Dancing at the crossroads and bothántaíocht, visiting neighbours; sharing news, music and lore were very much a part of Irish life not so long ago. Reliance on social interaction held a higher importance to people back then than it does today. Face to face interaction is becoming less and less of an occurrence, while interaction is still happening, only now, through our screens. 

‍

What does this mean for our public spaces? The way in which we occupy space has changed. Is this the reason that many of these public spaces scattered across our island aren't working as well as they could or once did? Or is it that we don’t value our public spaces like other European cities do? Is it the lack of marble sculptures and terrazzo tiled squares or the sunnier skies? 

‍

Despite the ever changing micro-climates in the west of Ireland, there are public spaces in towns, and villages that have important social spaces at the centre of their civic arrangements. Simultaneously, these towns have ample exterior spaces that are struggling to find their identity.

‍

‍

In the South West of Ireland, on the Dingle Peninsula, within the Gaeltacht of Chorca Dhuibhne, lies a small fishing town with a patchwork of coloured townhouses. The town follows the natural contours of land and sits steadily against the rising slope overlooking the bay. Dingle town, known and visited by many, is characterised by its cultural richness which is celebrated and shared through festivals and community events. 

‍

The town's openness and social personality creates a level of pressure on its public spaces to perform; these places have a certain responsibility to engage communities and enhance performance. In Dingle, there are three public spaces that interest me, each for varying reasons: An Díseart; a series of garden rooms, the Town Park - a struggling pocket longing to find its place at the heart of the town - and lastly the Mart, a vital gathering place for the agricultural community along with being a trading center.

‍

I know these spaces well having grown up on the peninsula yet it's only now I find myself considering them differently, conducting a sort of analysis. 

‍

‍

On Green Street within the grounds of St Mary's Church and the neo-gothic former convent, lies a series of garden rooms, each with their own personality. One enters through a gate within an opening in a stone wall, adjacent to the church and from there you are lead up and around winding paths, experiencing the circular patterns of the ground, mini mazes, a greenhouse, wild flowers, a willow tunnel, stone walls, the nuns graveyard guarded by two angel statues at the gate and enclosed by white iron railings, native trees planted by local families, places of rest, more in some rooms than others. It's an old stone wall that continuously wraps around these gardens that encloses the public space, while also providing protection for the plants on this wind swept peninsula.

‍

This is a public space which is welcoming to all, enjoyed by many, respected by its visitors, and cared for by the community. A place of adaptability, having various events taking place here throughout the year; the sounds of ceol tradisiúnta coming from the wooden gazebo during the summer months, taispeántais ealaíne from local artists within the greenhouse or immersed within the gardens during Féile na Bealtaine or Other Voices and locals improving their planting skills through gardening courses during the off season months. To me it is a place that holds a certain sense of serenity, calmness, but most of all it's a place I feel I can connect with physically and mentally, a nurtured space for everyone.  

‍

Only a short stroll down Green street and down Greys Lane is another one of the town's public spaces. Looking back at the 1841 OS Map of the town, it is clear where the park derived from, simply the back of many of the townhouses which then formed a large green open space in the centre. 

‍

Dingles Town Park, despite the many attempts to reinvigorate this space for the town, its people and its visitor unfortunately remains somewhat of a struggling space. Nestled within the town's core centre its location is quite fortunate for an Irish town park. Its only entrance is located almost at the corner of where Greys Lane meets Dykegate Lane, the home of the Art Deco Facade of the Phoenix Cinema. The park doesn’t reveal itself at its entrance. Through a set of green metal gates one enters and then follows a hardened tarmacked path up to the right through what feels like an alleyway which then widens out to a large open space. A concrete paved path wraps around the perimeter, while more hard surfaced areas occupy the centre of the park, one tennis/basketball court enclosed by metal fencing and a smaller area, also enclosed by metal fencing which once housed a children's playground, now taken away. Green grassed areas take up the rest of the space with some trees and some scattered benches. This is a place that has been associated with antisocial behaviour, due to its impermeability. 

I spent some time analysing the park with help of the creative minds of the 2023-2024 Transition year students in Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne while taking part in the IFI Architecture in Schools programme. Together with the local students new designs and interventions were developed through drawings, discussions and model making to enhance and improve what could be the future of the park. 

