"This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in [include the complete citation information for the final version of the article as published in the European Planning Studies 2012 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at:
Counsell, D., Haughton G., and Allmendinger P (2012)
Growth management in Cork through boom, bubble and bust
Introduction
The economic fortunes of the Cork metropolitan region experienced a massive transformation from the mid-1990s, when after decades of stagnation the area’s fortunes began to improve dramatically. Population in the city-region grew from a static base of around 314,000 between 1986-1991to an estimated 346,000 by 2000; estimates for the Cork Area Strategic Plan (CASP) suggested that in the four years from 1996 employment grew by 20% (Atkins, 2001). The region’s employment base benefited from substantial foreign direct investment in this period (FDI), notably in pharmaceuticals and IT (Romsa 2003, Power and Brunt 2007). As part of an effort to re-make the image of the area and to project it onto the international stage, local actors also successfully mounted a campaign for the designation of Cork as the European Capital of culture for 2005 (O’Callaghan and Linehan 2007).
Cork it seemed was riding high on the ‘Celtic Tiger’, as the phenomenal economic growth of Ireland came to be widely known (Kitchin et al. 2012). This period of high growth placed new demands on the Irish planning system, which was substantially reformed from the late 1990s onwards. Growth management became the compelling task for Irish planners, not least the larger urban areas as they sought to cope with the local pressures of growth across administrative boundaries. In the case of Cork the need to develop a new space of planning in order to manage growth was achieved by creating a non-statutory, spatial plan for the wider city-region, covering the ‘urban core’ area administered by Cork City Council and the rural hinterland area of Cork County Council.
The Cork Area Strategic Plan (CASP), published in 2001, represented an innovative attempt to address the problems of population loss in the central urban area and an associated rise in low density residential sprawl, particularly in the suburban and rural areas to the south and west of the city. The strategy sought to promote a major shift in the existing development pattern, refocusing future housing and employment growth in central Cork and along public transport corridors to the north and east of the city. Key to achieving this vision would be massive improvements in infrastructure to open up the new growth areas, and an assumed ability to ‘switch off’ or at least reduce some of the development pressures to the south and west of the city.
Cork has a history of seeking to plan at a non-statutory, functional scale going back to the late 1960s (Hourihan 1979, Hogan 2009, Haughton et al. 2010). This experience of nearly 45 years of continuous city-regional planning is possibly unique in Ireland – only Dublin comes close (see Williams et al. 2010). When it was published in 2001 CASP was still unusual in providing a non-statutory, sub-regional plan developed by neighbouring local planning authorities that recognised the value of joint strategic thinking at the city-regional scale. Indeed CASP was in the vanguard of demonstrating the utility of sub-regional spatial planning on its release, possibly assisted by the close involvement of national officials in its steering group.
In 2007-2008 as the Irish economic miracle began to unravel, it soon became clear that the Irish planning system had been part of the problem, helping to underpin a speculative land and property boom that was an integral part of the banking sector’s problems. The result, it is now widely acknowledged, was over-priced land and housing, too much poor quality residential and commercial development, and environmental degradation due to car-based sprawl and the amount of one-off housing built in rural areas without adequate local infrastructure, with chronic over-zoning of land leading to the emergence of Ireland’s now notorious unfinished ‘ghost estates’ (Kitchen et al. 2010, McDonald 2011, An Taisce 2012).
The problems in Irish planning were already there for those who chose to see them before the financial crash: dissenting voices were not heeded, instead they were often vilified making it hard to have a mature debate about whether the Irish boom economy had transmogrified into a speculative bubble economy. One such protagonist,An Taisce (the Irish National Trust), argued recently that: “there was a catastrophic failure of the planning system which drowned out and side-lined questioning voices” (An Taisce 2012, p.6).
In this paper we want to examine how these national level problems manifested themselves at the local level, as local actors increasingly began to question the achievements of CASP. The CASP Update (Cork City and Cork County Councils 2008) acknowledged that the spatial distribution of development in Cork had not been in accordance with the 2001 strategy, indeed the old pattern had continued seemingly little abated, with the balance of population still shifting away from the city. As a non-statutory spatial strategy CASP is a form of ‘soft space governance’, that is a planning space that does not form part of a statutory planning territory in Ireland (Haughton et al. 2010). Such soft space approaches have become increasingly common in Europe in recent years, reflecting the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), as planners seek to address the gap between formal administrative boundaries of local government and the functional geographies of housing and labour markets in particular (Stead 2011, Luukkonen and Moilanen 2012, Metzger and Schmitt 2012). One of the potential attractions of using non-statutory ‘soft space’ governance arrangements to engage in strategic plan making is that those involved might feel less constrained by the formal requirements of statutory plan making, which can make the process slow and open to orchestrated campaigning by lobby groups with entrenched positions (Allmendinger and Haughton 2009, 2010). By contrast soft space planning is sometimes seen as desirable as it can allow the introduction of more creative, less orthodox thinking. In this context using outside consultants to act both as honest-brokers and as sources of external expertise can be helpful when it comes to negotiating with local stakeholders. The downside, however, is a disconnect from the democratic accountability of local government, which is possibly why soft space planning arrangements are often set up so that they can work alongside, rather than in opposition to, statutory local plans (Allmendinger and Haughton 2010; Haughton et al. 2010). There is a recurring tension then between the limits of working within democratic local political structures and the limits of working outside them. Politics is never far from the surface in matters of soft space governance.
