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Streets are the elemental public resource that every citizen can enjoy. William H. Whyte describes streets in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces [1] as the “connectors” within the urban structure or, “the rivers of life of the city - the places where people come to participate in urban life.” Cars have been dominating the streetscape of our cities in the past decades, pushing people inside their homes. Local authorities saw the lack of vehicles during lockdowns as an opportunity to initiate plans for people-centric spaces in their cities and towns. Dublin reassessed its relationship with the public realm with increased pedestrianisation and cycle connectivity and improvement to the green spaces within the city. This article discusses how the provision of street furniture has a distinct impact on the reshaping of the urban fabric within the capital of the country.
At first glance, the transformed South William Street looks pleasantly busy. During the pandemic, the street promised a glimpse of the normality that everyone was craving. But behind the hustle-bustle, there is just one lone bench that forms somewhere to rest as part of the street’s public fabric - discounting the Powerscourt steps, where you might be hosed down unceremoniously. The rest of the street furniture is privately owned by restaurateurs. This issue of the hazy ownership of the city’s fabric is analogous to many other streets in the inner city. While the repaving and increased footpath that many streets have seen since March 2020 allows people to socialise outdoors safely, many of these streets project the narrative that the city is only accessible to a specific group of people; those who can afford to, the patrons who can go to these pubs and restaurants. These new urban measures haven’t taken into account groups such as teenagers or the elderly, who may not have the disposable income to frequent the spots they wish to be in to experience the city. They have no place on these streets and face the risk of social exclusion.
How democratic are these spaces? In her book Purity and Danger [2], Mary Douglas writes about the history of the city and its ambition to keep the centre of the city clean and pure, discarding the other, less desirable, elements of the city to the peripheries. This ambition heightens the rose-tinted image of the colourful, manicured appearance of the city and is promoting the contemporary condition of the city as a space for consumption. Pedestrian measures within the inner city have been exemplifying the obsession with the central spaces of the city and the ignorance towards the areas that the working class inhabit. Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at LSE, claims that the key issue with urban spaces in our cities is civility. The key element that needs to be embedded in the urban fabric is enabling different types of people to come together within the complexity of the city. At its core, a city should be welcoming, accessible and diverse.
The streetscape of the coast road in Dún Laoghaire saw transformation with redesigned pedestrian paths and a greenway connecting the Coast Road of South Dublin from Blackrock to Dalkey. Here the transformation of the street aims to improve the relationship of the people with the coast. The simple gesture of creating the pedestrian zone along the coastal end allows for opportunities for the street to spill out, and to create pockets of parks. Frequent street furniture allows citizens to take a moment to pause to simply observe the city and occupy their streets or catch up with their neighbours and friends. These micro public spaces provide habitable space for different people all through the day; joggers and parents in the morning dropping their kids off to school, the elderly during the middle of the day, and the teenagers, young adults and professionals later in the evening- all the while improving the green footprint of the city.
The city is a living organism and not a static entity, sensitive to external stimuli. The role of public space is constantly evolving with the socio-economic ebbs and flows of a place. We need to mobilise the recently reinvigorated global interest in public space to enable different groups of people to occupy and in doing so celebrate the complexity of our cities and towns. The Danish urbanist Jan Gehl in his book Life between Buildings [3] classified people's activities into three categories: necessary activities (such as going to work or running errands); optional activities (such as going for a walk or standing around); and social activities (such as children playing or people talking). He concluded that social activities are far more likely to occur in places of high quality; in well-designed urban spaces. Dublin needs more spaces that focus on social regeneration, on spaces that do not depend on spending money just to sit and catch up with a friend.
Working Hard / Hardly Working is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
1. W. H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Conservation Foundation, 1980.
2. M. Douglas, Purity and Danger, UK, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
3. J. Gehl, Life between buildings, Denmark, The Danish Architectural Press, 1971.
4. South William Street, Dublin by Aakriti Sood.
5. Dún Laoghaire Coast Road, Dublin by Aakriti Sood.
You’ll eventually ruin a good thing if you’re always questioning it.
Growing up in Longford you are conscious of the identity of this small town. A town which was stretched like a cloth in many ways and was never certain of what it wants to be. The Main Street, the Train Station, the Market Square and the Cathedral, each of the town's main focal points and civic centres all detached, becoming islands in their own right, separated by tarmac streams and rivers.
