“I’ll have the squid.”

“How do you want it?”

“I don’t know?”

“What do you want it for?”

“I’m going to do it on the grill.”

“Right, so I can gut it, clean it, give you the tentacles apart, the head prepared and scored, and do you want me to separate the ink for the freezer?”

“Sounds good to me!”

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And thus begins the delicate process of the fishmonger carefully slicing, separating, extracting, sluicing, scoring, wiping, and sealing the fish, which is handed to me.

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This is a vignette of the type of interaction that happens on a regular basis for a good portion of the Spanish population. Every city has its share of fixed markets that open on a near-daily basis in a permanent space, with stallholders selling everything from fresh to dried goods. Though places of commerce, these are civic spaces, owned by the councils and put at the disposal of local businesses to provide a public service. The understanding is that while the markets provide food, they are equally important as community amenities that foster connection between people, and between people and the food that they consume.

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The Irish experience, by contrast, offers little by way of markets that can be integrated into people’s daily or weekly shopping routines. Taking Dublin city centre as an example, the outlook is not positive. Moore Street has been in a state of limbo since the early 2000s, whereby various development proposals, as yet unbuilt, have stymied investment in the basic management and infrastructure needed by the traders to keep the site going. [1]

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Works are due to finally begin on the Victorian Fruit and Vegetable Market this year – after a six-year closure period – with a proposal for a retail market to include cafes, restaurants, and a public event space. [2] The Iveagh Markets, closed since 1996, is in an advanced state of dereliction, with no conclusion in sight to the legal wranglings over its ownership. [3]

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With a dearth of independent butchers, fishmongers, and greengrocers on the high street, the only viable option for most is the supermarket, which has consequences for choice, the environment and communities. There is a lack of real choice of fresh food options when compared to the options on offer from a specialist market provider. Market produce can be bought in the quantities needed by the customer and may be cheaper (for them) as a result, while cutting down on food waste and eliminating the need for the customary plastic packaging. Supermarkets also put consumers at a remove from the producers of the food they’re buying, whether those producers are situated on the other side of the world, or, if local, are financially squeezed by the big stores’ monopoly, with implications for fair pay and the environment.

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Which brings us to the critical value of markets as community spaces, especially when viewed in contrast to supermarkets. Critical urban geographer Sara Gonzalez notes that “Marketplaces also function as spaces for social interaction particularly for vulnerable groups and can promote fairer forms of consumption and production”. [4] Given that their locations are often in socially deprived urban areas, this interaction is particularly important to – often poorer, older – local residents who may be  from immigrant communities, and who derive enormous benefit from these spaces which are not driven purely by “capitalist profit but by reciprocal care, solidarity or cooperativism that benefit traders themselves but also users that gather around them”. [5]

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In recognition of the value that markets provide in relation to communities, sustainable food culture, and choice, much is happening in Europe with regard to their preservation and promotion, though the success or otherwise of these moves is contested. One view is that markets can be used as drivers of local regeneration, maintaining their traditional role as providers of everyday goods while diversifying their offering to cater for a wider range of shoppers and tourists, often with management or ownership transferred from municipal authorities to private companies and landlords. [6]

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The alternative view is that the redevelopment of these traditional markets focuses on affluent buyers and tourists, driving out existing traders and shoppers and leading to gentrification and displacement of poorer local residents, such as has happened at Brixton and Borough Markets in London and at La Boqueria and Santa Caterina Markets in Barcelona. [7]

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So, what can be done in an Irish context to help existing markets to flourish and encourage the establishment of new ones while ensuring that they continue to fulfil the everyday needs of local residents and do not fall victim to over-tourism?

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Retaining Dublin as an example, support from local authorities is needed to promote markets through establishing market-focused bodies with responsibility for developing an overall action plan, like the Institut Municipal de Mercats de Barcelona (IMMB). [8] Traders’ rights need to be protected, particularly in relation to providing long-term licenses to new and existing traders. Publicly-owned space must be provided on a long-term, secure basis, so that markets aren’t pushed out as soon as the land they operate on becomes a development opportunity for a private landlord, as happened to the Green Door Market. [9]

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By-laws should be considered to facilitate longer or more flexible opening hours in recognition of the fact that many people work during the day and would need to access the market early or late. Responsibility for the setting and collecting of rents should be kept with the local authority and pitched at a level to help vendors compete with supermarket prices. This would also prevent sudden and unsustainable rises coming from private owners, as happened at Brixton Market. [10]

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Local councils should work with market management to ensure that the mix of vendors meets local community needs and does not pivot towards a purely tourist offering. Basic infrastructure investment (water, electricity, internet, and WCs) is a minimum requirement, along with the refurbishment, construction and maintenance of built assets. While the focus here has been on a Dublin context, opportunities exist in other urban centres and historic market towns in Ireland, such as is happening in the new Thurles Market Quarter development underway in Tipperary.

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All of which is to say that the development of successful markets that serve an essential civic function is contingent on who gets to shape them, and for whose benefit. Ensuring that markets remain local amenities rather than just tourist spaces will require public ownership; democratic governance by traders with offerings aimed at and priced for local residents; secure tenure for vendors; infrastructure investment; and fair rent policies.

