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Archive for the ‘economy’ Category

The City’s Edge: Dublin in Fragments 1

08 Jul

Viewed on a map’s surface, as the city embraces the Irish Sea and lazily asses itself out towards Ireland’s midlands, Dublin appears curvy and welcoming, but, in person, it’s spiky and wants you to go fuck yourself. The Spire, a stainless steel needle that reached 400 feet into the air on O’Connell Street, is often nicknamed the Spike by those wishing it to stand humorously as a symbol of hard drug use in the inner city, but I prefer to think of it as a representation of the metallic, unyielding, non-stick attitude of Dublin and Dubliners in general. The city has an edge. As an additional point of comparison, it’s difficult to get a decent view of the Spire in the city centre. You can wander around the low-rise centre without ever seeing it at all; the same goes for Dublin. It’s simultaneously there and not there. For me, Dublin is still a great unknown, and I’ve lived here nearly all of my life.

This realisation led me to set myself tasks: would I be able to describe Dublin – not neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood, and not necessarily through its history – in a way that reflected what I think I already know about it, while also acknowledging that there are things about a city that constantly change, that you know only briefly before they’re spirited away, and there are things that you may never know.

Dublin is a place I hate; Dublin is a place I love. Both feelings jostle around inside of me as I make my way around the city’s streets by foot, by bike, by bus. I’ve never committed to either love or to hate the city, but often I decide on a position, before changing my mind later. I never really thought I did love the city, but sometimes I find myself doing so, before stopping myself. Sometimes the late evening light catches a stubby Georgian street a certain way, and you’re transported briefly to a transcendental city, one where you haven’t just stepped in someone’s vomit.

Dublin, most of all, is a city of fragments. It’s been broken into pieces. These pieces are spread around the map, and often, no matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to connect them all. Sometimes it’s impossible to connect any. This is partly a product of bad planning, partly because our minds rebel against the overwhelming experience of city life, and all we have left are fragments of urban experience to hang on to.

And this is the way I want to approach Dublin: through fragmentary glances down its streets and alleys, through midnight rambles in its industrial estates and exploratory hikes amongst its suburbs. Dublin is knowable through its fragments, or it’s not knowable at all.

In a way, all cities are the ruins of past civilizations, and Dublin is no different in this. The city, especially at its threadbare fringes and its sharp edges, testifies the recent death of a dream that consisted of full employment and house ownership for all. Incomplete developments that loom over country roads and adjoin supermarket car-parks concretize the optimism once felt about an ever-expanding property market, an optimism undermined by economic collapse. These estates are at times melancholy places, at times sites of a pioneer optimism. They are undoubtedly part of Dublin, but are also isolated fragments cast to the North, South and West of the city, thrown there by cheap land, the greased wheels of planning and good transportation links.

Dublin: pointy, sharp, steely, desperate, broken into pieces. Coming to a town near you, or it would be if you weren’t already there.

 

Keep it concrete

24 Jun

I’m currently sitting on a sofa in an apartment in the Clongriffin development, to the far north of Dublin city (the dividing line between Dublin City and Fingal County is almost literally visible from the front windows of the apartment, across a vast expanse of scrubland that had been marked for development, but is now, quite excitingly, being reclaimed by nature as wetlands, the area’s natural state).

This zone has, to some commentators, become shorthand for the mistakes of property developers right at the end of the boom. And, in many ways, it is something of a wasteland (the half-built main street, is one notable example). However, in terms of transportation links to the city and beyond, Clongriffin is excellent. Recently, a DART station opened (see facile broadsheet colour piece here) at the east end of the development, and this serves commuters to the city well. A bus service, the 128, which runs through the city, terminating at Rathmines, runs every ten minutes during peak hours, and last night, when I jumped on one in Rathmines, the next bus was due only 20 minutes later.

The 128 bus

In addition, there are many good things about the place: the large park, located fairly centrally in the development, that locals run and cycle around; the decent positioning of the apartments in relation to the street, which resembles a small boulevard, or narrow dual carriageway. There’s no doubt that many residents like it here.

However, because of the comparatively low density, shops in the development are few and far between: there’s a small Centra shop, an off licence, and a chemists. Numerous commercial units stand unoccupied along street-level, and a large building near the DART station, which was to have been occupied by Superquinn, remains spookily empty. At night, no lights shine from within the building, and the image is disarming.

A view of the wasteland wetlands, with the Superquinn building beyond

 

16 Jan
No Laughing Matter
Yes, yes it’s a terrible thing, if you’re worried about the price of things and the cost of living and all that. But, isn’t this amusing: if consumer price inflation hits a certain level, the Bank of England has to write a letter to the Treasury. ‘Dear Treasury, sorry about that whole inflation business. Regards, The Bank of England.’ All very refined and polite. Certainly better than those ‘Oi – give us yer business’ phonecalls that so many banks make nowadays.