🔄 Ongoing
Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council is the local authority for south-east Dublin, serving about 234,000 residents (233,860 at the 2022 census). It is one of the four Dublin local authorities in Smart Dublin, the regional initiative that uses Dublin as a testbed for new technologies to tackle urban challenges and improve public services.
The Council runs the pilot with Sandyford Business District (SBD), which manages Ireland’s largest business district. The district covers 2.5 km² across four business parks, is home to several hundred companies, and has a daytime working population much larger than its resident population.
The pilot is part of IB-Green, an Interreg North-West Europe project focused on climate-resilient industrial and business parks. EU funding through the programme supported the design of the Civic Park, and Sandyford is one of the project’s seven pilot parks.
Business and industrial parks are some of the most heat-vulnerable areas in European cities. Large, paved areas, few trees, big roofs and little shade create strong heat island effects. As a result, workers have few cool or shaded places to go during the day.
Sandyford, developed over decades as a car-focused employment district, fits this description, and most of its open space is privately owned. Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown’s Sandyford Urban Framework Plan 2022–2028 aims to shift the area “away from a traditional business park to a liveable area.” Creating a civic park at Corrig Road and Carmanhall Road has been a goal in every version of the framework plan since 2009.
The pilot is based on the idea that adaptation investments should rely on evidence, not assumptions. Latitudo 40 used satellite Earth observation to map the surface urban heat island, land surface temperature and tree cover density across the district, delivered through its EarthDataPlace platform. The results show which parts of Sandyford are hottest and where the tree cover is lowest. RealSim created a digital twin of the entire district — all four business parks, built on a game engine — including planning data and approved developments, so that interventions can be seen in their real and future urban context.
These tools were combined: the Earth observation results guided three planning scenarios for the Civic Park site, which were modelled for cooling performance in Latitudo 40’s Urban Simulator. The results were then visualised in the digital twin for stakeholders and the public.
The aim was twofold: to find the mix of vegetation and water features that cuts heat stress the most, and to use the digital twin to show businesses, stakeholders and the public that adaptation investment should go where the evidence shows it delivers the most cooling.
Alongside the public-realm strand, the pilot works on the district’s privately held land through business surveys, focus groups and the IB-Green Award, which recognises companies that install green and blue infrastructure on their own premises.
Urban Simulator (Latitudo 40): a scenario-modelling tool that tests how nature-based solutions — trees, planting, lawns and water features — would change surface temperatures before anything is built. Planners compare alternative designs side by side and choose based on cooling evidence rather than visual preference alone. In Sandyford, it compared three planning scenarios for the new Civic Park.
The Civic Park itself — a tree-lined green space with a flexible central lawn for events and markets, a bandstand, a covered multi-use sports facility, children’s play areas, public toilets, walking and cycling links, extensive planting and sustainable drainage, designed by Urban Agency — together with reduced heat stress and improved air quality in the district, and road space along Corrig Road and Carmanhall Road reallocated to expand the park.
Ongoing. The project has completed its analysis, design development and community engagement phases. The statutory consultation closed on 21 July 2026, and the project is progressing through the final stages of the Part 8 process. Funding is secured, and the Council plans to deliver the park within the current IB-Green project period.
Next steps:
The district has a measured heat baseline. A quantified SUHI, land surface temperature and tree-cover baseline now exists for the Sandyford district, usable as a before-and-after benchmark for the district as a whole rather than for the park site alone.
The park design rests on cooling evidence. The Council selected the park design from three simulated cooling scenarios, making the choice of vegetation and water configuration an evidence-based one.
The digital twin shows the district as it will be. A district-scale digital twin covering the full 2.5 km² and four business parks is in use for planning and communication. It incorporates consented developments, so that proposals are assessed against the district as it will be, not as it is.
The public helped shape the design. The design progressed through two full rounds of public engagement — non-statutory in mid-2025 and statutory in mid-2026 — with feedback documented in a Design Consultation Report and addendum and carried into the design.
The park is funded. The Council secured €10 million for the Civic Park under Ireland’s Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund, confirmed in the June 2026 announcement of 82 approved projects under the €1 billion fund, alongside the IB-Green contribution.
The approach reaches private land and other regions. IB-Green designated Sandyford the pilot region for the IB-Green Award, giving the district a mechanism for extending adaptation onto privately held land and a route for transferring the approach to the other partner regions. The methodology is being transferred across the IB-Green partnership’s seven pilot parks — Hemrik (Leeuwarden, NL), Overmaat-Rijkerswoerd (Arnhem, NL), Seclin and Ravennes-les-Francs (Lille European Metropolis, FR), Zellik (Green Energy Park, BE), Singen (DE) and Sandyford (IE) — establishing a replicable European model for greening ageing industrial and business parks.