How did longstanding and successful attempts at sub-regional spatial planning fail in directing growth and creating sustainable development despite the success in plan making and what does this tell us about the nature of such soft space forms of strategic planning? To address these questions we review both the CASP plan and its 2008 update, drawing on two sets of interviews with local and national actors. The first round of five national interviews and 22 in Cork was undertaken in 2005-7, immediately prior to the implosion of Ireland’s growth model, with a subsequent set of 10 interviews undertaken in 2009, after the CASP Update had been published and after the national government had begun to announce its dramatic cut-backs in public expenditure in response to Ireland’s growing financial crisis. In both rounds we interviewed planners, consultants, community groups and stakeholders in related areas, operating at national, regional and local levels. We start with an analysis of what we term the boom-bubble-bust experience of Ireland. This is followed by a detailed examination of the experience of trying to deliver on non-statutory strategic metropolitan planning in Cork through this difficult period.
From an economic boom to a property market bubble and then a financial market bust
With a low corporate tax regime and light touch regulation of development and the banking sector, Ireland became a textbook example of the rewards that might come from adopting a neoliberal pro-business, pro-growth agenda.Or so it seemed to many during the boom years. Building on the substantial investment of European structural funds in infrastructure and skills training in the 1980s-1990s, employment began to boom, not least following a substantial influx of foreign direct investment attracted not only by the regulatory regime, but also the availability of a well-trained, English speaking workforce, with Dublin in particular growing rapidly. The rapid turnaround of Ireland’s economy achieved international recognition and quickly earned the sobriquet the ‘Celtic Tiger’ (Matthews and Alden 2006). The flaws in the Irish growth model were exposed when the country became one of the most severely affected casualties of the financial system meltdown of 2007-8 (Connor et al., 2012).
But for many commentators rather than simply a local manifestation of the global financial crisis, the problems lay closer to home. Writing in the Financial Times, Gardner (2010 p.1) argues that: “Whatever Irish politicians say,… Ireland knows this is almost entirely a homemade crisis, which happened to coincide with an international credit crunch.” So whilst the international financial crisis may have hastened the exposure of the problems of Ireland’s banking system, these were always going to come to light once the political efforts to prolong the Irish property bubble were no longer tenable. The fundamental problem that was disguised at the peak of the boom was that the housing market was no longer being driven by economic growth, as in the early years of the Celtic Tiger, but instead by chronic over-speculation in property and imprudent lending by some Irish banks. Connor et al. (2012) draw a distinction between the Celtic Tiger era (1997-2002) and the subsequent bubble period (2003-7). Where the former was marked by growth in FDI and accumulation of real long-term assets, the latter period they argue witnessed a decline in FDI and a rise in speculative investments subsidised by government tax breaks on certain types of property development.
Several accounts of the property boom era identify that part of the problem was a close knit group of politicians and developers, who not only worked to promote the growth model but publicly mocked and vilified those who questioned it (McDonald and Nix 2005, Gardner 2010, McDonald and Sheridan 2008, An Taisce 2012, Kitchin et al. 2012). David Gardner (2010 p.1) in his summary of the debate over the causes of the Irish crisis identified one particularly widely held view:
Encouraged by venal politicians who actively discouraged regulation and provided a phenomenal array of tax breaks to builders, and in an environment of cheap money and easy credit …, Irish banks went on a reckless spending spree. They lent, above all, to property developers. When that bubble burst – and with devaluing the currency no longer an option [as part of the euro-zone] - it all but bankrupted the country and triggered a painful sequence of tax rises and pay, pension and public spending cuts.
During the boom period many property developers learned quickly how to exploit weaknesses in the planning system. Aided by local political opinion that tended to support development enthusiastically, the result was large areas of land being zoned for development whilst the planning system struggled to resist proposals that went against local plans:
permissions and zoning have been facilitated by the abandonment of basic planning principles by elected representatives on the local and national stage and driven by the demands of local people, developers and speculators, and ambitious, localised growth plans framed within a zero-sum game of potentially being left behind with respect to development (Kitchen et al., 2010 p.3).
According to the journalist Frank McDonald (2011) a “reckless over-zoning” of land for development went in tandem with a huge growth in “suburban-style housing in the middle of nowhere, as more and more land was re-zoned for residential development at the behest of farmers and others greedy for rich pickings.”
