What the book is about
Good housing policy is good social policy. Indeed, what is little appreciated is that good housing policy is good transport policy, good health policy, good fiscal policy, good planning policy, good gender policy, and so on. The list is almost endless. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much money is spent on housing from multiple perspectives, a lot of discussion and analysis of housing – from policy to delivery – revolves not around issues of regulation, transport, gender, health and so on, but around the various internal subsectors of housing (private rental, social and private housing) and their respective markets. Issues in housing policy and outcomes are often couched in the economic narratives of price, value, costs, yields and opportunities. Indeed, due to the impact of (sometimes surprisingly ill-informed) discussion of the economics of development and the emphasis on market impacts, much analysis of housing provision sees construction as the beginning of the housing process rather than something that should be the outcome of analysis of its relationship with other, related issues. In other words, the physical manifestation of housing should be the culmination of other processes and not the start.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Contributor
Biographies
Introduction - Lorcan Sirr
1. Housing and regulation - Deirdre Ní Fhloinn
2. Housing and transport - Suzanne Meade
3. Housing and political philosophy - Sinéad Kelly
4. Housing and the dynamics of land - Maoilíosa Reynolds
5. Housing and minorities - Rebecca Keatinge and James Rooney
6. Housing and sustainability - Orla Hegarty
7. Housing and policymaking - Paul Umfreville
8. Housing and rights - Padraic Kenna
9. Housing and gender - Eva Kail and Sabina Riss
10. Housing and homeownership - Lorcan Sirr
11. Housing and the state (from domophilia to domophobia and back again) - Joe Finnerty and Cathal O’Connell
12. Housing and rural Ireland - Mark Scott and Liam Heaphy
13. Housing and planning policy for apartment development - Declan Redmond and Hualuoye Yang
14. Housing and health - Hans Dubois
15. Housing and ageing - Sean Moynihan
16. Housing and vacancy - Cian O’Callaghan and Kathleen Stokes
17. Housing and home - Emmett Scanlon
Index
Contributor Biographies
Hans Dubois is a Research Manager at Eurofound, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, in Dublin.
Joe Finnerty is a lecturer in University College Cork and has taught on a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the School of Applied Social Studies since 1999. Reflecting some of his research interests and community engagement, this teaching has covered topics in housing and homelessness, social indicators and poverty measurement, and survey methods.
Liam Heaphy is a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing in NUI Galway. Liam joined ICHEC in 2021 as a postdoctoral research fellow on the EPA’s Five Year Assessment Report, which will deliver a comprehensive, state-of-the-art report on our understanding of climate change for the government of Ireland.
Orla Hegarty is an architect and member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Orla contributes regularly to national broadcast and print media on the subjects of the built environment, the construction industry and housing. She has appeared as an expert witness to the Oireachtas (Irish parliamentary) committee on housing on subjects including regulation in the construction industry, vacancy, housing standards and defects, and building control.
Eva Kail is a Vienna-based urban planner who has popularised gender mainstreaming in city design and contributed to more than 60 projects related to gender equality in housing, transportation, planning, and design of public spaces. Eva served as the head of Vienna’s first women’s office, the Frauenburo, which was established after a 1991 photography exhibition she organised called Who Owns the Public Space. The exhibition led to broader conversations about how many European cities, including Vienna, had been designed primarily with male commuters in mind and could consequently fail to meet women’s needs. Eva became head of the Frauenburo in 1992.
Rebecca Keatinge is Environmental Justice Solicitor at Community Law and Mediation. Rebecca has extensive experience in human rights law. Before CLM, she was Managing Solicitor at Mercy Law Resource Centre. She has also worked in the immigration and asylum field, including working with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Cambodia. She is a member of the Public Interest Law Alliance (PILA).
Sinéad Kelly is a lecturer in Human Geography at NUI Maynooth. Her main research interests focus on urban political economy, in particular property development and processes of financialisation, urban regeneration, gentrification and planning policy and post-crisis processes of neoliberalism.
Padraic Kenna is the Director of the Centre for Housing Law, Rights and Policy at the School of Law, NUI Galway. He specialises in housing law and housing rights, property and land law, consumer law, regulation and governance, with a commitment to promoting housing rights within the contemporary housing and regulatory systems.
