Recent debate around the proposed redevelopment of Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre has largely taken place on aesthetic grounds. The question is being framed as one of taste: do you prefer the new design or the old building? Most decry the loss of a unique and charming landmark, while others welcome the modernisation of a “grotty, schmaltzy, and twee” structure.
I find myself firmly in the former camp, surreptitiously charmed over the years by the Victorian façade; I appreciate the botanic-greenhouse effect, how it complements the park and creates an unlikely but cohesive gestalt to that whole part of town. It is undeniably unique and instantly recognisable, a place to meet or shelter from the rain without having to buy something.
However, I don’t think this aesthetic debate – valid as it is – does justice to the depth of outrage felt by Dublin residents over this proposal. There is something much more profound going on in the city that deserves to be articulated: the urban landscape of Dublin is being reshaped according to the desires of private investment capital, while the residents – those who live, work, walk, meet, eat, drink, create and maintain the city – have virtually no say in how this happens.
The logic of capital investment dictates that all decisions are ultimately subordinate to the impetus of maximal returns. Transforming space into financially productive units becomes the guiding principle of new development, regardless of the importance of the location. Hence the explosion of hotels, offices, retails units, and student accommodation.
Sometimes this results in the rejuvenation of a dilapidated landscape, but very often it means the proposed destruction of an imperfect but meaningful place that has become an integral part of the identity of an area: The Bernard Shaw, The Complex, The Cobblestone, Moore St., The Tivoli Theatre/District 8, Newmarket Square, Yamamori Izakaya, and now Stephens Green Shopping Center.
These kinds of places were not necessarily planned to be everything they eventually became. That is not how authenticity works. Authentic places emerge organically over time, with and through people’s natural desires for a certain way of life. They are manifestations of communal living, and democratic expressions of how people wish to exist in a place together. Edward Relph, humanistic geographer, calls this the “genius loci” or ‘spirit of a place’, which reflects the genuine culture and history of a people. People spontaneously gathering on Drury Street to sit on sunny kerbs to talk, drink and eat is another example (one the council is considering putting a stop to).
This incremental loss of authentic place-making takes a subconscious toll on people’s relationship with their home city. Being confronted with standardized, interchangeable, buildings that look remarkably similar – red brick facades, pointed geometric angels, large glass panels – leaves you with an empty, hollow feeling which Relph calls ‘existential outsidership’. It is characterised by a deep sense of alienation and separateness from a place. The message repeated is that the city is not for you. Residents become mere spectators or background characters in the investment games of private capital.
Developers are aware of this, however tangentially, which is why their hyper-realistic 3D drawings give the impression of a genuine attempt to contextualise buildings into existing landscapes. Inevitably, this appears tokenistic and manufactured. Putting a single tree in the atrium of an office, or a little playground in an apartment block no more creates a sense of authenticity than placing a vinyl player in a hotel room and hanging a Miles Davis record on the wall.
This sense of alienation generates the outrage that bubbles to the surface with each new proposed development. When media interest swells, it provides the only visible forum people have to express how they feel. While Irish planning law technically permits public participation, the mechanisms available can be seen as reactive and bureaucratic. Citizens are often forced into the negative role of the ‘objector,’ intervening only in the hopes of making a design slightly less awful.
Our iron-clad laws of private property ensure all of this is perfectly legal: if you have access to capital, you get to decide what a place looks and feels like. In this case, it is Lanthorn, a property investment venture that took over Davy’s real estate portfolio, acting through DTDL Ltd, a company registered in the tax-haven British Virgin Islands, who are determining the future of Stephen’s Green. Creating a sense of belonging and welcoming people to freely associate in the heart of the city is probably not their main priority.
French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre writing about Paris in 1968 coined the phrase ‘The Right to the City’. He argued that the citizens of a place have the primary right not just to access the basic necessities of a city (water, housing, sanitation) but to be actively involved in co-creating the city according to their own needs and desires. This idea was expanded upon by Marxist-geographer David Harvey in 2008 during the Occupy Wall Street movement.
According to Harvey, what is at stake is not just the aesthetic urban landscape, but our ability to become the kinds of people we want to be: “what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of daily life we desire, what kinds of technologies we deem appropriate, what aesthetic values we hold.”
Erecting barriers on the canal, kicking people off a sunny street, no loitering signs in public squares, and the proliferation of for-profit buildings during a desperate housing crisis, tells a sad story about the vision Dublin City Council has for the city, and its people.
