Sell Our Cities
Oct 9th, 2007 by Donagh
One of the items that Morning Ireland touched upon today was the An Bord Pleanála hearing today to decide upon the fate of the JC Decaux and Dublin City Council initiative to provide free bicycles in exchange for billboard advertising space.
“An Bord Pleanála will open a hearing today into a controversial decision by Dublin City Council to allow large billboards be erected at key sites in return for free bicycles.”
Part of the reason why the decision is controversial is because of the Councils decision to make hundreds of applications for planning permission, based on each of the sites where billboards would be erected, rather than one job lot.
We’ve discussed the issue in detail here already.
“To be fair, according to the council, advertising billboards are supposed to come down as part of the deal. Of course many of them are actually illegal. In fact, questions are very understandably being asked as to whether the Council should even be talking to the good folk at JC Decaux, given their track record.”
A recent profile of the company in the Economist provides some interesting detail about the company and it’s relatively checkered history:
“In the past JCDecaux has repeatedly been accused of unfair play and Jean-Claude has twice been convicted of criminal offences in connection with contracts awarded by local governments. Both offences took place before the firm floated on the Paris stock exchange in
2001. Since then it seems to have played by the rules.”
The DCC has said that it cannot reveal the details of the deal with JC Decaux because of commercial sensitivity.
Economist link via a thread on the Architecture message board Archiseek.