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In the particular is contained the universal, and so it is here. The issues relating to the making of successful and equitable markets that prioritise the needs of residents over the interests of tourists and private capital apply to Irish society more generally, not least in the realm of housing. And so perhaps there is an opportunity in the establishment of a framework for development and governance of marketplaces to provide guidance on how we might manage the bigger issues of our time.

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A town stretches itself towards fields beyond. At its edge, a low, long building is beached parallel to a road that heads away, towards somewhere else. Marooned in a sea of tarmac, the building’s facade is repetitive. Windows reveal the backside of photo frames and potted plants. A large sign at the gate proclaims the building’s function. Its aged residents listen to the drone of passing traffic.

At another end of a town, identical low-pitch warehouses hold production lines of pharmaceutical and engineering innovations, small businesses, and product showrooms. One building in their midst marks its difference by solid fencing painted brightly to look like giant multi-coloured pencils. At regulation height, the fence conceals one-, two-, and three-year-olds as they play in the narrow space between it and the rectangular-box building. Their squeals spill over the fence.

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A town. Any town. Many towns. Such scenarios repeat.

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Within these nursing homes, crèches and early years centres, there are incredible nurses, carers, minders, and educators supporting the needs of our youngest and oldest citizens. Their commitment is humbling, their contribution to their communities often greatly undervalued [1]. A profound shift has, over decades, taken place in terms of formerly intergenerational relationships of care, likely due to society being tied by the structures and priorities of capitalism. Our built environment reinforces this separation of generations with institutional typologies that silo us in terms of age and mobility, at either end of our lives, the stages at which we are potentially most vulnerable. Whilst this might make sense for many rational reasons, in this separation of old from young, we have lost something of what it means to be human.

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We must question whether these built forms of care, located often at the edges of our settlements, are really the spatial models that we wish to replicate again and again and again. How, instead, can architects, urban designers, and planners generate proposals to enable clients, governments, and citizens to recognise that in the built environment there is so much potential for the establishment of alternative scales and spatial relationships in how we care for our youngest and oldest. Whilst there are notable well-designed examples of care facilities, all doing tremendous work, we seem to be somewhat unquestioningly translating commercially viable, increasingly larger models of care provision into monolithic building types. The rate of closure of smaller and medium-sized nursing home and childcare providers, often family-run, is concerning [2]. The vulnerability of the nursing home typology was highlighted, with profound trauma, during the recent pandemic and, as Fintan O’Toole recently reminds us, we must not forget this so readily [3]. Indeed, it is welcome to note that in the 2023 Draft Design Guide for Long-Term Residential Care Settings for Older People the Irish Government commits to “supporting older people to remain living independently in their own homes and communities for longer” [4], and recommends the household model of long-term residential care, with maximum twelve residents per household [5].

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This is a time when Ireland’s ageing population is projected to continue rising for the next three decades [6]. It is a time where childcare providers are under sustained pressure and can barely match the demand for places. It is a time where the government’s Town Centre First policy aims to “regenerate” town centres [7]. The opportunity is ripe for an integrated approach.

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There are emerging examples of relationships between such care settings. Here and there in Ireland, preschooler groups make weekly visits to their nearby nursing home in a pedagogical strategy known as intergenerational learning [8]. Research from the US notes that the co-location of childcare and elder care helps “both generations thrive” [9]. The work undertaken by the two-year “TOY – Together Old and Young” project, across seven European countries including Ireland, facilitated “young children and senior citizens learning and developing in intergenerational community spaces” [10]. The built environment could facilitate these fruitful exchanges more easily. This text, then, is a call for spatial and design leadership to explore, develop, and promote the potential of this intertwining and integration. Both childcare and elderly care are understandably highly regulated sectors. To bring these care settings together or alongside one another into a new architectural typology – a model approach that could be replicated across towns, villages, and city neighbourhoods – a vision is needed that looks beyond the inevitable challenges that must be overcome. Architectural design is well placed to explore and develop such a vision, a blueprint that can be worked towards through policy and planning shifts. A professional design ideas competition could be one such starting point, as could advanced university design studios, each accompanied by public exhibition, publication, and advocacy.

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As babies and young children, our small worlds incrementally expand. In our older age, most often, our worlds gradually shrink. At either end of this circle of life, our encounters with one another, then, are more pronounced, more significant. The sense of touch has profound healing capacity: holding the hand of an older person, hugging a distressed toddler. Staying present. Taking time. Thus, though physical needs may be wildly different, for a number of years at our youngest and our oldest ages, like the intersections of a Venn diagram, there are substantive parallels in our social needs.

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The simplest encounters may make for the richest shared intergenerational experiences: observing the daily passing routes of a local cat or fox. Counting the dots on a die and the squares on the board to the next ladder or snake. Playing the role of customer at a make-believe café. Tending, together, to the cultivation of flowers and vegetables. Hearing, when confined to lying in bed, the sounds of playing and chattering. Watching. Listening. Trusting.