‍

Interesting ideas included adding a second entrance through the historical wall at Orchard Lane at the north eastern side. Dingle was once a walled town and this stretch of stone wall is the remnants that once enclosed the town. Creating an entrance here could be a way to celebrate the historic wall while giving it a new life and providing a functional access route from one side of the town to the other. This could become part of the daily routes taken by the town users. Other interventions equally as interesting and important focused on the recreational aspect; market stalls, sports zones, children's play areas, and practical elements; seating, lighting, security while other students emphasized redesigning the layout of the park. These are all elements that would add to the place allowing one to connect with it in one way or another.

‍

‍

The Dingle Mart is a cornerstone of rural life on the Peninsula, combining its practical function as a livestock trading center with its cultural role as a community gathering point. Its multifunctional setting, which consists of a large open hard surfaced area and the mart building itself which contains the teared ring room where the selling happens, a canteen and shed space toward the rear with pens for the animals. The large open space outside occupies a carpark for most of the time and then on Saturdays the mart place, a tradition that has been taking place for many years and is a vital part of the lives of so many who live on the peninsula and in many Irish towns across the country. The mart is host to the sale of sheep and cattle usually, but once a year events like The Scotch Ram judging and Agricultural Show take place. 

‍

Benjamin Gault (1858 - 1942) was an American conservationist and ornithologist, who captured vital moments of life in Dingle and its surrounding while visiting the west of Ireland in the mid 1920’s, circa 100 years ago. This footage was only recently found with the help of a local farmer, Micheál Ó Mainnín from Baile an Fheirtéaraigh. I find it fascinating to use these images to compare how these spaces were once occupied and used compared to today.

‍

Each space described belongs to Dingle town and are a part of the town's fabric, they each serve a separate purpose. They are places of social interaction, where people connect with public space. I think that perhaps these spaces should work together and integrate with their surrounding context to provide flow throughout the town. I think as architects there is a need to listen to locals more closely, at the end of the day, they are the ones who know these spaces and places the best, they are the users of the space. 

‍

We have to look to the future of the town and think how these exterior rooms can be an integral part of the town's system, pockets of public space which enhance the towns sociality, cad atá i ndán dóibh, what future do these spaces hold? As Dingle continues to evolve, preserving these spaces is crucial. Public spaces like these deserve our attention and respect, for they form the backbone of the community.

‍

These spaces are inherently different, spaces of leisure and trade don't seem connected at first, but they are the cores of this town, without them Dingle loses all character, all space to breathe. They are not just physical locations but embodiments of the town’s spirit, reflecting its history, culture, and resilience. In the face of changing times, Dingle’s public spaces remind us of the importance of thoughtful design and shared stewardship. Whether through festivals in the park, quiet reflection in the Díseart gardens, or the enduring traditions of the Mart, these spaces connect the past with the present, ensuring that Dingle remains a vibrant hub for generations to come.

‍

“My second body came to find my first body when the river flooded my house… the river was in my house but my house was also in the river.”

Excerpt from The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard

‍

‍The River Farset, which gave Belfast its name – Béal Feirste, meaning ‘Mouth of the Farset’ – was consumed by the city’s underbelly in 1848. Undone by the river’s own achievements in industrialising the Victorian town, this Venetian-style ferrier, cum public dumping ground, was shoved and rerouted into subterranean hollows. These sewer pipes forged new confluences between the Farset and its beneficiary, the River Lagan, who would accompany Belfast into its cityhood in 1888 only to be reacquainted with the dreary descendants of its donor’s builders in the twenty-first century.

‍

I have lived with the River Lagan, and all that comes with it, for some time now; the viridescent shopping trolley stench of low tide; midwinter starling murmurations; gaudy, palm tree shaped wayfinding; and Buckfast bottles on the towpath tongue tied by adolescents asking what music I am listening to – Chappell Roan is always the right wrong answer. Together we are residents of the timeless ‘Climate Change Floodplain’ marked by the Department of Infrastructure’s (DfI) ‘Flood Maps NI’ that brings the river into my house and suspends my rental bed in the public riverbeds of the Lagan.

‍

‍

I enjoy my current proximity to the river but I am reminded of these perils when they reposition the ‘Flood Defence Works’ blockades on what has become a bi-monthly basis. I am always reassured, however, by DfI’s efforts proudly cable-tied to silver trespass-friendly hoarding that reads: “£18m Belfast Tidal Flood Alleviation Scheme (BTFAS): Delivering a scheme of works that will provide a long term approach to tidal flood risk management for over 1500 properties in Belfast.”

