Lance Armstrong and the Mahon Planning Tribunal

When Lance Armstrong announced he wasn't contesting charges that he used blood doping to achieve his "unbelievable" 7 Tour de France titles, there was for me no sense of justice or victory. It comes 13 years too late. It is practically irrelevant. It does nothing to address the wilful neglect of the governing bodies, the great athletes who's sporting careers were damaged, the bullying and outing of competitors who didn't play along with the EPO game, and in the case of Marco Pantani a tragic ending of a life through overdose. It has taken a generation change to clean out Armstrong and his cabal. It made me think of the Mahon Tribunal, published to much fanfare just a couple of months ago. Righteous indignation, victory and justice. The moral incarceration of Bertie Ahern, Flynn, Wright etc. etc. All a generation too late. Mahon: a judicial report that now sits on a shelf and brings no justice. Just as Lance got back on his bike, said don't worry and talked about his cancer work, everybody involved with Planning corruption has just got on with it. We can't go back and declare Ahern's election victories null and void, and install the #2 party belatedly. Even talk of a planning regulator has gone very quiet. What is clear is the idea of legal justice, where someone is tried and sentenced 10 years after the event is of little benefit to anyone, unless corrupt politicians and developers compensate Irish society for the billions of euro of damage done (of course thanks to Fiana Fail society is compensating the government and banks). Justice is an on-going project. It demands open governance, transparency and leadership. The planning system (with the check of An Bord Pleanala) is actually not too bad at this (although can still do better). The local government system of governance, which is supposed to balance the Executive with the Public is not so good. Sometimes organisations operating in the name of management which operates in the interest of the organisation (as opposed to the people and places they serve), can be just as damaging as a corrupt one. The priority for Local Government reform should not be efficiency (ie. number of Councils etc) but accountability and responsibility... every day.

Mahon and Zoning

The two words are inextricably linked. The Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters & Payments aka The Mahon Tribunal delivered its final report on 22nd March. Now that the dust has settled on the findings of the Tribunal, it’s about the right time to think what good has it done for planning? It is notable that one of the only recommendations Mahon J. came up with, was that there should be an independent planning regulator.

If there is one thing planning is not short-on, its regulations and regulators. But it fails to hit the obvious point. All the controversy surrounding allegations of political corruption and impropriety concern zoning.

Zoning is such a simple concept, that even politicians (not all!), who haven’t a clue or a care about what good planning means for their constituents(present and future), are able to understand it. A local Council decision can change the development rights on a piece of land from grazing cattle to building houses. Apart from capital gains tax, the landowner walks away a lottery winner every time.

The ‘zoning’ of land became such a momentous a decision, that in an overly simplistic construction industry, too much importance has been associated with it, and therefore too much monetary value attributed to it. Zoning created hope value, which created land-banking. It fundamentally skewed the real value of land, what it is worth, and what it can produce (either for farmers or developers). It feeds speculation, not investment.

Land Use Zoning is not a good planning tool. It is an unhappy marriage of post-war modernism and garden-city utopianism. Its clumsy, it doesn’t allow towns to grow organically, street by street or square by square. It is comprehensive and not incremental. It creates mono-use suburban areas, with a paucity of services, variety, interest and beauty, served and segregated by over-engineered distributor roads. This is not a personal opinion. People like Leon Krier, Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, INTBAU , Congress for New Urbanism, Congress for European Urbanism and 'A Vision of Europe' have explained it much better, and in more detail.

The introduction of Core Strategies in the 2010 Planning Act (with de-zoning) and Strategic Environmental Assessment provide for a much improved regulatory environment. However, in many ways Development Plans are still focussing on ‘what use, where?’. When a Council seeks to provide jobs it’s solution has been to zone land for industrial or commercial use – build a business park for the IDA. For urban growth – zone fields for housing and retail parks. Census 2011 shows Ireland is still growing. Zoning doesn’t provide answers to fundamental questions of how a place should grow, how will it look and feel, and who will live there. Government (both central and local) should place zoning to one side. The focus should be on creating an enabling environment for small scale/low cost interventions to take place. Perhaps we need a regulator for de-regulation?