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ABSTRACT
The increased emphasis within Europe on the role of second-tier cities has implications for the ways in which these urban centres are considered within national spatial planning strategies. In centralized, monocentric states such as Ireland, there has been a general ambivalence towards urban policy for cities outside the capital city, and historically, this has prevented the development of a strong, diversified urban hierarchy undermining prospects for balanced regional development. This paper examines the extent to which a new found emphasis on Ireland’s second-tier cities which emerged in the ‘Gateways’ policy of the National Spatial Strategy was matched by subsequent political and administrative commitment to facilitate the development of these urban centres. Following a discussion of the position of second-tier cities in an international context and a brief overview of recent demographic and economic trends, the paper assesses the relative performance of Ireland’s second-tier cities in influencing development trends, highlighting a comprehensive failure to deliver compact urban growth. In this context, the paper then discusses the implications of current development plans for the second-tier cities and proposals for Irish local government reform for securing compact urban development.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge the ongoing support of the UCC Centre for Planning Education and Research, and to thank David Counsell and Jonathan Hall for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In 1901, only 28% of the country’s population resided in urban areas (settlements with over 1500 persons). By 1961 the state’s population recorded for the first time an urban majority (CSO, 2011, p. 16) and the aggregate urban population reached 62% in 2011.
2. The category of ‘Towns of 10,000 and over’ captures two different settlement types: the traditional county or market towns (which are distributed widely across the territory) and the commuter towns (which are generally located within the catchments of the principal urban centres).
3. GVA is used here to reflect general patterns of economic activity as it is the only economic measure calculated at a regional scale in Ireland. GVA, however, only provides a broad signpost of economic activity because of the way in which transnational firms tend to report exaggerated levels of output from their Irish operations as a way of transferring taxable revenues from other jurisdictions to reduce tax liabilities. As a result, this measure tends to reflect regional concentrations of foreign investment as opposed to pure economic activity. These patterns of foreign direct investment however also reflect the general regional economic profile of the state and the location and concentration of employment.
4. The NSS introduced the concept of Gateways as a key element of its spatial strategy. ‘Existing Gateway’ locations, defined by urban regions with a population of over 100,000 included Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford, while 5 New gateways were identified in locations had relatively small existing populations. This research identifies the grouping of Existing Gateways as the second-tier of Ireland’s urban hierarchy.
5. The NSS produced an estimate of potential population growth for each ‘gateway and surrounding catchment’ for 2020 on page 49. However, no standardised definition for these units was used; instead, the NSS used the various understandings of each ‘city and surrounding catchments as defined in local land use and transport strategies’.
6. The ‘legal city’ unit simply captures the administrative city unit and does not reflect a demographic or economic reality, which in all cases extends beyond these boundaries. However, its analytical value in the context of this paper relates to centrality. The ‘legal city’ zones represent in all cases the core of each urban gateway, and in policy terms, these core zones were identified as a focus for growth and development within each gateway.
7. Central Statistics Office (CSO) Place of Work, School or College – Census of Anonymised Records (POWSCAR).
8. There are numerous ways in which a city region unit may be defined, but it was considered practical to use a standardised measure of the urban areas’ commuting catchment to reflect the functional reach of the various cities. This was the same unit used in the Gateways Hubs Development Index 2012 under the NSS in 2012 (Future Analytics, Citation2013). In order to be able to measure consistently and compare historical data, the 2011 ‘city-region’ definition was taken as the territorial city region for the 2002 and 2006 census.
9. The NSS presented a projection of population change based on an assumption of economic growth and used baselines for each city region, taken from the respective local land use and transportation strategies. The projections were based on a 20-year forecasting period; the implied population change figures used here is based on a calculation of 10 years of projected annual growth. In addition, the comparison here between actual ‘city region’ growth and that implied by the NSS concerns different territorial units. As a result, the relative population change rather than absolute change is of interest here.
10. The anomalous case of Limerick, which exhibited a 4.8% reduction in the number of journeys over 30 minutes, may be explained by the closure of a single major employer (Dell), which as a very substantial regional employer would have led to a significantly lower amount of regional scale commuting.
11. In cases where there were two separate Core Strategies and Settlement Hierarchies within a single county (in all four cases), the total City Council figure was allocated as the top of the unified settlement hierarchy. The former top tier of the settlement hierarchy for the constituent county council hierarchies then became the second tier of the unified settlement hierarchy.