‍

‘BTFAS’ represents an imperative and decisive need to once again reconsider and reconfigure our relationship with the city’s arterial waterways. The scheme’s single-solution intervention, however, unfortunately speaks of a form of urbanism not unknown to Belfast. Offering a discontinuous, tunnel-visioned wall, this ‘Flood Defence Barrier’ ties together binary conceptions of climate challenges facing the city with the very attitudes and approaches that built the Farset’s tunnels - all put in motion by a quick unlearning of what it means to build walls and barriers in Belfast.

‍

‍

Elsewhere in Europe, cities are dismantling such infrastructure in favour of diversified nature-based solutions while we are reminded that our new £18m brick-clad concrete wall only grants us a false sense of built security until 2080, at best. One might forgive this ‘necessary evil’ should its offering to the public realm and towpath be marked by generosity, a seat here and there perhaps, yet even the steeply pitched coping slabs prohibit the pleasures of sitting down.

‍

The decision to mirror the brick of my home – and the 1500 others like it – in its public facing facade is an interesting one: simultaneously working to flatten city-river relations through what now feels like a privatised throughway, while also suggesting a sense of always having been there, alongside the compendium of bodies that shape our shared material milieu.

‍

I am sure these deliberations have concrete answers, but sometimes when I traverse the sections of the wall that lie underground, perforations permitting pitiful access to the river, I wonder who might raise these occlusions should the tide swim up to meet us. Has the nursery 200m from my doorstep been granted the agency to act on this suggested inevitability, or must it await the department's designated keyholder coming up the Lagan in a bubble?

‍

‍

I am relieved to have been asked better, muddier questions by an assemblage of steel staging and rope drifting up the Lagan on a floating public pavilion. Designed by architects OGU and MMAS in collaboration with sound artist Matilde Meireles, DRIFT asks how dissolving the neat boundaries we draw around ourselves, and the city, might better deal with the complexity of living with, and on, the water.

‍

Funded through cultural channels not typically reserved for advancing architectural production in the city as part of ‘Belfast 2024’, this project is not bound to offering the bricky certainty of our Flood Defence Barrier; rather, it takes form through knots and scaffold couplers, held together by that which remains uncertain: our right to be on, in, beside, and with the River Lagan. Unlike its £18m peer, however, DRIFT mirrors the river’s temporality to grant its waters – and those it sustains – agency in responding to such rhetoric.

‍

‍

Re-presenting the Lagan’s undulating surface as site, the project rests on a system of three pontoons that unfasten the city’s quays from the water’s edge. In its counterweighted greys and blues, DRIFT resists visual and ideological camouflage, instead inhabiting the complex material interdependencies and vulnerabilities between the river and its receding urban peripheries.

‍

I once fell into the River Lagan – before its banks were fenced off – when I spotted a harbour seal by the Weir Bridge. It was then, as Daisy Hildyard puts it, that my second body came to meet my first, reacquainting me with the waters that quenched my thirst, washed my feet and dishes, flushed the sewers, and returned to wet my waist. Towed downstream to inhabit such tidal ecologies, DRIFT’s pontoons invite us to experience these private and public lives of the Lagan, and their entanglement with our own – Meireles’ collaged soundscapes unfolding beneath folded white linens sparing us the niceties of embodied submersion.

‍

‍

Now disassembled, it is these curated temporal intimacies that continue to ripple and breed new forms of publicness in the city; watery writing groups and kinetic kiosks that have emerged in its wake to turn toward the river and explore its duality as both site and more-than-human subjectivity.

‍

In this sense, DRIFT punctuates its cladded-concrete counterpart with leaky perforations that mirror its own. In the end, neither contains nor resolves. What the Lagan’s walls present as a unidirectional, government-led prerogative, however, DRIFT quietly renders everybody’s business. It is this collectivising – this knotting of the individual with the natural, socio-cultural, and built bodies of the river – that sets vital terms and conditions. For these troubled waters demand an architectural climate praxis better attuned to the coalescing boundaries, interdependencies, and agencies that allow, limit, and negotiate change.

