IN-PERSON Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

The urban renaissance movement in Britain and Ireland sought to apply new urbanist design principles in tandem with economic regeneration of city centres, combining wholesale redevelopment with some degree of heritage-led development. Thus, industrial warehouses and port heritage in English cities such as Manchester and Salford, and Dublin in Ireland, were combined into large-scale programmes of renewal. In Ireland, however, settlements continued to suffer from the effects of continued urban sprawl including out-of-town retail and edge residential estates, which deprived town centres of their historic functions. A Town Centre First policy, inspired by its Scottish precedent, has been active in Ireland since the 2022 Programme for Government, and seeks to address town centre decline by repurposing vacant and derelict buildings for residential, commercial, and community use. This follows a preceding Heritage Council-led programme for town centre renewal based on community engagement and data analysis. This paper is based on a two-year EPA Ireland-funded project on the embodied carbon costs of adaptive reuse of vacant buildings versus greenfield new build for Irish towns. It is based on six life cycle assessment building case studies, clinics with property owners, and a national policy workshop. The paper examines how the carbon savings of adaptive reuse of town buildings and infrastructure could be factored into urban regeneration as a means to support town centre first and regeneration policies. The paper also considers the prospects for district scale retrofits to revitalise urban centres and their alignment with social inclusion and urban design principles.