Michael Moynihan: Why is there such an aversion to the basics of upkeep in Cork?
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Strolling around Cork recently I noted work going on in several different places: small excavations, little foundations. To what end, though?
I refer you to social media, where Cork City Council clarifies the matter.
“Work has begun on installing foundations for Cork’s new wayfinding scheme. The city centre’s unique island layout, with river channels to its north and south, can make orientation challenging and confusing for visitors, according to Fáilte Ireland research.
“Informed by best practice in orientation, the wayfinding network will include engaging interpretation around the city’s character and heritage, highlight Cork’s compact nature and help connect existing attractions.
“The new signage will include detailed location maps to help visitors better determine their current location and will also inform visitors and residents what lies within walking or cycling distance.
“The signage will be installed in early October and accompanied by a decluttering exercise to remove defunct signage and poles. The Wayfinding Scheme is supported by Fáilte Ireland, the NTA and Cork City Council.”
The fine print first.
A “decluttering exercise to remove defunct signage and poles” is long overdue: you could argue that that should be the top line in this statement, not the provision of — ah — “new signage (which) will include detailed location maps”. Which has a certain ‘like for like’ quality we’ll come back to.
Still, there are locations which have no shortage of signs, directions and symbols festooning them. A clean-up would be no harm, so credit where it’s due. If these superfluous signs are being removed, that’s a good thing.
As for ‘wayfinding’ itself, though ... this appears to be one of the new buzzwords which does little more than complicate matters unnecessarily. My favourite example of the genre was ‘wild swimming’, also known as ‘swimming’, but ‘wayfinding’ has an additional note of unearned valour which I think helps it to the top spot. ‘Wayfinding’, as far as I can make out, means finding your way around town. Not slashing your way through tropical undergrowth to stand with stout Cortez upon a peak in Darien, despite the mock-heroic overtones.
To go into more detail, wayfinding goes back to the work of American geographer Kevin Lynch in the sixties. He worked on the legibility of urban spaces, terming a consistent network of directional signs, street information panels with maps, printed maps, and plaques a wayfinding system.
Which doesn’t mean it’s above criticism. I saw some concerns expressed by one Leo Hollis, urban theorist and author of Cities Are Good For You, on the matter of wayfinding and its accompanying sign systems.
He told some years ago: “Like all urban technologies, one has to be very cautious about who is running this, and who it is aimed at. If the legible city only maps shopping malls, car parks and the police station, this seriously reduces what the city has to offer. This can make parts of the city invisible to the visitor.
“Someone somewhere has made an arbitrary decision that tourists don’t want to go there, or that place is too dangerous so it should be avoided.”
This is a point worth raising, given Cork City Council states that the city can be “challenging and confusing for visitors, according to Fáilte Ireland research”.
That isn’t my primary concern here, though — that permanent signage is being erected around Cork because tourists find the middle of a small city “challenging and confusing”, even if the same statement goes on to describe Cork as “compact” rather than a bewildering urban labyrinth.
Nor am I overly worried about spending money on such maps even though many of those visiting — and living — in Cork have access to smartphones and can probably orient themselves pretty swiftly through a variety of apps and location services.
This is the home of the robot tree, after all, an expensive feature of Cork’s urban landscape which surely deserves inclusion as one of the “existing attractions” on the new wayfinding system.
No, what would worry me is maintenance of the new system, particularly when you see what happened with maintenance of the old system.
Last April, I wrote here about the Cork City brochure, Our City Is Changing. I pointed out there were relatively few references to maintenance as one of the mainstays of municipal work,
In doing so I pointed out: “A casual stroll around Cork city last Saturday revealed plenty of areas crying out for attention rather than reimagining or rethinking. No sweeping changes needed, just some basic upkeep.
“Take the tourist maps at various parts of the city, many of which are defaced by graffiti: one hasn’t been cleaned for so long that there seems to be some kind of moss growing on it.”
Remember those tourist maps? The City Walks signs? The grey boards with plastic covering?
Now they seem to be gone, no doubt to be replaced by the shiny new wayfinding system. How long will that system be shiny, never mind new? How long before its constituent parts begin to resemble their predecessors — unreadable with spray-paint and sprouting mould?
That’s what happens when there’s a lack of maintenance, and there’s a mindset at play here that needs to be changed. From MacCurtain Street to the aforementioned robot trees, why is there such an aversion to the basics of upkeep in Cork?
Last March we saw the ultimate embodiment of this with the South Gate Bridge, when only a portion of the bridge was cleaned.
As Eoin English reported at that time: “The crew was only told to remove the graffiti from the affected stonework. They were not told to clean the rest of the stonework.”
Little wonder that a city councillor called it as “a bit of a half-arsed effort”, which was a piercingly accurate description given how much of the bridge was left untouched.
Lately yours truly was leafing through the city columnist’s bible, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, which describes the long career of Robert Moses and his influence on New York’s physical development. There are pearls on every page: Caro’s description of the traffic chaos caused by new roads and bridges in New York might strike a chord with those stuck around Dunkettle these mornings, for instance.
Try this paragraph.
"And the cost of neglected maintenance is astonishingly high: the West Side Highway, for example, could have been kept in perfect repair during the 1950s for about $75,000 per year; because virtually no repairing was done, by the 1960s the cost of annual maintenance would be more than $1,000,000 per year; and in 1974 the highway had begun literally to fall apart — a condition that would take tens of millions of dollars to repair."
Anyway, best of luck with the wayfinding. And I’ll see everyone back here in a couple of years with an update.