There is an alternative perspective however, which is that during the early years of the Celtic Tiger there was strong demand for new housing and that suppressing supply through the planning system added to house price inflation (Connor et al. 2012). In this interpretation, planning was actually too restrictive, or at least too slow to cope with the unprecedented scale of demand, with much of the new development only ready to come on-stream when the financial crisis started to become apparent.
Whichever interpretation is right, as the crisis unfolded it became clear that Ireland had been left with a legacy of ghost estates[1] and extensive over-zoning of housing land. Kitchin et al. identified 620 such ghost estates comprising some 19,000 housing units, and over 300,000 vacant houses overall – ninety of these estates were in County Cork. Over-zoning meant that by 2008 Ireland had 42000ha zoned for residential development, excluding land zoned for mixed use, much of it on greenfield sites, with designation leading to inflated land prices which in turn spread into the speculative bubble as ‘assets’ against which loans could be granted (An Taisce 2012). This zoned land could have accommodated a virtual doubling of Ireland’s population (ibid).
Clearly then the planning system was deeply implicated in the financial problems of the nation. As much was admitted by the Irish Minister for the Environment in April 2011, when he wrote in the Irish Times that the new government was:
determined to move away from the previous developer-led planning system.
We can see the results of such a system everywhere – unfinished estates, inappropriate zoning and a lack of joined-up thinking between central and local government and between the public and private sectors.
Mismanagement of property development and planning, enabled by failures in banking, has damaged our country and its reputation.
The rhetoric here is strong and condemnatory of the previous approach. Yet in the boom years the Irish planning system was held by politicians and officials to be working reasonably well within a framework developed after much public consultation. This raises questions about the warning signals about the Irish growth (management) model not heard earlier: were they simply side-stepped and normalised as ‘acceptable’ signs of dissensus in a democratic society?
We want to take threeinitial analytical cuts into this issue. The first is that the Irish government held two distinctly different ideological positions on state-market relations. The financial sector was subject to a form of laissez-faire market fundamentalism involving light touch regulation (see Gamble 2009). Alternatively, land use regulation and planning was underpinned by a more social market approach, serving to placate both European Commission regional paymasters by addressing EU concerns with social justice and sustainable development, and domestic pressures to promote balanced national growth. In Peck and Tickell’s (2002) terms, this was neoliberal ‘roll-back’ and ‘roll-out’ operating in tandem. This twin-tracked process of regulatory reform created a multi-dimensional form ofregulatory deficit. Far from promoting sustainable growth the twin-track approach to regulatory reforms instead came to undermine it, as the reforms worked in contradictory directions and created irreconcilable tensions, not least as promoting untrammelled economic sector growth clashed with processes of growth management. The failure to resolve these different ideological positions and frames was a problem both of government philosophy and of government policy.
The second analytical cut concerns the ‘implementation gap’ between national and local priorities that emerged from a form of deeply entrenched localism. In his analysis of the Irish planning system Walsh (2012, 48) argues that in contrast to the more technical-rational approach that developed in the UK, planning in Ireland remained much more committed to a local-rooted democratic model. This has resulted in a particularly strong mandate for local government to act in planning matters and has historically meant that national government has been reluctant to over-ride local decisions. When national government sought to reform the Irish planning system in the late 1990s a carefully brokered compromise was required that led to stronger local planning powers allied to stronger national and regional guidance. The problem, it was soon to transpire, was that the national and regional frameworks were essentially advisory rather than binding, with limited disciplinary power. This set the scene for a fairly surreal set of planning debates, in which visionary spatial plans could be produced by planners and their ‘stakeholders’ with great fanfare, yet when it came to abiding by these agreements there was no effective sanction for those who chose to breakaway.
This analysis chimes with recent critical work on post-politics, public engagement in policyand neoliberal governmentality (e.g. Swyngedouw 2009, Thorpe and Gregory 2010, Allmendinger and Haughton 2010, 2012), which raises concerns about the de-politicisation of decision-making through governance bodies and the problems of consensus-based approaches that evacuate the political by rendering irrelevant, invisible or unheard dissenting voices. These voices may be heard and accommodated, but they remain residualised, tuned out as background interference rather than heard as equal voices with legitimate authority claims. By rejecting the prevailing mainstream discourses and the existing social order,those who would engage on other terms struggle to find themselves accepted on equal terms in governance arrangements or in consultations (Rancière 1995, Swyngedouw 2009). In Mouffe’s (2005) terms, this points to the distinction between the political as spaces of irreconcilable conflicts and demands, and politics as the practices and institutions for normalising and formalising the accommodation of dissensus. As Metzger (2011) highlights, debates about the post-political need to be sensitised to the various ways in which fundamental political moments and acts of dissent are not simply eviscerated from planning through its consensus-management role, instead they may be displaced in sometimes sophisticated ways.