Dr Patrick Collins asks: “Who Thought That Was a Good Idea?”
The challenge of delivering inclusive, affordable, and sustainable housing is one shared by communities across the world. While the contexts may vary, the question at the heart of the issue remains the same: Who gets to decide what our places become?
In this article, Dr Patrick Collins draws on original research in rural Ireland to explore how power, participation, and planning intersect and what happens when communities are given the tools to shape their own futures. Based on the case of the Maigh Cuilinn Village Plan, the piece highlights one of the largest public consultations ever conducted in rural Ireland, and offers important lessons for anyone interested in democratising decision-making around housing and development.
This full academic paper was published in Journal of Place Management and Development, and is published here by the Institute of Place Management as part of our ongoing commitment to exploring the causes and consequences of place inequalities. It contributes to our broader work aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, and reflects our belief that meaningful place leadership must always start with meaningful participation.
“Who Thought That Was a Good Idea?”
Walk past a new development, a supermarket, a student accommodation block, a vanished field - somewhere you used to play, do some underage drinking, meet, or just see the sky - and chances are you’ve muttered the words: “Who thought that was a good idea?”
It’s a small question that hides a much larger one: Who gets to decide the future of our places? And why is it almost never us?
Planning, for many people, is something done to them, not with them. It is a domain of technical reports, opaque processes, and decisions made far away - geographically, socially, and politically. In Ireland, the planning system has always been highly centralised. Some of us might be aware of the benefits this brings in the form of strategic coordination, but fewer are aware that its cost comes in the form of local agency. For communities outside the core decision-making centres, especially rural ones in Ireland (ones with less monied and less dynamic local authorities), this has created a deep sense of detachment from the processes shaping our everyday environments.
That detachment has consequences: not just in how places look and function, but in how people feel about belonging and about their ability to shape the world around them. Given an opportunity to go further, I would say that the consequences are being felt in the creaking of democratic systems across the world.
My recent research, now published in the Journal of Place Management and Development, explores a small but significant attempt to challenge this detachment: the Moycullen (now Maigh Cuilinn a move back to the Irish language name) Village Plan.
Planning with, not for
Maigh Cuilinn is a village just west of Galway City. It has many of the traits of a village of the edge of any city, fast growing—pressured by housing demand, infrastructure gaps, and a palpable fear of placeless development. But in 2019 (supported by the Irish Research Council) rather than waiting for yet another plan to arrive from above, the community decided to write their own.
What followed was one of the largest public consultations ever conducted in rural Ireland. Over 800 people took part (in a village of 1,500), contributing to interviews, workshops, mapping exercises, and even an interactive app designed to let residents visualise development trade-offs. Important is the fact that this wasn’t about responding to a proposal, it was about imagining what kind of place Maigh Cuilinn could become.
What emerged wasn’t radical, but it was grounded: a village that prioritised connections; between people, between generations, and between the built and natural environment. Residents wanted more than infrastructure. They wanted cohesion. They wanted sustainability. They wanted to feel part of something.
But perhaps more than any individual proposal, what mattered was the process itself. People felt heard. They felt included. And for many, it was the first time they had ever been asked what they thought.
Why this matters now
Too often, we treat community input as a courtesy rather than a condition. Consultations come after the plans are drawn. Participation is shaped to fit the decisions already made. As a result, people disengage - not just from planning, but from public life more generally.
This isn’t accidental. It is symptomatic of a deeper shift: people being quietly removed from the socio-spatial - excluded from the shaping of their environments through technologies that centralise and automate, and through political frameworks that prize efficiency over inclusion. Neoliberal planning logic has transformed development into a technical problem, best solved by experts and markets, not by messy, deliberative democracy.
The result? Places that feel like they belong to someone else. And citizens who stop believing that public processes have space for them at all.
But initiatives like the Maigh Cuilinn Village Plan offer a counter-narrative. They don’t just gather opinions - they build capacity. They rebuild trust. They reconnect people to place, and to one another. And crucially, they offer a reminder that planning can be political in the best sense of the word: a shared conversation about how we want to live together.
Reclaiming the local as a site of agency
This isn’t about nostalgia or parochialism (though they were encountered). It’s about recognising that meaningful participation is still possible, and perhaps more necessary than ever. At a time when civic disaffection is rising, and when planning decisions feel increasingly remote and technocratic, re-embedding planning in the community is both a democratic imperative and a practical one.
If Maigh Cuilinn shows us anything, it’s that people are not apathetic. They are often simply uninvited.
So the next time you pass a development and ask, “Who thought that was a good idea?”, consider this: the problem isn’t just the idea. It’s that we’ve stopped expecting to be part of the thinking.
Dr Patrick Collins is a lecturer in Economic Geography School of Geography, Archaeology & Irish Studies, Galway University of Galway. Dr Patrick Collins will be speaking at an Institute of Place Management online conference on Thursday, 6th November, where he will discuss this research further in the lead-up to World Urbanism Day.
Why This Matters to IPM members
At the Institute of Place Management, we believe that how we make decisions about place matters just as much as what we decide. The story of Maigh Cuilinn reflects a growing movement - across the globe - to reclaim decision making in our places as a participatory, democratic process rooted in local knowledge and shared values.
As we align our work with Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, we invite practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to join us in exploring practical ways to embed meaningful community participation at every stage of planning. If you’re working on similar initiatives or want to collaborate on future research, please get in touch.
About the author
Formed in 2006, the Institute of Place Management is the international professional body that supports people committed to developing, managing and making places better.