Every Irish town has a church, one at least, well-positioned locally; a place traditionally of communion and continually of memory, now part of a Western European trend of underuse and heading towards abandonment [1].
A unique model of research-by-design for repurposing vacant churches has emerged in Flanders that is instructive for Ireland, given our mirrored societal shift from the dominance of Catholicism.
Dialogue is emerging around the cultural value and significance of Irish churches, as their potential for reuse, and for better understanding ourselves as a society, is explored. In their exhibition at Housing Unlocked, David Lawless and Sophie Kelliher proposed adapting thirty-three Dublin churches for housing, churches that had been put forward by the Archdiocese for rezoning and rejected by Dublin City Council [2]. Since then, thirty-two further churches have been listed by the council for Residential Zoned Land Tax, though the Archdiocese has appealed this decision [3].
Making Dust, by artist and researcher Fiona Hallinan, in collaboration with Ellen Rowley – currently at VISUAL Carlow – documents the arguably needless 2021 demolition of the Church of the Annunciation, a modernist landmark in Finglas, and the impact of that loss on a community. Giving attention to what was an important ‘space for communal experience and the rituals that mark the progress of life, whether cathartic or complicated in nature’, [4] the work raises questions about the protection of the places and behaviours that our communities value.
Church vacancy doesn’t have to lead to the destruction of sites of collective experience, and with an eye too on the global climate emergency, demolition should be considered a last resort. Since the introduction of church policy plans in Flanders in 2011, whereby municipalities and church boards were invited to outline a long-term vision for the future use of every parish church, over one third of all parish churches, about six-hundred in total, have been listed for complete or partial repurposing [5].
The Projectbureau Herbestemming Kerken (Project Office for Adaptive Reuse of Churches), or PHK, was established in 2016 to provide secular guidance for furthering church policy plans, by way of feasibility studies and assisting with funding applications. The feasibility studies, requested by local authorities for specific churches and carried out by multidisciplinary design teams, have numbered over sixty a year, and are collated online [6].
Adapting underused or vacant churches in Ireland would be in line with government policy: since 2022, the Town Centre First approach emphasises the role of sustainable reuse and repurposing of existing building stock and assets in revitalising Irish towns. While the policy document recognises the detrimental effects of vacant and derelict properties on the ‘vitality and attractiveness’ of towns, the only mention of a church building is praise for McCullough Mulvin Architects’ adaptive reuse of St Mary’s in Kilkenny. This exemplary project transforms the thirteenth-century church into a museum and has been central to the ‘delivery of social, cultural benefit to a community’ [7].
Though church reuse in Ireland faces the obvious obstacle of land ownership, and issues around secular occupation of sacred space, in Flanders this is overcome partly thanks to a Napoleonic structure – still in existence – where fabric committees (five laypeople appointed by the bishop) are responsible for the secular organisation of religious practice, including the maintenance of church buildings. As potential deficits in the budget of fabric committees are paid by local municipalities or the province, the responsibility for redundant churches is shared [8].
Through the work of the PHK, redundancy makes way for the potential regeneration of towns and villages, and feasibility studies and open competitions allow for contributions from potential designers, no matter the size or age of their practice [9]. In an Irish context, the opportunity to contribute high-quality research-by-design would be available to young and/or small architecture practices – whose innovation and energy are often confined to domestic projects and their reconfigurations – as well as to more established firms with extensive experience and high turnover.
While we have some fine precedent examples of adaptive reuse of churches in Ireland (Rush Library, another McCullough Mulvin project, is worth visiting), exploring the PHK’s research reveals surprising ideas, like the reimagining of the church of Don Bosco, St Niklas, by Open Kerk Studio as a sports hall, through the introduction of a raised floor that integrates the heating systems while protecting the original tiles [10]. While some design teams have focused on developing a methodology that can be applied to any church, and others have tested extreme conditions of site-specific intervention, interesting commonalities have emerged across a multitude of design proposals, such as a desire among designers and communities to retain some space for refuge, contemplation, and reflection, as was historically found in church buildings [11].
One critique of the PHK is that it has yet to bring a design project to site, but it has created a body of research that illustrates the potential for underused churches in Irish towns to become significant sites of revitalisation and community.
One Good Idea is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
1. Religion, European Values Study, [website], 2018, https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/about-evs/research-topics/religion, (accessed 6 March 2023).
