What Berlin reminded me about Ireland

A.J O'Dowd is a Dublin-born Senior Engineer at Civic who has spent the last two years living in Berlin while continuing to lead and support public realm projects across Ireland. Seeing one city as a resident while helping shape another, A.J shares his perspective on what Ireland can learn from Europe's public spaces - and why our greatest strength has been here all along. 

I've lived in Berlin long enough now to get a sense of how the city feels, how it moves and how it ticks. Berlin isn't perfect, nowhere is. But as a city, to me, it works. 

The first things I noticed included that it’s a great city to walk and cycle in, and that it is incredibly green. I live in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood, which can feel more like a village than a city. Children cycle around unaided, people stroll along the canal and cafés and bars spill onto generous pavements, creating a warm, convivial buzz around the place. 

While continuing to work on projects back home in Ireland, I often find myself making comparisons. Not because I think Berlin has all the answers, but because stepping outside of Ireland allows me to look at it through a different lens. It makes me want to take some of the things that work here and ask,  how could we also have them at home? 

Why can't we have more green spaces where it feels safe to let children cycle the streets without supervision? Why can't we create streets and urban environments that encourage communities to grow, rather than asking communities to grow in spite of them? 

As engineers and designers, we can sometimes be guilty of designing what we've designed before, with small incremental changes because that's how it's always been done. We don't necessarily need to think better, but we do need to give ourselves the space to step back and think differently. 

Making a city work is of course incredibly complicated, but designing a street for people doesn't have to be. 

Trying to ease vehicular congestion in an old Viking settlement like Dublin requires highly technical work. But if you take away some of that complexity and distil it down to what would make streets a better place for people, the answers can be obvious. 

Walk through certain neighbourhoods in Berlin and you'll see streets where that thinking has been applied. A generous footpath on either side, a cobbled carriageway in the middle, then perhaps a planted area. Trees, seating, space to play, somewhere to stop and have a conversation. Think of this compared to your standard asphalt carriageway and footpath layout; think of how these make you feel. The interventions can be incredibly simple in their logic, but they create streets that feel comfortable, generous and human. 

And this isn't uniquely German. Copenhagen has spent decades designing around people rather than vehicles, creating a cycling culture that is now embedded in everyday life. Vienna has experimented with greener, cooler streets that respond to climate while improving the experience of living in the city. Across the Netherlands, the evolution of cities like Amsterdam shows what can happen when active travel and public life are considered as part of the same urban system rather than separate transport questions. 

My favourite cities have streets that reflect the city’s identity. Berlin has an open minded, free and bohemian character. The streets in my ‘kiez’ or neighbourhood community reflect that. Concrete jungles that prioritise the car can strip that identity away. Accordingly, our towns and cities should be more than transit corridors. 

A tree isn't just landscaping; it can manage surface water, cool a street, support biodiversity and make somewhere feel better to be. A wider pavement isn't simply about pedestrian capacity; it can encourage active travel, support local businesses and give people somewhere to stop, meet and connect. The design intention and execution informs the use - trees and wider footpaths are simple examples of what people-first design can look like. 

We're already seeing that thinking in Ireland. Grow College Green is about changing how people move through Dublin city centre, and also about creating a civic space that reflects the significance of one of the country's most important public places. Similarly, the Tallaght Village Enhancement Scheme acknowledges that a village isn’t primarily a transit corridor; it’s first job is to be a village. The design intention is for community to thrive. 

I think that's particularly important because Ireland has something that good that public realm should be designed to nurture - we're an extraordinarily social nation. Community isn't something we need to invent through clever design. It's already there. Our job is to create places generous enough for it to keep happening. 

One thing I've come to admire about many European cities is their confidence in allowing contemporary interventions to sit comfortably alongside centuries of accumulated identity. They evolve without forgetting where they came from. 

Ireland has a strong reputation for being warm, welcoming, social and accommodating. Do narrow footpaths and car-dominated streets represent céad míle fáilte? I don't think so. 

Design should be informed by, and respond to, the character and feel of the area it is in. We should learn from and adopt best practice from places where it has worked, while adapting it to the locality. Ireland has always borrowed, adapted and made ideas of its own. Our cities and towns can do the same - taking inspiration from elsewhere while creating places that feel unmistakably of their time and place. 

We can borrow ideas from Berlin about calmer neighbourhood streets, take inspiration from Copenhagen's confidence in active travel and learn from Vienna's approach to climate resilience. But those ideas should always be filtered through the character, history and culture of our own towns and cities. Good public realm shouldn't make an Irish town feel like Berlin, Copenhagen or Vienna. It should make it feel more like itself. 

Living in Berlin has taught me plenty about streets, transport and public space. The most valuable lesson, though, has been about Ireland.