Newspaper Articles
It is to Brendan Behan that the definition of a city as a "place where you wouldn't be bitten by a wild sheep" is attributed. By this test Dublin certainly qualifies as urban.
However the degree to which the city has absorbed the massive influx from its hinterland in the past 40 to 50 years has diluted its urbanity and altered its nature so that it has become increasingly a suburban city.
In 1926, census figures reveal almost 60% of the population lived in Dublin's inner city - the oval area bounded by the Royal and Grand Canals and the Circular Roads respectively. In 1960 there were 160,000 people living in this area, approximately one third of the population of the city. Recent estimates suggest that this figure has now fallen below 80,000 or less than one twelfth of the population of the Greater Dublin region.
This decline has followed a pattern common in many British and American cities, but not to the same degree in many cities in mainland Europe. Many factors contributed to this decline: the desire to eliminate the notorious tenement slums of Dublin's inner city; the general acceptance of the Garden City ideal; the growth in motor car ownership; and the lack of commitment to urbanism by city and national administrators alike many of whose roots were essentially rural.
A derelict inner city has become concomitant with increased crime, ghettos of deprivation and a general feeling that Dublin's core was not a place for visitors, either foreign or Irish, to spend too much time in.
RESIDENTIAL RENEWAL IN THE INNER CITY
In recent years there has been growing recognition that the pattern of urban blight in the capital is unhealthy and that the role of the historical city centre must be reinforced. Pressure from conservationists, professional bodies such as the RIAI, and increasing cosmopolitanism as a result of more contact with European cities has led to a national desire to see the haemorrhage stopped and a renewal of the Dublin's historic core. Central to this change of viewpoint is a recognition that residential development is the critical element in renewal of the central core as a "living city". In short there has been a significant shift towards urban living.
Dublin, in spite of its urban blight and the many badly designed modern buildings, is still a beautiful city. This is due not only to the prevalence of its architecturally significant eighteenth century Georgian buildings but also to the residential developments of the Victorian age in the inner city, around the North and South Circular Roads. In the buildings in these areas, which are generally well preserved, there are many fine examples of the essential components of a popular architecture, enriched by the craftsmen's imagination. This core of eighteenth and nineteenth century building stock can provide the spirit and example for this move towards residential renewal in today's inner city.
Dublin Corporation initiated the residential renewal process and had limited success with its development of a series of local authority housing schemes including the Coombe and City Quay developments in the late 1970s. However it was recognised at the time that it was essential to have a wider social mix to prevent the urban core becoming a single class ghetto and that social housing was not in itself sufficient to create a properly functioning inner city.
In recent years the decreasing availability of land in the older Victorian suburbs together with the realisation that not everyone wished to live on the outer fringes of the city has encouraged private developers to look, for the first time since the early years of the century, at undertaking residential schemes within the inner city. Schemes have been completed at High Street, opposite Christchurch, Arran Quay, Phibsborough, Rialto and Ringsend in the past two years.
The recent establishment of Temple Bar Properties Ltd. to spearhead the sensitive renewal of Dublin's "Left Bank" under the Temple Bar Area Renewal and Development Bill offers the prospect of a wider range of residential types being provided in this area, including residential use in both refurbished and mixed use developments.
This latter type of development, with residential use over retail shops or other commercial uses, was once common throughout Dublin's core. It is also one of the features which gives the great European cities such as Rome, Paris and Barcelona much of their character and prevents them becoming ghost towns when the daytime occupants return to the dormitory suburbs.
It is worth noting that when the Wide Street Commissioners approved their designs for Westmoreland Street and D'Olier Street in the early nineteenth century they looked to France and Italy for their architectural and urban design references, and these streets became among the first major city streets in these islands to have this form of mixed development with shops at ground floor level and residential use overhead.