2. S. Kelliher, D. Lawless, ‘Thirty-Three Churches’, Housing Unlocked, Irish Architecture Foundation, 2022.
3. A. Beesley, ‘Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin seeks to delist dozens of churches and parish centres from a new tax’, The Irish Times, 15 February 2023.
4. F. Hallinan, ‘We Turn Towards an Ending and Pay Attention’, VISUAL, 2023.
5. S. Sterken and C. Ardui, unpublished research paper, KU Leuven, ongoing.
6. ‘Repurposing Churches’, Vlaamsbouwmeester (Flemish Government Architect), [website] https://www.vlaamsbouwmeester.be/nl/kerken, (accessed March 6 2023).
7. Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and Department of Rural and Community Development, Town Centre First: A Policy Approach for Irish Towns, Government of Ireland, 2022.
8. J. Dancker, ‘The Future of Parish Churches in Flanders, Belgium: A Dialogue on Municipality Level’, in_bo, vol. 10, 2016.
9. ‘Repurposing Churches’, Vlaamsbouwmeester (Flemish Government Architect), [website] https://www.vlaamsbouwmeester.be/nl/kerken, (accessed March 6 2023).
10. Studio Open Kerk, Endeavour [website], 2021, https://endeavours.eu/project/studio-repurposing-churches, (accessed March 8 2023).
11. S. Sterken and C. Ardui, unpublished research paper, KU Leuven, ongoing.
The Planning and Development Bill 2023 is currently making its way through the Oireachtas, with planning policy reforms focused on ‘efficiency’ to achieve growth. These reforms intend to streamline planning processes and accelerate decision-making. The consequence of a market-led approach to local planning is a reduction in the scope of citizens’ democratic right to have a say in the future of their towns and cities. The future system risks further limiting local debate over local change, while the current system fails to sufficiently harness local knowledge and invaluable stories of place. There is an alternative approach. In Ireland, there is an embodied culture of storytelling that naturally lends itself to a form of public engagement that creates space for dialogue.
‘Dialogue’ comes from the Ancient Greek ‘Diálógos’, where diá means ‘through, inter’, and lógos, ‘speech, discourse’. This definition could imply a concept of ‘talking through’. William Isaacs describes the word as ‘way to think and consider things together’.[1] In this sense, and for the purpose of this article, dialogue is comprehended as a means to understand others, but with no intention of achieving unanimity.
The treatment of time in planning processes often regards the future as a definite moment. There is an absence of the present and the everyday in spatial planning strategies.[2] For example, Dublin's six-year Development Plan sets out the long-term vision for the city based on a pre-established strategy, often lacking the ability to adapt to the complexity of changing global and local contexts. This inflexibility can lead to under-delivery of development, as the plans have little scope to deal with the unpredictability in shifting social relations. If strategic planning is a relational practice, how can planning and design processes embrace tensions between political expediency, bureaucratic vacillation, and urban realities?
Of growing concern is the trend within the planning systems of several European nations for neoliberal planning policies that favour private economic actors over public participation and discourse.[3] Such policies are underpinned by the accusation that ‘planning is an obstacle to growth’[4] and a rhetoric focused on the importance of ‘efficiency’ to achieve economic development. As a result, streamlined planning processes are justified by limiting the ‘barrier’ of public debate.[5]
These practices have been deployed by development lobby groups in Ireland to progress their objectives, contributing to the de-democratising of the Irish planning system.[6] According to the research, the narrative that convinced decision makers on certain planning reforms in Ireland – in 2017, the introduction of the fast-track Strategic Housing Development process, with applications made directly to An Bord Pleanála, bypassing the local planning authority’s decision-making role with no appeals process – were based on market solutions to problems traditionally addressed by public interventions, pursued by conflating the ‘collective good with efficiency’.[7, 8]. Swift decision-making equated to efficiency and the meeting of broader growth objectives. Whereas slow, deliberative, public engagement was perceived as an impediment, a problem to be solved through these planning reforms.
The objective of dialogue in planning processes is to increase pluralism and democracy. Citizen dialogues within planning processes have been established as a practice over the last ten years in Sweden. The use of ‘Citizen Dialogues’ in the Swedish planning system aims to include the public in decision-making, with this type of deliberative planning process encouraged before the statutory obligation of public consultation with various stakeholders. The ‘Citizen Dialogues’ guidance demonstrates how a dialogical method has been modified and adapted to meet specific needs and realities typical to planning issues, using Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation to consider the different stages of citizen engagement within the planning process.[9] This is practised through an acknowledgement of the fundamental importance of different perspectives of stakeholders.
