Street art, bike bunkers and pollution fighting plants – meet the man behind Dublin City Council’s ‘Beta’ projects
Public bodies are not often associated with building experimental projects on a shoestring budget, but there’s one small Dublin City Council (DCC) department that has been doing just that.
DCC Beta, founded and headed up by former council architect Shane Waring, has been testing ideas around the city since 2012.
Among its more notable successes are the painting of thousands of drab electricity boxes around the city, and the introduction of bike bunkers.
“I see myself as a civic entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, inside an organisation,” Mr Waring said. “What drives me is solving urban problems.”
With an entrepreneurial background from co-founding and subsequently selling car-sharing service GoCar, he said the idea for DCC Beta came out of the introduction of 10pc “innovation time” in the council.
“I went back to the city architect [Ali Grehan] and said, ‘Remember innovation time? I finally have something I’d like to spend 10pc of my week on.’ That’s how it started,” he said.
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“It started off with a free WordPress site. The signage and branding and all that was a Word document. I literally inserted the Greek letter beta in and that was it. So, it cost zero to set up.”
Mr Waring’s first Beta project was the repainting of traffic-light boxes in the inner city, seeking a colourful way to kick-start the fledgling brand.
“I wanted to start with a positive project, so we took 11 boxes all in one area, just off Capel Street. At the end, the trial was removed after 18 months and then assessed,” he said.
The project, which cost €1,100, was a hit, with feedback pouring in once the electricity boxes were repainted their original grey colour.
“People were like, ‘Where’s that thing gone? We loved that’,” he said.
Today, about 1,000 such electricity boxes across Dublin have been revamped under the “Dublin Canvas” branding, and Mr Waring believes it is now Ireland’s largest street art project.
“The idea is that we have two brands, Dublin City Council and Dublin City Council Beta,” he said. “It gives us a way to clearly signal we’re unsure about something. This might be a terrible idea, and we are actively seeking feedback.”
Following the success of the electricity boxes, Mr Waring turned his attention to tackling the lack of secure bike parking in residential areas of the city centre.
“[At the moment] you either put it on the footpath and it’s in the way… or you put it on a pole and it gets nicked, or it’s out in the weather and it rusts more quickly,” he said.
“Or you’re bringing it into your house and you put it out in your tiny backyard, with bin bags in front of it, and so on.”
Several variants of corrugated metal “bunkers” that sit in car-parking spaces were devised to store the bikes safely, with 12 currently dotted around the city.
Based on the success of these initial trials, a contract to operate a scaled-up bike bunker scheme was signed with Bleeper recently.
Another project under the scaling-up stage is “downpour planters”, a way of solving excess rainfall runoff on to footpaths and helping prevent pollution in the water system.
“When it rains, the first 15 minutes is where the most rain falls, and then it calms down a bit,” Mr Waring said.
“So, particularly inside the canals, we have an old, combined sewer system. You have the pretty clean rainwater mixing with foul water.
“When you have heavy rainfall events, often the system hits capacity and then you get outfall events, where water gets discharged straight into rivers.”
Planters installed so far have successfully slowed the flow by absorbing and gradually releasing the initial hit of water.
“We have six planters, and the plan is we’re going to try a new type of downpour planter that’s bigger, with a more sophisticated design,” he said. “We’re going to embed sensors into them to actually measure how much they slow the flow. From that, we’ll be able to place a monetary value on them as a solution.”
Further trials under way by the two-person Beta team include a free public cooktop in Herbert Park in Ballsbridge, a cargo bike sharing scheme, and a trial of digital keys for sports coaches to access park facilities.
In fact, Mr Waring estimates 14 projects are currently being progressed under the Beta banner, all at different stages of development.
The schemes can be tracked on a website which shows their details, whether they were successful, and whether they have “graduated” to become fully fledged council initiatives.
Often things don’t need money, they just require time to stop and think
The Beta initiative has also been light on the council’s purse strings, costing just €17,500 to run trials during the first three-and-a-half years of its life.
“Part of being very shoestring was useful because it forced you to be creative. It forced you to kind of go, I don’t need 10 of a thing, I can learn with one of a thing,” Mr Waring said.
These days, the unit is assigned around €75,000 annually – a drop in the ocean compared with DCC’s near-€1.5bn budget.
“Almost always the problem is spending the budget. Often things don’t need money, they just require time to stop and think,” he said.
A key principle underlying DCC Beta is the unique way in which ideas are handled, with fewer guardrails from inception to scaling to ensure speed.
The three-stage pipeline for ideas includes a concept stage, which decides whether it is a good idea to trial the project. This includes picking what Mr Waring calls a “Goldilocks” location that is not too obvious for the solution, but represents a typical Dublin area.
A trial would be performed at this stage and data collected intermittently, which would then be removed after a set time.
Provided the trial goes well, the delivery model is the focus for the second stage, asking how to deliver and sustain the solution.
The final stage is localising the solution for specific areas and further scaling it up for much wider implementation.
As for the DCC Beta project itself, Mr Waring believes it is still in the second stage on the ideas pipeline.
“One of the things about the scaling stage is making something sustainable. If I’m hit by a bus, [DCC Beta] is gone,” he said.
“Ideally, the scaling stage is about how do you make it become business as usual by the end of it. And it’s not there yet.”
Members of the public can suggest ideas for DCC Beta at www.dccbeta.ie/suggest and can view existing projects at www.dccbeta.ie/project .