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The pervasive belief that owning one’s home is the only path to qualitative living has not only hindered the emergence of alternative forms of tenure, but has influenced the under-reform of the rental market for decades. Why is it that in a post-modern world, in which so many resources no longer have to be owned, but can be shared or rented, homes still have to be owned to feel truly ours? It is worthwhile taking a step, back and above, and looking at how homeownership ideology has served a precise purpose in governments’ agendas.
As seen over and over throughout history, the link between politics and housing is an untieable one. During the twentieth century, governments began to market the ownership of one’s home as a basic need of society. Interestingly, as Richard Ronalds writes in The Ideology of Homeownership, there is no evidence to suggest that owning one’s home is an indigenous need of the modern individual [1]. Rather, it consists simply of a preference, forged by policy-making and social norms. The consolidation of such preference and the marginalisation of other forms of housing provision through specific policies can be observed predominantly in anglophone countries in the latter half of the previous century. In England, the Conservative movement recognised the full potential of homeownership as an activator of social stability. For a citizen to own one’s home meant having an active stake in the state and an invested interest in maintaining lifelong employment. The owner-occupied home becomes the only other space in which the labour class spends time outside the workplace, and family life inside the home becomes a societal ideal. Homeowners, through their choice of tenure, were believed to form an instantaneous conservative constituency [2]. Moreover, Kemeny (1992) contends that the preference towards homeownership stemmed from a re-moralisation around privatism and individualism.
Both Protestant and Catholic beliefs favoured a tenure that facilitated privacy and family life, reinforcing the perception that the ownership of one’s home was the sole path to virtuous living. The ‘superior’ idea of privacy materialised tangibly in the structure of the middle-class home with its dividing walls, separated accesses, series of rooms, gardens, and hedges. Private property was seen as an individual right and homeownership ideology became intrinsically linked to class perception, exacerbating class differentiation. Additionally, rented tenures became stigmatised as precarious and ontologically insecure, further solidifying homeownership’s superior status. The marketed idea of owning one’s home becomes an obdurate ideal and a “self-fulfilling prophecy” [3].
With the commodification of housing, from being a tool for social stabilisation, the purchase of one’s home brings forth another phenomenon: the mass entrance of the population into the financial sphere. Arguably, the government's push for privatism in housing could be attributed to its desire to distance itself from housing provision responsibilities, capitalising on the public’s inclination towards homeownership. With homeownership becoming the preferred form of tenure, and with a significant part of the population becoming homeowners and entering the financial market through private mortgages, housing prices start to soar. As housing became closely tied to processes of consumption, the market became the primary agent that facilitated the freedom and progress that the middle class required. Saskia Sassen [4] writes that the financialisation of mortgages for modest-income households becomes a circuit for high finance for the benefit of investors, with a total disregard for the homeowners involved. The appreciation of housing becomes interlinked with the foundation of the global economy [5]. An additional bias is made through the middle class’s perception that estate assets would be of eternally growing value and that investing in a home is not a mere need but an opportunity to store wealth. Owning one’s home is now perceived not only as preferable but also as highly desirable because of the monetary gains associated with it. The idea of a ‘home of one’s own’ was no longer simply seen as a practical necessity but also as a marker for self-identification and self-realisation [6]. As a result of these complex, somewhat stochastic processes, the rented market lost all desirability and remained under-reformed.
Since post-war times, homeownership ideology has grown roots so deep in the public imagination that despite it now being financially impossible for a new middle-income family to purchase a house in a larger city, the paradigm remains unquestioned. In Ireland, The recent unsustainability of homeownership and the shortcomings of the market-based provision of housing are evident in the numbers contained in a recent report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) [7]. The report states that, in Ireland, while 80% of adults over forty years old own the home they live in, only a third of adults under forty are homeowners.
High rents, precarious contracts, and a shortage of rental housing make it virtually impossible for young adults to make consistent plans for their futures. The imperialist manner in which homeownership-centric policies have dominated the public and private housing provision system has resulted in a residualised rental market and a deeply undiversified housing landscape. The trajectory that homeownership ideology has traced in the twentieth century tells a compelling story of how policies influence preference. The problem of the persistence of a preference becomes evident when the ideology gains so much ideological weight that it becomes self-evident and perceived as ‘natural’ (Kemeny, 1995), not allowing other strategies to even be considered or imagined. Architects must detect the fallacies of the standardised ownership-based housing system and advocate for additional ownership solutions, to create a counter-speculative strategy for housing.
Architects and housing experts must not limit their focus solely on typology, because the systemic issues embedded within the housing crisis will not be improved by alternative typological formulas alone. We need a fundamental revaluation of how we own and access housing, not solely relying on a bottom-up process through the work of building cooperatives, but also through the development of national frameworks for alternative ownership models. By challenging the entrenched preference for homeownership, we can begin to imagine forms of tenure that truly meet the needs of our diverse society.
Working Hard / Hardly Working is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
1. Richard Ronald (2008), The ideology of home ownership societies and the role of housing. Palgrave Macmillan: New York.
2. Reinier de Graaf (2017), Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession. Harvard University Press.
3. Jim Kemeny (1995), From Public Housing to the Social Market: Rental policies strategy in comparative perspective. Routledge: London. Extract: “Policy, therefore, creates a rental system that – perhaps at first unintentionally – steers household choice towards owner occupation. This in turn creates a consumer ‘preference’ for owner occupation which then leads the government into a policy of actively encouraging owner occupation as a response to demand ... The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the more that one-way biases are built into tenure choice the more households will begin to express a ‘preference’ for the policy-favored housing”.
