We must connect ordinary people with their city's future

A Limerick City project involves architects, students, city officials and members of the public in shaping all the layers of their city's future 

Architecture student, Daniel O'Reilly from Galway with his work, 'cargo and commuter' at an exhibition of work by students from UL's School of Architecture and Product Design in Istabraq Hall, Limerick City, as part of the Design@UL Showcase 2025. Photo: Alan Place

Public participation in shaping the future of our cities is one of the great untapped sources of intelligence and imagination we have. 

It is this collective resource that can help to transform our urban centres and rural towns into places where people genuinely want to live. City-dwellers want their cities to be better places - healthier, greener, more climate-resilient, and above all, vibrant centres of everyday life. 

Yet it remains extraordinarily difficult for anyone, whether officials or ordinary citizens, to connect these aspirations with the city’s actual planned future. One reason is simple: nobody can easily see what the future city will look like when everything is brought together. 

City-County Development Plans (the statutory documents produced on a five-year cycle) are fantastic documents for professionals, sophisticated multi-layered, technical and two-dimensional, while the planning process by its nature fragments the future into site-specific pieces. 

Neither format allows people to quickly grasp the bigger picture of the city’s trajectory, and as a result, meaningful public participation is stifled because the information is not presented in a form that is accessible or compelling.

This summer we have begun the work of creating a dynamic model of Limerick City, at once virtual and physical, that is intended to transform the public’s ability not only to see the city’s future, but also to help shape it in ways that are more accessible, more inclusive, and open to a broader audience than is currently possible. 

The purpose of the model is to offer citizens a panoramic vision of the future city: a reference point where the larger picture can be grasped at once, and where people can participate directly, seeing, debating, and reimagining the city. Crucially, the aim is to draw insight, and intelligence from the public mind. 

To do this, the model is being placed in a publicly visible and accessible location within the Citizen Innovation Lab at Sarsfield Street, Limerick, where it can act as a catalyst for new conversations, for arguments and exchanges, but also for planting the seeds of design and for reshaping ideas about urban life right there, in public view.

The model is neither a statutory instrument nor a fixed representation of ‘what is’. Without owner or author, it is deliberately conceived as a shared civic resource. To make this possible we have drawn on our active role within the European Network of Living Labs, which in Limerick is a unique collaboration between city and university. 

(Left to right) UL’s professor Merritt Bucholz, head of the School of Architecture and Product Design with Clare O’Callaghan, executive architect and Sonja Reidy senior executive officer at Limerick City and County Council. Photo: Brian Arthur

This partnership makes it possible to propose things that neither institution could in isolation: large-scale projects that are not yet part of the formal planning system, planned mobility enhancements such as new bridges across the Shannon, projects that are in the planning system but have not be realised, and projections into the future of climate impact.

A model of a city, of course, is not new in itself. What makes this one different is its dynamic nature; by layering projects before they are completely conceived it can reveal strategies for difficult to understand impacts such as flooding, accessibility, and climate resilience. 

At its foundation, we have built a physical model at a recognisable scale - a form compact enough to comprehend, but detailed enough that people will easily recognise the streets, buildings, and neighbourhoods. 

Onto this we have layered the city’s imagined future: the projects granted through planning applications, the proposals not yet realised, and visions still in discussion. 

Finally, we will add virtual layers that represent the urgent issues shaping the future city: responses to climate change and flooding, efforts to green the city, strategies for mobility and transport, and to accelerate the embrace of Limerick not merely as a place to work or pass through, but as a place to live fully and meaningfully. 

Architecture student, Emma Henry, Swinford, Co Mayo, showing her work 'Reuse: An Urban Village' to her mother Noelle Henry at an exhibition of work by students from UL's School of Architecture and Product Design in Istabraq Hall, Limerick City, as part of the Design@UL Showcase 2025. Photo: Alan Place

When the public sees this layered representation, the conversation shifts, and attention turns from narrow concerns to larger questions of potential, unlocking opportunities for new ideas on a meta-urban scale. Crucially, this model is flexible; designed to be added to or adapted by citizens, by the Local Authority, and by the various stakeholders that wish for a better Limerick.

In this way the model is not fixed, but an evolving canvas for the hopes, ideas, and lived realities of the people of Limerick. The Limerick City model is a key part of our participation in the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL). 

We are hosting the model within the Citizen Innovation Lab at UL’s City Campus, because we believe that genuine partnerships between city and university provide precisely the kind of vehicle needed to generate, share, and disseminate new knowledge.

At its best such collaboration gives form to the public’s creativity and energy. In this sense Limerick can be seen as a groundbreaking city - an experiment in human design for human life, a place both real and aspirational, familiar yet open to transformation.

UL School of Architecture Innovation Unit 25 - 'One city revisited. Photo: Brian Arthur

Finally, the city model project stands as a prototype for our new programmes in Urban Design and Climate Resilience, and for the Master in Landscape Architecture. These disciplines, perhaps more than any others in the realm of design, will define how the fabric of our cities and towns evolves in the decades ahead. 

Rooted firmly in place, with the city as both subject and classroom, we are using this prototype as a living test-bed for a new kind of place-based professional design education, one that is responsive to climate, to community, and to culture. 

The underlying premise of these new programmes is that the design of our cities is a fundamentally public act. It is not a mystery to be guarded by an elite cadre of experts or technocrats. 

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Rather, it should be understood as a collective undertaking, a 21st-century civic partnership that empowers all of us to give shape to our common future. If we are to realise this future, then the means of communication we use must be clearer, more accessible, and more immediate. 

The Limerick City model could be one step toward making that possible, offering citizens not only a vision of what the city might become, but also a vehicle through which they can participate directly in making that vision real.

• Merritt Bucholz is a professor at the School of Architecture and Product Design, University of Limerick.