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Enabling such opportunities on a regular basis offers a sense of purpose to both age groups. For older people, the anticipation of each next encounter with non-judgemental, imaginative, and endlessly curious young children is a powerful stimulus. For the youngest, these exchanges develop instinctive compassion for others from childhood. We can make design decisions so that, even at intimate scales in urban contexts, occupants young and old are facilitated to sustain deep connections with the more-than-human world, ensuring its natural cycles are perceptible in long-term residential environments for older people and in long-hours daycare for young children.

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The Dutch typology of the hofje, typically “a collection of identical cottages grouped around a communal garden” or urban courtyard, “built with private capital, originally to provide free housing for the elderly poor who could no longer provide for themselves” [11] is a beautiful fusion of social purpose and architecture, and an example that could inform this intergenerational proposal.

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Through adjustments in Irish policy and planning, and with thoughtful design across all scales, keeping generations visible and connected at the centre of our towns and neighbourhoods would, via the ordinariness of the everyday, harness the potential of the built environment to foster empathy, the core of our humanity.  

Already functioning as a successful reuse of an old industrial infrastructure without any intentional architectural intervention, the Royal and the Grand Canals are likely our largest, and certainly longest, public spaces in the city. From the moment the sun emerges in spring, to late autumn, they bustle with activity, hosting commutes, walks, runs, and late-night gatherings. These truly vital spaces were gifted to the city by the cyclical nature of industrial change.  Decommissioned, they have persisted throughout the success and decline of Dublin, fostering public social space which is increasingly rare within the stoic red-brick city centre. Our canals offer roots from which civic and cultural spaces may grow.

A reflection from John Banville’s Dublin memoir, Time Pieces, illustrates the canals’ enduring appeal:

“… by the canal at Lower Mount Street Bridge and watched a heron hunting there beside the lock . .. I told her I loved her, but she closed her eyes and smiled, with her lips pressed shut.”[1]

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Dubliners display a love for their city on these banks every summer, and yet it goes on unrequited. Public spaces adjacent to the Grand Canal such as Portobello Square and Wilton Park are being eroded by speculative demand, despite their evident popularity in a city thirsty for space. Portobello Square is a rare open public square directly abutting the canal, so intensely popular at times that the authorities see no other crowd control option but to physically impede the public from occupying it. In 2021, Portobello Square was boarded up and temporarily privatised in return for an investment in its redevelopment.[2] This was a convenient alignment of interests, as the space had also been fenced off the previous year to prevent anti-social activity.

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The Grand Canal’s banks often do not inspire hope in the here and now, instead becoming a discomforting reflection of our town and country. The most recent fencing off of the canal to prevent its occupation by unhoused asylum seekers [3] proved unpopular, not solely for its inhumanity, but also its cost. Hope, however, lies within this provocation; the moment of inflection should be seized to offer a new scale of social and cultural infrastructure to the city. The canals are crying out for rejuvenation through a top-down shift in thinking, to irrigate the city with public cultural spaces, foster more pace for unexpected encounters and more feed for the friction and forum that cities are ultimately about. Another greenway won’t activate the canals’ multitudinous potential to invigorate their dense urban surroundings.

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Plans released by Waterways Ireland at the beginning of this year set out to enhance public seating, increase accessibility, and combine two existing narrow pathways to form one wider path.[4] Unfortunately, these proposals fall short of the ambition these urban spaces so desperately need. Combining pathways may optimise the space as a liminal venue of commute, yet may equally alienate those who use the bank as a space for slower, un-programmed occupation. Addressing the challenge of these banks’ inability to support year-round activity within their current footprint seems quite the daunting task.

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The canals would benefit from receiving intentional interventions beyond their immediate banks to amplify their use. Where possible, the tarmac roadways lining the canal banks should be reappropriated in service of the canal corridor, providing and connecting into adjacent cultural spaces. In King’s Cross in London, a sculpted mediation of the streetscape down to meet the water’s edge becomes seating for an outdoor cinema during summers[5], and in Paris, new businesses are opening in alcoves along the Seine, unlocked by the riverside’s pedestrianisation.

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One thing has become abundantly clear, engagement in this issue should not be the sole task of Waterways Ireland. At minimum, council authorities should engage with W.I. to support their common ground. As it stands, similar to the redevelopment of Portobello Square, the current W.I. proposal for the Grand Canal’s banks involves a public private partnership, with IPUT Real Estate part-funding the works to the canal banks.[6] Unfortunately, investment of substantive urban change always seems to lie beyond the remit of the local authority, Dublin City Council.

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When the building of the Grand Canal was commenced by the Board of Inland Navigation almost 270 years ago, it was government founded, funded and led.[7] Dublin City was building much of what we now see as its most definitive urban fabric, public and private, at a time when architectural neo-classicism proliferated with bold metropolitan might. The Rotunda, Grattan Bridge, Parnell Square, and Gandon’s Customs House, are just some of the iconic city elements built in this time. Perhaps in our government’s present moment of liquid economic abundance, we should aspire to a new era of bold urban thinking; a new scale in what we demand from our city; and, ultimately, in what we propose that our city becomes. The canals are a good place to start. Their waterway function now secondary, the city should lean in, commit to the development of this deeply urban space, and allow the future of the canals to define Dublin anew.

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