4. Saskia Sassen, (2012), “Expanding the Terrain for Global Capital: When Local Housing Becomes an Electronic Instrument,” in Manuel B. Aalbers (ed.), Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets, p. 78.
5. Pier Vittorio Aureli, Leonard Ma, Mariapaola Michelotto, Martino Tattara, and Tuomas Toivonen (2019), “Promised Land: Housing from Commodification to Cooperation”, e-flux [website], https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/collectivity/304772/promised-land-housing-from-commodification-to-cooperation/. Accessed 20 October 2023.
6. Anthony Giddens (1991), Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press: Stanford.
7. Peter Flanagan (July, 2020), “Barely one-third of adults under 40 in Ireland own a home, report finds”, The Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/07/20/ireland-has-one-of-lowest-rates-of-home-ownership-for-under-40s-esri-says/. Accessed 20 October 2023.
“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.
This article looks at how we build with, against, despite, and in spite of the tide, as walls rise and waters swell, and an assemblage of flood defence barriers and a floating pavilion appear on Belfast’s River Lagan.
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Bloom Lane, situated off Ormond Quay and near the Jervis Shopping Centre, is Dublin City's unofficial Italian district. A perfect example of a previously ignored alleyway working hard to reinvent its function and impact on the surrounding urban landscape, Bloom Lane is pedestrianised, with properties on both sides. Bloom Lane is an excellent example of an alleyway that has transformed from a practical passageway into a dynamic public space with a cultural appeal.
The 'Italian Quarter', was originally designed as part of an urban regeneration project on the 'decaying northern quays'. The development maintained the facade of an older building while the frontage was cut through to construct a pedestrian access route running from the Millennium Bridge through the Italian Quarter to a zebra crossing that connects to the rest of the Millennium Walkway and the Jervis stop on The Luas Red Line. Bloom Lane has been revitalised through the use of public art, careful lighting, and clever design.
Today, the lane stands out as a creative area in the city thanks to its vivid street artwork and colourful paintings. In addition to making the neighbourhood more attractive, these artistic features give it a distinct personality that draws people on foot and promotes exploration. The installation of expansive murals and public art, which gives the area vitality, marked the beginning of Bloom's Lane's makeover. These vibrant, eye-catching pieces of art transform the alley into an outdoor gallery, providing local artists with a platform and visual stimulation for onlookers. By giving the alley a unique character, the artwork transforms it from a plain backstreet into a renowned example of urban inventiveness, that draws both locals and tourists to the area, making it a destination rather than just a shortcut.
Bloom Lane highlights how, with the proper interventions, even modest, underutilised places in congested urban settings can be transformed into assets that work hard and add to the city's cultural and visual appeal. Bloom Lane thrives because it strikes a balance between aesthetics, usefulness, and community interaction. This transformation of an ordinary alley into an inspirational location demonstrates how small-scale urban interventions can have a big impact. Imaginative design can make even the most ignored streets work hard for the city and its residents.
On the other hand, across the Liffey, Exchange Street Lower, near Temple Bar and Essex Quay/Wood Quay in Dublin's city centre, is a public place that falls short of its potential, despite its prominent location, and the cultural and historical value of its surroundings. The street is disappointing due to poor design, neglect, and missed opportunities. This alleyway lacks individuality, with a dreary and utilitarian style that fails to capture the liveliness of its surroundings. Compared to the bustling and distinct atmosphere of adjacent districts, it feels generic, with no unique features or undefined architectural elements to catch attention or engage passersby.
Adjacent restaurants attempt to activate the route's courtyard with outdoor seating. The courtyard, a hidden space with potential, remains disconnected and underutilised, further emphasising the need for cohesive planning. Other efforts such as The Báite Viking longboat – a unique feature that hints at the potential for the street to connect more deeply with Dublin’s rich history and culture, via an artistic installation that draws upon the city’s Viking heritage – remains a point of pride and intrigue for both locals and tourists. However, much like the street itself, the longboat fails to engage its surroundings or the fleeting glances of those who wander.
Despite its high traffic volume, Exchange Street Lower is hardly working, offering little to encourage visitors to stop and interact. The lack of greenery, benches, or other pedestrian-friendly amenities restricts its function to that of a shortcut rather than a destination. Exchange Street Lower represents a missed opportunity to connect key cultural landmarks in Dublin.
Exchange Street Lower and Bloom Lane are both instances of Dublin's tiny urban areas. Bloom Lane demonstrates how small-scale, smart interventions – such as decent lighting, regular maintenance, and the introduction of public art – can transform an alley into a dynamic and engaging location. In contrast, Exchange Street Lower exemplifies the dangers of neglect and a lack of purpose, even in a desirable location. The striking contrasts between the two demonstrates the transformative power of design and investment in urban settings. Where Bloom Lane works hard to create value for the city, Exchange Street Lower rarely works, and remains an untapped asset waiting to be realised. Bloom Lane demonstrates how intelligent interventions may transform a space into a dynamic and engaging environment, while Exchange Street Lower is emblematic of neglect and wasted opportunities.
Examining Dublin's unofficial Italian quarter, Bloom Lane, in contrast with Exchange Street Lower, an area that suffers from neglect, poor design, and missed opportunities, Sarah Adekoya highlights the importance of purposeful interventions in urban development.
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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.
This essay focuses on Shannon New Town, exploring its history from the development and conception by architects to the personal and social history of Aoife’s family. Comparing two spaces within the housing estate of Cronan, highlighting the architectural and social significance, as well as the broader social importance within Shannon.
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