Ali Grehan’s vision for families to live in Dublin City.
I’ve previously written two posts on Families Living in Dublin City, both of which were inspired by Ali Grehan’s talk at Tedx Dublin. The talk is now available on youtube, and you can watch it here:
And read the previous two posts:
Post One – Families in Dublin City
Post Two – Families in Dublin City, What does the Census Say?
@TedxDublin @Aligrehan talked about families in Dublin City. What does the #census say?
Average Number of Rooms per Household, Dublin City
Following on from yesterday’s post and Ali Grehan’s TedxDublin talk about families living in Dublin City, I decided to take a look at what the 2011 census says. The problem, as described is that there is a lack of families in Dublin City Centre, in particular there is a lack of families living in privately rented or owner occupied accommodation.
Because I work visually, as usual I’ve created a range of maps. The first one, the big one on the left, shows the average number of rooms in households across the city. As you can see, “average” accommodation around the city centre is very small. There is some hope out towards the canals, and a lonely hold out “Merchants Quay D” in the city centre itself. The average doesn’t tell the full story in this case though. There could be lots of studios and lots of six roomed houses, which on balance would provide some scope for families.
% of Households with Four or More Rooms
To see this, I made another map, this time showing the percentage of houses with four or more rooms in a given area. I’m taking four or more rooms as the basic minimum necessary for a family. The very city centre still looks horrendous, but the there does seem to be at least some accommodation available that could suit a (small) family. So the accommodation is a bit of a stretch, but there might be some around the place.
What about the age profile of the city centre? A map of the average age doesn’t really tell us much. It’s in the middle, there are some much younger areas, probably the ones with a lot of children, and some much older areas. It could simply indicate a good mix of ages overall. Looking at it more closely though shows up the skew. This is a population profile diagram of 50 different areas of Dublin City:
Population Profile of the Dublin City Centre
You can clearly see the huge peak in the number of twenty and thirty year olds, and the lack of children. The dark black line is a more normal distribution from a random ED in Dun Laoghaire, added for illustration. What’s really noticeable though, is the lack of 10 – 19 year olds, there are some young children, but the middle group is missing. I suspect people are starting their families before they leave the city centre. That and the birthrate bump in the last few years is showing up.
And one final map, the percentage of households in different areas that have children.
Percentage of Households with Children
Again, that little red blob of no families in the city centre is clearly visible. I had hoped when I started this exercise that one area would stand out as having families. Somewhere that we could look at the characteristics of the area and figure out what’s making it work. Honestly, nothing is jumping out at me, beyond the fact that there are some families nearer the canals. The areas of the city centre with higher proportions of families are the areas with higher proportions of social housing. (This data is in the census, but I haven’t mapped/graphed it, just looked at the numbers.)
If this is something we want to change, that band along the canals is what needs to be built upon, using the classic linear development model. In this case, that would be to find an area with the features you’re looking for and to try to extend those features into an adjacent area which has some of those features. With that in mind, I can’t help but wonder if the Fishamble street project would be better placed somewhere like
Either way, I really hope the project succeeds, Dublin would be a much nicer city with a greater age diversity in the population.
Households with Broadband in Ireland
A very quick map, showing the percentage of households in each area with broadband internet.
Data taken from the CSO census statistics as usual.
And the obligatory close up of Dublin:
Broadband per Household, Dublin
(If you like this, you might also like The Healthiness Map of Ireland)
What's in a word?
Futerra Communications post earlier today prompted me to write something that’s been mulling in my head for a while.
Take the Bruntland Definition of Sustainable Development :
sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
She published it in 1987 as part of the “Our Common Future” report. We talk about it alot but never seem to make any progress or even to understand what it really means.
One of the papers I hope to publish deals with this. Look at the statement. There are four fundamental concepts there. Four key ideas that are complex and need to be understood if we’re really to make progress in the field of sustainable development. They are:
Now look at what each of these mean. Not what they mean to you though, look at what they mean when we talk about business, when we talk about economics and when we talk about sustainability.
Take the last first. Future Generations. In sustainability when we talk about the future, we talk about generations literally. Some researchers talk about 75 years, some forever and ever, the absolute shortest you ever see is about 25 years, the most frequent is 50 years. Economics doesn’t even acknowledge the idea that 25 years in the future exists. Economic plans are done on up to a 10 year basis, but most plans are done on roughly the same timescales as political cycles, i.e. 4 – 6 years. Business makes plans for the future in one year time slots, often in quarter year time slots and occasionally a really far reaching business may stretch up to 5 years.
Development runs into the same problems. Read the literature on sustainability and development is all about careful, incremental improvements constrained by the availability of resources and damage to the environment. Business development, economic development? More profits, more jobs, bigger GDP, higher turnover, in short it’s about one thing and that’s growth. There has been some dialogue about that in recent years, but the reality is right now every finance minister in Europe wants to return to economic growth and every business around the world wants to sell as many products as possible to as many people as possible to make as much money as possible.
Needs are very carefully expressed things in sustainable development. Think Mazlow’s hierarchy and your need for food, shelter, heat, security and so on up the pyramid to self-actualisation. Needs in business are two-fold. The need of the business to grow and develop (see above), and the needs of the customer the business wants to satisfy. It’s been a long time since businesses in the Western world sought to sell you only what you actually need. Obsolescence is deliberately built in to most products to ensure you as a customer will purchase again. If you don’t have never ending needs, businesses don’t meet their need to grow. If businesses don’t grow, then neither do economies and as it’s currently set up economies need to grow because that’s linked to employment.
Compromising. The final concept, is the one I’m struggling with, and why the paper isn’t published. The literature on sustainable development talks alot about what might compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs – climate change, environmental damage etc. The literature on economics addresses it somewhat with things like energy security and political unrest. The literature on business not at all. It’s awkward.
Businessmen, Economists and Sustainability Practitioners may all be speaking English, but they are not speaking the same language. Until they do, we won’t make progress.
Time banking, currency of the future?
I first came across the idea of time banking a few years ago in Japan. The way that time bank system worked was simple and straightforward.
There was one task – the care of elderly parents. All members had elderly parents who lived in a city not their own. All members were willing to care for an elderly person in the city they lived in. To pay someone to look after their own parents was too expensive but by collaborating, they could all spend time locally looking after someone else’s parents, and in exchange have their own parents looked after by someone else. Simple, straightforward collaborative effort.
Or was it? Obviously there are many possible risks with a scheme like that, though experience seems to show that those risks are less than what news reports might have you believe. What’s really complicated is matching the needs of different people so everyone can contribute what they want to hand get their needs met. Perhaps most important is that the matching process shouldn’t be too time consuming or require too much sensitive information. Overall the system needs to be flexible enough to handle the normal rhythms of human life too, after all we all get sick or have a big event to attend occasionally.
Time banking is a movement that has been slowly growing. Looking at the www.timebanks.org or the 65hours website, it seems to be nearly there, but not quite there yet. I still think it’s missing the essential element of human behaviour, it doesn’t fit seamlessly into peoples lives.
When technology manages to crack that nut, we’ll see a whole new world.