The rambling Park Road becomes Earl Street as it meets the station, then Ballymahon Street as it strides past the Market Square, and before you know it you are on Main Street with little give away that there has been any change at all; bar the street signs high on the corner buildings edges. As this long stretch of street intersects with the river Camlin it becomes Bridge Street, previously the gateway to the rest of the town, when Longford's centre was perched on the north embankment.
A path taken by many crossing Ireland along the Slighe Assail, an ancient highway running East to West from the Drogheda area, upon which the urban centre of Longphort is believed to date from. Born around the fifteenth century with its inception as a Gaelic market settlement, Longford once trickled parallel to the north bank of the River Camlin. The original town ‘square’ or trapezoid was capped by a market house, flanked to the west by O’ Farrell’s castle and St John’s Church to the East. This square, unnamed, was once the epicentre of the ‘old town’, yet now it's little more than a chicaned byroad and car parking for the solicitors and dentists which occupy the grandest buildings sitting nearby. Contrary to its place of origin, along the clay banks of the river, Longford never intended to interact with the river so intensely – it was always about overcoming an obstacle, acting as a resting stop, halfway across Ireland. A town of streets, an arguably linear settlement with unrhythmic public space due to its origination as that of a road, uncertain what its hierarchical formation is.
The development of the cavalry barracks in the early eighteenth century pushed public life south of the river, with industry and manufacturing happening along the south bank with businesses – such as a distillery, corn mill and tannery – making use of the fast flowing Camlin. But, as described in the Historic Towns Atlas of Longford, the greatest boost to the towns economic life came with the Royal Canal in 1830; in part due to plans for the canal to pass only eight kilometres from the town and local traders successfully convincing the canal company to build a harbour in Longford town. With this significant investment of infrastructure, many large-scale buildings began to pop up around the town. A new market hall, a market square adjacent and, of course, storehouses and warehouses. This area to the south of the town had at this stage totally taken over the old town as the commercial centre, as larger institutional buildings and residences were built to the north. It is these two spaces that act as the focus to this discussion, as one playfully juxtaposes the other.
The town, in many ways, is a town of urban iconography. Upon the sports shirts and school crests sits the cathedral; at the end of the main street stretch sits the Barracks wall’s and gate’s; while the market building stands free in the largest open ‘square’. Everyone knows these icons, yet rarely interacts with them, only in a way akin to how you might interact with a ruin that you might spot as you pass by. This iconography is personified by St Mel’s Cathedral, which was described as ‘an act of faith in stone’, or as I like to think of it, a cathedral at the junction of four roads. The fabric as I said is stretched, it doesn’t have a coherent pattern, perhaps why the town has behemoths like St Mel’s, the Market Square and Connolly Barracks; landmarks with such purpose that it didn’t matter where they rooted as long as they are seen to be there.
This is where I begin to wonder if it is Longford's relationship to modernity that caused the urban downfall of both the ‘old’ town square in the north and the new market square to the south. The market square could be looked at as a piece of pre-modernist planning, with the aim of creating a societal appreciation for the town's fabric through the creation of a larger, more accessible space focused on access; facilitated by barge, cart, and automobiles. It is through the use of the public infrastructure network surrounding the market square that the space thrives. Yet, it is these factors that have created its ‘island’ issue.
When I return to Longford and I walk between the Market Square and Church Street, I now realise that neither of these spaces are really working hard for the town; it is the icons that occupy them that are working hard for themselves while it is everything that connects them that is hardly working. A town born on the side of the road lost its identity somewhere along the way, and now in its hopeful adolescence, I hope these spaces can be seen, reimagined as possible palazzos, surrounded by institutions that beam the richness of the town's history. If we stop looking at these squares from the seats of our cars and occupy the street, we might really begin to understand what needs to change to allow the town to hardly work for its appreciation again.
In this article Luke Reilly examines Longford, his home town, noting that its character is indebted to the uncertainty it feels towards its own identity. Through providing a rich personal take on the town's history, Reilly offers a series of generous assumptions, aiming to portray that within these moments that are hardly working, there are opportunities for the town to hardly have to work at all.
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The living room
When speaking against mono-functional public space, Jan Gehl, architect and urban design author, suggested that the private living room provided a successful example of a space that allows for an independent yet connected experience: “in the living room all members of the family can be occupied with various activities at the same time, but individual activities and people can also function together”.1 Here Gehl’s metaphor captures part of the intuitive draw of public space, which can be considered more broadly in typologies such as public libraries and museums, where cognitive engagement oscillates between the individual mind and communal room.
