With Covid-19 affecting Dublin far more than the rest of the country, it's probably time to think hard about Ireland's spatial strategy. Thread

It's tempting to think of Covid-19 as a once in a lifetime, extraordinary event, and therefore not something that needs to be planned for, or that can be avoided by actions we take. This isn't true on a number of levels. Covid-19 is the third such event in the last century.

The Spanish flu pandemic got into Ireland by way of a battalion of American soldiers arriving in Cobh, the disease spreading through Cork to rest of the country. In the 1940s & 50s, exacerbated by wartime embargoes on fuel, Tuberculosis became endemic in the crowded Dublin slums.

Each of these events imposed massive costs on Ireland. The silent lack of response from the Anglo-Irish state to the flu pandemic finally discredited it, and in the 50s Corporation workers knotted their own blankets together to stretcher dying children from...

...the innacessible attics of decaying Georgian houses and built a great network of fever hospitals to isolate and cure the infected. Afterwards the city centre was cleared of slums and the inhabitants moved to new and extensive suburbs. Gradually, however...

...the notion of a centralised state built around a crowded single city has reasserted itself, with recent calls for "high density" and "high rise" buildings. Large offices with thousands of workers have been established in central locations, served by crowded....

...public transport. Calls to expand other cities and for low-density housing in the extensive available land have been dismissed as special pleading, a selfish drain on shared resources. However a look at Germany wd show you that the network of small cities there makes...

...pandemics easier to control. Are pandemics going to be a feature of the future? In the last two decades SARS and bird flu nearly got out of hand and became pandemics, swine flu did become one, but wasn't as bad as expected....

We have relied on the efforts of others and the random kindnesses of viruses for our safety. Neither is in our control, but spatial policy and the concentration of people in places is. Ireland is always going to be open and connected; we like it that way.

What we cannot be is open and connected while concentrating our population into one single crowded city; that would be to design a pandemic's playground for it, and then wire it into a travel network that delivers the equivalent of a battalion of travellers into it every day.