Suzanne Meade is a chartered engineer and transport planner currently working for Transport Infrastructure Ireland, where she has responsibility for management of the Road Safety Programme on the national road network. She has a PhD in applied transport statistical modelling that developed road safety evaluation methods for cyclists and lectures in sustainable transport at Technological University Dublin and road safety at IT Sligo.
Seán Moynihan is the Chief Executive Officer of ALONE, a charity organisation founded in Ireland in 1977 to highlight the issues facing older people living alone.
Deirdre Ní Fhloinn is a barrister specialising in construction law, which she also teaches.
Cian O’Callaghan is Assistant Professor in Geography at Trinity College Dublin, working in the area of urban and cultural geography. His recent Irish Research Council-funded research was broadly concerned with the impacts of Ireland’s property bubble and associated crisis, with a particular focus on housing, urban vacancy and spatial justice.
Cathal O’Connell has been a staff member of the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork since 1990. Prior to joining UCC he was employed in the housing, finance and city management departments in the Irish local authority sector. His main research and publication interests are in the areas of Irish social policy development, housing policy and housing management and urban regeneration.
Declan Redmond is an Associate Professor of Housing and Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, UCD. He teaches modules on housing, planning and sustainability, the history of city planning, planning methodologies and the planning studio. His principal research interests revolve around housing and planning, urban regeneration, the politics and governance of planning and conservation policy and practice.
Maoilíosa (Mel) Reynolds is a registered architect with more than 30 years’ experience in project management, conservation, urban design and developer-led housing in Ireland, the UK and the USA. He established his own practice in 2008 and holds a degree in architecture, a master’s in urban and building conservation and a diploma in project management; he is a certified passive house designer. He has lectured on property development, procurement and professional practice and is currently a board member of the Passive House Association of Ireland.
Sabina Riss is a registered architect, university lecturer and researcher based in Vienna. Her main scientific area is gender perspective on housing and urban planning as well as on professional field architecture. She is coauthor of various scientific studies for public clients and is an invited speaker, expert and consultant with a gender focus.
James Rooney is a practising barrister and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law, Trinity College Dublin.
Emmett Scanlon is a lecturer in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD. He is a registered architect and is accredited in architectural conservation by the Royal Institution of the Architects of Ireland. Emmett’s practice includes the design and construction of buildings, academic research, architectural education, the development of national policy in architecture, architectural writing and criticism and the design and curation of exhibitions.
Mark Scott is Professor of Planning and Dean of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy in UCD. Mark is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast with a BSc in environmental planning, a diploma in town planning and a PhD in environmental planning. Mark’s research is focused on the environmental and sustainability dimensions of spatial planning theory and practice, specifically related to rural planning, land-use governance, climate action, green infrastructure and green space, and health and the built environment.
Lorcan Sirr is a Senior Lecturer in housing, planning and development at the Technological University Dublin. A former Sunday Times columnist, Lorcan has written extensively on housing and planning policy and is most recently the author of Housing in Ireland: the A–Z guide (Orpen Press, 2019). He has provided strategic guidance on housing, planning and issues of governance to not-for-profit bodies and public institutions, and given evidence to Oireachtas (parliamentary) committees. Lorcan has an MA from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and an MA and PhD from the University of Manchester.
Kathleen Stokes is a postdoctoral fellow on the Rethinking Urban Vacancy project at Trinity College Dublin. She holds a PhD from the University of Manchester. Her research intersects urban and political geographies, with a particular interest in urban space, infrastructures, labour and citizenships.
Paul Umfreville is a chartered Town Planner. He was Head of Scrutiny at a London Council for seven years, bringing accountability and community engagement into governance processes. This was part of a wider 25+-year local government career involving planning, community development, partnership working and policy development. Paul is now a PhD candidate at the Technological University Dublin focusing on public policy processes, particularly in the area of housing.
Hualuoye Yang is currently a PhD student in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at University College Dublin. Her main research interests centre on the area of sustainable urban development and housing policy. Her doctoral research examines the implications of compact growth policies for sustainable urban residential development in Ireland, especially the degree to which planning policies are driven by viability concerns and whether such policies may lead to poor-quality residential development.