Dublin City’s major civic amenity the Phoenix Park, within a relatively affluent part of the north inner city and within walking and cycling distance of the ‘commercial’ heart of Dublin City Centre.

Against this background, it must be stated that the community within the O’Devaney Gardens complex was marginalised in relation to the surrounding area:

The physical environment, appearance and in some cases the condition of the flat blocks themselves was poor and the complex was badly laid out and socially, culturally, and economically segregated from the more affluent surrounding streets.

Employment among residents was lower than average within the City, children were extremely poorly catered for.

A preliminary inspection of the flat complex indicated that it would benefit greatly from improvements to the immediate external environment in the form of Precinct Improvement Works and the strengthening of the existing built fabric through a judicious placing of new accommodation to strengthen perimeter boundaries to the various complexes.

Our initial assessment was that the standard of accommodation available within the existing building stock at O’Devaney Gardens was actually very good; flats were generally of large size with a number of balconies to each flat.

The disposition and layout of many of the blocks, the overall scale and breadth of the complex, the number of through routes, the lack of overlooking, overly large unsupervised open space and very low-grade lighting, all coupled with a fairly low density of development gave rise to a situation whereby access and egress to the immediate precincts of the blocks themselves was freely available to casual passers and large swathes of open ground and road frontage were unsupervised.

This, in its turn, had given rise to a situation where the complex had the classic hallmarks of the inner city ‘no go’ area with the usual visual indications of anti-social activity.

The existing flat blocks presented two physical difficulties which constituted both emotional and real impediments to the creation of ‘safe’ spaces and precincts: Firstly, they presented a shabby appearance externally, and secondly, the stair access to the various levels of these blocks was ‘open to all’ thereby creating difficulty in curbing anti-social behaviour and promoting good estate management of a complex.

Using this survey data as a ‘baseline’ for the proposed architectural works enabled us to set out certain design targets, as follows:

• Breaking the complex down into smaller separated complexes each comprising no more than two blocks, sharing a common central amenity space.
• The provision of more focused, overlooked and easily secured, lockable small playground and ball game areas within the new shared amenity area of these reduced and separated complexes such that these areas become the “domain” of those residents alone and not used by ‘strangers’ and casual passers-by.
• Infilling the perimeters with full ‘edge’ or street line development which would increase the levels of desirable activity along the road and make it a safer, more secure part of the complex.
• The ‘building up’ of these external boundaries to screen and protect the adjacent flat blocks and their amenity spaces. Such new edge development would also introduce the possibility of a greater level of ‘filtering’ in respect of the means of access and egress to the various flat blocks.
• Part of the problem of layout in respect of the complex was the relatively low density with which the blocks had been planned. Distances between blocks were too great to facilitate desirable (security) overlooking and the large swathes of undedicated open space militated against the sense of community which the residents correctly identified as being most desirable for the future improvement of the area.
• The general environment of the complex needed considerable improvement in terms of road design, public lighting to roads and paths, private lighting to flat block and amenity spaces, the elimination of ‘rat-runs’ and dedicated secure parking areas for residents only, while well-lit spaces, overlooked and busy streets, and ‘privatisation’ of the various flat blocks and their associated amenity and recreational spaces would all go a long way towards resolving these problems.

A conclusive masterplan was then developed by this practise for both the Resource Centre and Regeneration of O’Devaney Gardens for future development by Dublin City Council.  

Dublin City subsequently chose not to implement these proposals and instead sought to procure the regeneration of the complex by way of an abortive Public Private Partnership (PPP) development, which collapsed in 2008.