Design in Dialogue, a book co-written by sociologist and urban planner Seppe De Blust, architect Freek Persyn, and architect, photographer, and mapper Charlotte Schaeben, also highlights how fundamental the ‘knowledge of many’ is in engagement processes.[10] Facilitating a form of engagement centred on lived experience allows for the diverse interpretation of realities. Both the Swedish model and the examples cited by De Blust, Persyn, and Schaeben emphasise how a dialogical approach can allow for alternative conversations that increase democracy in planning processes.
A recent report from the Aarhus Compliance Committee expresses concerns at some of the Planning and Development Bill 2023 contents related to public participation. Under the Aarhus Convention, Ireland has an obligation to comply with ‘The Public Participation Directive’ which states: ‘Public authorities should enable the public to comment on, for example, proposals for projects affecting the environment, or plans and programmes relating to the environment. The outcome of the public participation process should be taken into consideration in the decision-making process.’[11]
The question is, how could a form of dialogical engagement work in an Irish system that doesn’t allow for true public engagement? What kind of dialogical engagement would best suit the Irish context and who would carry it out?
One idea is to embed a dedicated role within the local authority that would carry out a type of engagement process that is focused on dialogue. In order to address concerns of diminishing public debate in planning, the role would have to be at the heart of the planning department, using the local authorities' in-house design and planning professionals and lived experiences in helping to define the role. The dialogue officer could be a facilitator between multiple stakeholders within processes linked to either planning policy or development planning. Their responsibilities could include community-focused placemaking; involving residents and businesses to collaborate in co-design processes; developing strategies for representing community voices in planning processes; and enabling community participation in the co-production of design proposals, masterplans, and polices.
The UK’s Public Practice, a not-for-profit job placement programme that guides the transition of built environment professionals from the private sector into public sector placemaking positions, is an example of an initiative that builds local authority capacity by supporting the creation of new roles. For example, community engagement specialists are embedded into the planning system, creating change that otherwise wouldn’t exist. The Greater London Authority's Placeshaping Capacity Survey 2024 report illustrates how Public Practice’s programme is the most valuable resource to placemaking projects in London, and notes that a programme of proactive planning allows for ‘better engagement and public support, provides greater certainty, and a more efficient process for developers, allowing for coordination of investment.’[12]
A new role in the planning team that facilitates a form of dialogical engagement would require an understanding of the power structures present in the planning process from the perspective of each of the different actors experiencing that particular planning process. For example, in development planning, there is a need to negotiate the varying interests and controversies among citizens and stakeholders at pre-application stage prior to submission. Mendelow’s Matrix can guide a mapping analysis of these relationships in terms of interest and influence over a project. Understanding the power structures and relationships between stakeholders with diverse positions allows consideration of how conversation and understanding between key actors may be enhanced. While these dialogues may not lead to concrete outcomes, they can facilitate a sharing of knowledge and lived experience between different stakeholders that otherwise, would not exist.
The purpose of a dialogue role would be to address the dominant market-driven, decision-focused city-making processes that often overlooks local lived experience. A dialogue officer could facilitate a continuous form of engagement throughout the planning process, as opposed to engagement that comes at the end of the process, like the current system of public observations upon submitted planning applications. As uncertainty in decision-making is in conflict with the current pace of the planning system, could dialogue be used in an Irish context as a tool to increase pluralism, representation, and democracy in planning processes, and ultimately – by reducing conflict – support a more streamlined decision-making process?
In the context of planning reforms focused on 'efficiency', Sophie El Nimr argues instead for a new, dialogue-focused mode of public engagement with planning processes in Ireland.
Read“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!”
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.
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.
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]
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]
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.
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]
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]
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]
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?
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]
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]
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.
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.
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.
In this article, architect Joe Stokes calls for the promotion and revival of Dublin's markets not just as places of tourism and commerce, but as community-led amenities.
ReadA 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.
A town. Any town. Many towns. Such scenarios repeat.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In this article, Anna Ryan Moloney argues for the caring potential of new spatial relationships between society's youngest and oldest members.
ReadWebsite by Good as Gold.