Through the example of an historical landscape in Glasgow and one in Dublin, this article proposes a new type of outdoor ‘living room’: the Victorian Garden Cemetery. Inspired by their origin, this piece contemporises these spaces by making the argument that through collaboration and creative intervention, these spaces can offer a multifunctional experience that brings together open greenery, cultural engagement, and socialisation.
Garden oases
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of cities across the UK and Ireland boomed due to industrialisation. Consequently, deaths rose, and small burial grounds, often attached to modest churches, became overcrowded and unsanitary. The garden cemetery, an idea produced to cope with this rising demand, allowed dedicated burial landscapes to be built on the periphery of urban centres, providing a solution to concerns around air pollution and the inhumation of bodies, while offering spaces for recreation and peace segregated from growing working towns.
Le Père Lachaise Cemetery (Paris) opened for burials in 1804 and provided a blueprint for those that followed. Winding paths with picturesque backdrops of designed landscapes, and protruding monuments of architectural and artistic merit littered these new grounds. Beyond providing safer and healthier outdoor space, these gardens aimed to inspire contemplation and reflection. In 1843, John Claudius Loudon, the author of On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries, stated: “Churchyard and cemeteries are scenes not only calculated to improve the morals, the taste and, by their botanical richness, the intellect, but they also serve as historical records”. 2
Glasgow Necropolis
Ideas behind the garden cemetery movement are potent in Glasgow Necropolis, the first of its kind in Scotland. Its 50,000 burials and 3,500 monuments sit upon a prominent hill, north-east of the city’s cathedral. Victorian families with financial wealth could afford plots and the commissioning of tombs, gravestones, and memorial monuments were often used to reflect social status. Consequently, the necropolis is today an open-air exhibition of architectural follies reflecting examples of Classicism, the Gothic, the Romanesque, and Renaissance styles. The site is currently maintained by the charity Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, who graciously volunteer to preserve the grounds and share knowledge to visitors through guided tours and publications. The grounds are otherwise used predominantly as a thoroughfare and for general park activities.
Strolling through the winding pathways, surrounded by greenery and pockets of architectural and social history, provides a similar experience to other cultural typologies. Yet, historical assets like the necropolis have potential to be elevated and provide more diversity among people’s choice of public urban space; to inwardly reflect and respectfully socialise in outdoor recreation. Instead of remaining as a static remnant of Glasgow’s past, a layer of contemporary intervention would reinvigorate the necropolis to encourage this, which can be achieved through forms of artistic collaboration.
Goldenbridge Cemetery
Located in Dublin, Goldenbridge Cemetery was, like the necropolis, inspired by Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. Established in 1828 by Daniel O’ Connell, Irish political leader and activist, it was Ireland’s first non-denominational burial grounds since the century Reformation. Though just acres, it is anchored by a large neo-classical mortuary chapel, surrounded by mature yew, oak and cypress trees. Despite its small scale, local initiatives have innovated the cemetery’s use, pushing it to provide a more multifunctional experience for the public.
Common Ground, a community arts organisation, moved into the cemetery’s lodge in 2016, and now use the building as workspace and to house artist studios. The organisation offers artist residencies where creatives are invited to respond to the cemetery and local area. Other community groups and artists now activate the burial space through creative intervention, welcoming introspective socialisation into the grounds where the public can perambulate individually and engage in the work collectively. For example, in 2020, the mortuary chapel was used as the stage for two musicians in the making of a film, by the Family Resource Centre, to raise awareness around violence against women. In the same year, artist Kate O’Shea exhibited a print installation of her collaborative work that called attention to spatial injustice in relation to gentrification.
Goldenbridge’s creative engagement offers a precedent for cemeteries across Ireland and the United Kingdom. By developing a programme of considered, artistic interventions to unused garden cemeteries, an outdoor multifunctional experience of Jan Gehl’s living room would be available to the public; a space where people can fluctuate between internal contemplation and cultural participation in outdoor recreation.
Steeped in social and cultural history, our dormant garden cemeteries are often used solely as thoroughfares. In criticising Glasgow’s Necropolis, Aoife Nolan uses one of Dublin’s small cemeteries to argue that considered, creative interventions to these historical landscapes could provide a new multifunctional experience where the public can fluctuate between internal contemplation and cultural participation in outdoor recreation.
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Crafting public spaces that respond to local climatic conditions demands careful consideration. The ground plane bears the brunt of numerous responsibilities: foot traffic, accessibility, servicing and managing fluctuating climatic conditions – specifically rainwater.
