2m. With the author clearly having no idea which figure was appropriate.

People will also select figures to bolster their own arguments. (For example by giving population densities of the Greater Dublin Area -- a planning term covering Dublin and surrounding counties -- instead of the urban area. Makes Dublin appear to have the population density of Alaska! Useful for the “Dublin is low density” argument, but completely disingenuous.)

Media coverage can affect how a city is perceived though and that's the problem.

Aard

Sure can. What way are you referring to?

Carawaystick

dubhthach wrote: »

see map on page 9:
http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/census2011vol1andprofile1/Profile1_Town_and_Country_Entire_doc.pdf

That map is a great resourse.
Interesting looking at the various sizes of towns (area vs. pop) Letterkenny vs. Drogheda for example. Or even Drogheda and Dundalk.

It also shows how most of Fingal is rural.

dubhthach

Most of area of Fingal is rural, but bulk of it's population would be urban. The city boundaries of course contribute this, so for example Castleknock though within the M50 is part of Fingal. (Howth was previously part of city and was detached in 1994!)

ongarboy

KCAccidental wrote: »

Media coverage can affect how a city is perceived though and that's the problem.

Media coverage can affect how anything is perceived which is why Galway is very often presented as a larger urban area than Limerick when the actual settlement population of Limerick (some of which spills over into Clare) is about 15000 more. 91,000 in Limerick vs 77,000 in Galway.

Fact will always be fact though and that is what the CSO Census figures present using certified, best international practice methodologies for population counts.

As regards the thread subject, Ireland doesn't need future cities - such ideas are about as merited as the failed spatial strategy. The 5 existing cities in the Republic are close enough to everyone in that no one is more than 2 hours from a critical mass centre. (exception probably being Donegal which can leverage off Derry city).

monument

ongarboy wrote: »

As regards the thread subject, Ireland doesn't need future cities - such ideas are about as merited as the failed spatial strategy. The 5 existing cities in the Republic are close enough to everyone in that no one is more than 2 hours from a critical mass centre. (exception probably being Donegal which can leverage off Derry city).

You're going to have to explain that one... Ireland does not need future cities because there's one within 2 hours of nearly every place?

And a failed spatial strategy is a reason not to plan anything in the future?