‍

The innermost tip of the estuary is where the wild Atlantic Ocean meets the River Shannon, the body of water that shares its name with Ireland’s first new town. Building work on this new community began in the 1950s, with Shannon emerging as a symbol of the excitement and optimism, seeking to manifest the ambitions of the newly established Irish Free State. Envisioned as a ‘‘city of tomorrow", it attracted industries and factories from England, the United States and Europe, encouraged by the development of the nearby airport and Ireland’s first free trade zone in the nearby industrial estate. Architects Downes, Meades, and Robinson, along with town planner Frederick Rogerson, designed the town’s housing and infrastructure.

‍

‍

I live in the Cronan Estate, at the end of the terrace, in a four bedroomed home that my grandparents moved into in January 1975. The most exciting part of Cronan is the layout and urban design. Architects traveled to Europe and England, looking at examples of innovative post-war housing developments, inspired by the seminal Garden City Movement that emerged in the early 1900s. This movement imagined built up urban centres surrounded by green belts, providing inhabitants access to nature while also dividing different civic spaces. Inspiration was also gathered from the Radburn Design developments, first implemented in New Jersey in the 1920s, taking an approach to planning that separated pedestrians and cars, creating distinct zones within housing developments with defined uses. This division of spaces is achieved by having the fronts of houses facing onto a shared green space while the backs are used for more functional purposes. In both of these examples there is a clear division, separating the green areas from the more functional built environment.

‍

Following these principles, in the Cronan estate, houses enjoy large green spaces at their fronts, with parking, roads and access installed to the rear. The front, the focus of the estate, is carefully designed so that it is working hard. The backspace by comparison is hardly working, a leftover space that over time has had to compensate for changes in use and increased spatial strain. This layout of greens along the front allows one to walk from one side of the estate to the other without crossing a road. This is replicated in many of the original estates in Shannon, creating a meandering pedestrian green band, with very few roads between. Through this well planned out organisation, these spaces flow into one another, as if the houses and greens naturally sat in perfect harmony from the beginning of time. They are working well, and for me, while growing up, it would have seemed inconceivable for the estate to be laid out differently.

‍

The low garden walls are the perfect height for my neighbours to sit and chat. When I dig up my garden at the start of the summer, people stop to chat, to talk about their own gardens; there is a pride in maintaining their fronts. Neighbours and local groups come together to maintain the greens, planting trees and flowers. The trees fill the views from my living room, allowing me to watch the seasons changing from within my home.

‍

The communal front areas are an extension of the home and gardens of the people living here. They provide a safe and inner sanctum, meaning that people feel at ease leaving their children to run outside. This outside space is working hard, and is an important space to the people of Cronan. When I was a child I would play at the front, sometimes running back through the alleyways, my feet clanging the metal manhole covers as I ran between the front and back of the houses. Lying in bed at night, I still hear the sound of someone travelling that same route, with the same loud clanging of the metal manhole echoing into the silence of the estate.

‍

The backs of the houses by comparison are hardly working, serving a more functional purpose, providing access to the roads and parking. The patchwork of well considered green areas and walkways along the front are a stark contrast to the backs that are formed by leftover space rather than intentional planning. The roads slink their way through the estate, allowing for cars as a mere afterthought.

‍

The back is where you park your car, unload groceries and dry your clothes. Neighbours work on their cars and people might sit outside on summer nights drinking. This space has many uses and functions. Between arguments over parking and the most direct route to the pub, this space is noisy and overused causing the backs of the houses to struggle to contain the noise leading to its overspilling.

‍

‍

Part of the problem lies with the limited space designed for parking in the 1970s, with an increasing number of cars crammed into the small space. This is reflected in the changing materiality of these backlands over time. When the estate was in its infancy, small green spaces were peppered across the back with beech trees. Green was interwoven with the practical use of the space for parking and access, linking the two spaces through its shared materiality of the front. These spaces have been replaced with tarmac and concrete, strained by efforts to provide room to accommodate everyone. 

‍

This once vibrant public space has been sterilised. Still, it holds the potential to work hard to serve the needs of its residents each day. A return to its previous state is still possible, however, green spaces beside parking have recently been tarmaced over due to them being viewed as untidy. If these could be replanted with grass and trees, this small change would unite the front and backs again. Planting along the alleyways would further enforce this link and also help to improve biodiversity. These small changes would return the spaces to the original vision of the planners and architects of Shannon and in turn improve the quality of spaces for everyone, it would lead to a space that is able to work hard again.

‍