WHEN I TRAVEL from Phibsborough to O’Connell Bridge to work, I pass empty old buildings; boarded-up houses; railings in need of repair. On the horizon, I watch cranes lift up more towers of glass and steel, the kind you see everywhere.

Across Dublin, buildings are left empty while their rooms are still useful; others are demolished when they could still be adapted and given new life. It feels that our value systems today still prioritise practices of erasure and demolition over care, repair and renewal.

Yet Dublin is still living, and people remain its life support. You see, no matter what gets built, where or by whom, the true heart of Dublin is found in our collective capacity to care for each other, our communities and our capital. And, while it can feel like we have recently built Dublin to mirror our economic ambitions, Dublin is here to stay, and it is never too late to show it we care.

As people, as communities, we understand instinctively how to care. Repeated Covid-lockdowns showed just how ready and able we all are to care for each other on a local and national scale. If we know how to care for each other, can we care for cities too?

Our current planning models treat Dublin as a set of static, red-lined, commercial objects to be managed rather than a living organism to be nurtured. To ensure our capital thrives and not only survives, we urgently need a radical transformation in our civic value systems. We need a new architecture of urban care, a design philosophy that acts with spatial empathy, prioritising the long-term health and happiness of communities of place and interest over short-term financial yields.

An architecture of care could better align our development values with public health. A healthy community cannot emerge from an environment that treats well-being as a luxury commodity instead of a basic civic right. Preventative healthcare can begin with urban form and this can happen by design:........

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