CITY EMBASSY DUBLIN
Connecting the Dots
>> As David Harvey noted in his article The Right to
the City (2008), there are a great many ‘social movements focusing on the urban question’. However, he maintains that these voices are not loud enough. In Dublin, the unruly make themselves known, but there is no ‘Commune’ as in Paris in the late 1800’s during Haussmannisation (Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovation of Paris). With the recent closures of many of Dublin’s DIY spaces, the issue is ever more pertinent.
IT IS TIME TO CONNECT THE DOTS There was a huge demand for and a huge supply of vacant spaces, but the barriers are high in number and there exists no clear process to surmount the obstacles that grassroots initiatives face in Dublin. There is a panoply of challenges and barriers, ranging from bureaucratic to regulatory to financial, that are creating an artificial scarcity of space. Thus, many of the vacant spaces in Dublin remain as underutilised assets. To better understand these obstacles in Dublin and to co-create pathways around them, we established Connecting the Dots in 2014. Our aim is to document and analyse the urban DIY initiatives in Dublin that create alternative spaces for communities in the city. We want to highlight the individuals and initiatives creating platforms for peripheral and underground groups to exist and express their creativity. We were particularly interested in exploring the link between the challenges of urban living and how people are functioning within spaces in the city. Much of our research was based on participatory ethnographic observation and action research conducted in and around Dublin within the creative spaces operating at the time. The diverse set of events that occurred in these spaces included: exhibitions, performances, spoken word events, music nights, open mic nights, interdisciplinary arts events, community-based events, gallery openings. The events happened in a range of spaces - including squatted warehouses, JaJa Studios, Steambox, Mart, Chocolate Factory, Seomra Spraoi and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Some of these spaces were either rented out or used temporarily by DIY initiatives and collectives.
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© Eugene Langan
One of the issues we discovered was the ‘value struggle’ between the commons and real estate, in which the value and practices associated with the urban commons come into direct conflict with the extraction of value via ownership of property deeds and access to credit associated with real estate and property speculation. On the one hand, independent spaces attempt to prioritise common value and common practices while, on the other, they come up against the reality of private ownership. In a similar manner to other cities, Dublin experiences the tensions between what DIY and grassroots spaces create and the neoliberal economics and property speculation still ongoing in Dublin. An enormous amount of energy is spent by established grassroots cultural organisations on locating and maintaining spaces, which often are not wholly suitable for the purpose, or which have no security of tenure. Recent initiatives have supported short-term solutions suitable for younger organisations, or temporary projects. Much can be done to encourage the development of policy to provide for and encourage longer term reuse of space by DIY initiatives as well as other cultural groups. >>