Met Éireann's preliminary data for 2024 shows that March’s rainfall surpassed long-term averages [1]. Further climate change research conducted by Met Éireann also reveals significant increases in heavy precipitation events, particularly during winter and autumn months, with a projected rise in extended dry periods [2]. This poses challenges for both water scarcity and abundance, necessitating prompt design solutions and adaptations to our public spaces and wider built environment.
Rainwater in cities isn't just an inconvenience, it holds potential. Rather than condemning rainwater into stormwater drains, through careful planning and management techniques there are ways we can redirect and collect it, enhancing the spatial experience and climate resilience of our public realm.
Hardly working
The surface of the pedestrianised core in Galway city over the years has succumbed to the inherent complexities of climate and water, with rainfall historically and consistently being a challenge. It averages at 2,800mm per year, in comparison to Dublin with an average of 680mm per year [3].
Since its pedestrianisation in the late 1990s, the street has undergone various phases of maintenance, resurfacing, and redesign. Previously paved with a cobble lock paving, this surface quickly deteriorated after years of heavy foot and vehicular traffic, compounded by poor drainage, and was removed in 2019.
Since then, it has been temporarily resurfaced with tarmac, and in many ways, is symbolic of the widespread soil sealing occurring across Irish towns and cities. This practice, along with the selection of visually unattractive drainage systems permeating the built environment, reflects a gradual erosion of the importance of aesthetic value in pedestrianised zones. These drainage systems are engineered to direct polluted runoff towards natural watercourses, such as rivers and streams, or in some cases to designated stormwater management facilities. Consequently, the resultant waste has been described as a "toxic cocktail of pollutants’’ identified by the EPA (Environment Protection Agency) [4].
The material surface of Shop Street in Galway city is currently under review as part of a broader public realm redevelopment and city enhancement strategy [5]. The strategy, while ambitious and impressive in terms of its quality of urban place making and accessibility standards, is conservatively reliant on impervious hard surfaces with traditional methods of surface rainfall drainage. The strategy, apart from its introduction of small areas of sustainable drainage systems (SUDS), misses a massive opportunity to effectively integrate and creatively link rainfall drainage from streets to new and existing public spaces, a critical characteristic of nature-based solutions (NBS) to urban run-off and climate resilience.
Working hard
The streets and sidewalks encircling Benthemplein in Rotterdam serve as its water veins, creating a living rainwater laboratory, a ground-breaking urban space known as the Water Square. Designed by De Urbanisten, and completed in 2013, it serves as a multifunctional public space that dynamically integrates water management with recreational and social amenities.The project aimed to address the city's challenges with urban flooding and water management. It not only successfully achieved this, but also exposed these challenges to the public through conscious and clever design [6].
Three basins gather rainwater: two shallow ones collect water whenever it rains nearby, while a deeper basin accumulates water during periods of sustained rainfall. Rainwater from the square flows via stainless steel drainage channels into the basins, visually mimicking natural waterways, while in dry weather, the space is accessible to all [7].
Here, linking the drainage channels to a large public space creates visual interest and dynamic interactions with water, enhancing the sensory experience of the square. The sound of water flowing through the channels contributes to the space’s ambiance, creating a playful, inviting atmosphere that attracts people to linger and engage.
The incorporation of street drainage into the design of the Water Square at Benthemplein exemplifies the seamless integration of water management infrastructure with urban design principles. By combining functionality with aesthetics, these channels contribute to the square's resilience, sustainability, and appeal as a vibrant public space in Rotterdam.
Conclusion
Despite notable differences in context and scale, the Dutch model offers insights and an attitude to climate adaptive design that can be applied to the Irish urban environment. Fundamentally, the Water Square at Benthemplein demonstrates that it is plausible to effectively manage and even embrace heavy rainfall within urban areas.
It is important to recognise Shop Street in Galway not just as an isolated segment of the city's fabric, but as an integral component of interconnected systems within the broader urban water landscape. This perspective acknowledges the wider context and interdependencies within the urban environment, encompassing flood prevention, the preservation of biodiversity, water quality maintenance, and ecosystem wellbeing. This calls for a change in how we perceive and handle our conventional drainage systems, prompting a fundamental question: are we designing what's right for our rain?
Rainwater in cities isn't just a problem – it's an opportunity. This article delves into the conventional methods of handling rainwater in our urban spaces, and looks to climate-adaptive examples of rainwater management, offering insights applicable to future urban environments in Ireland.
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