New builds revert to ‘shoe-box’ standards

A planning expert has accused the Department of the Environment of reverting to the ‘shoe-box’ apartment size guidelines of the 1990s and said the current floor area requirements will impact the most vulnerable in society.

In 2006, Kieran Rose, an urban planner, was tasked by Dublin City Council with heading up a project to improve apartment standards. Until that point, the minimum space permitted for a one-bed ‘shoe-box’ was, as Mr Rose put it, “a cramped 38 square metres”.

“Interiors were often gloomy, corridors long and narrow and balconies were not a usable feature,” he wrote in Work & Life, the magazine of Impact trade union, of which Mr Rose is a member. “Many argued that we were allowing the tenements of tomorrow to be constructed.”