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Recent developments in urban design discourse in Ireland include an Urban Design Symposium at UCD in 2023 [1], during which proposals to pursue an accreditation for urban designers within the RIAI were discussed. While the Symposium’s published proceedings highlight Irish architecture’s broad professional commitments, any meaningful engagement with environmental or climate adaptation issues were glaringly absent.
While it is too easy to point fingers and add to the rhetoric and calls for further expansion to the architect’s professional activities, the issue as I see it is rather that the profession of landscape architecture within Ireland remains critically underdeveloped. Elsewhere landscape architects are leading on large-scale urban adaptation projects and clearly articulating their role in the compounding climate and biodiversity crises. The urgent need for such professionals has led some of the western world’s most prized schools of architecture – the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; ETH Zurich; Pratt Institute – to inaugurate new professional programmes in landscape architecture in the past six years. To highlight the excitement and optimism that exists amongst its practitioners, Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets recently said that he was drawn to the field because “there’s still so many things to be invented" [2]. Landscape architecture, in other words, is finally having its moment.
In this regard I wish to discuss the disciplinary formations and practices of landscape architecture which are relevant to the development of urban design in Ireland. I frame landscape architecture here in its most ambitious form as it intersects with processes of urbanisation and as it emerges as a field uniquely equipped to take on a diverse range of issues at the intersection of living systems, public space, and social injustices. I also argue that the landscape architect has as much of a claim today to lead on urban design projects as the architect, and that ongoing considerations to accredit architects as urban designers by the RIAI may end up excluding landscape architects from their work to adapt the city to the environmental and social challenges of the twenty-first century.
Greater cultural awareness of the climate and ecological crises alongside an emerging consciousness of spatial injustices has positioned landscape architects as primary agents in the design of the built environment. This has perhaps been best articulated by Charles Waldheim in his 2016 publication Landscape as Urbanism, where he argues that traditional urban planning and design strategies – allied with the field of architecture – are incapable of reconciling with the pace and scale of urban change caused by both deindustrialization and market-driven urbanisation. As industry recedes from urban centres it is typically met with an inflow of global capital to capture opportunities for the making of buildings as financial machines. When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced the sale of Brooklyn’s abandoned waterfront piers in the 1980s, plans to occupy the 1.3-mile waterfront with fourteen-storey apartment buildings quickly emerged, but community groups challenged such developments and mobilised political and financial support for the project that would become Brooklyn Bridge Park. Over twenty years, the planning and design of the 85-acre park was led by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), and since 2021 has provided contact with the waterfront, access to an array of outdoor programming from sports fields to moments of solitude, offered open space to diverse communities, and acts as a bulwark to worsening storm surges. Brooklyn Bridge Park is a masterful choreography of expansive and intimate public space, curated views, play opportunities, and a thickening weave of volumetric plant and landscape material that is everywhere missing from cities.
While urban design and development typically limits the biophysical world to remaining parcels of open space, at Brooklyn Bridge Park this pattern is overturned. MVVA worked with economic planners to calculate the annual maintenance costs for the landscape – providing the logic for the volume of building development along its edges that would directly finance the park through property taxes. The subversion of architecture to landscape architecture in this case of urban development is instructive in longstanding debates over which design disciplines have the authority to guide decisions on the formation of the city. Yet the moment we find ourselves in – global heating, ecosystem devastation, landscape contamination, coastal vulnerability, stormwater pollutants, spatialised social inequities – requires a new kind of design intelligence led by the logic of landscape. While disciplinary formation in the design and planning professions mean that landscape architecture enjoys little public awareness or professional authority in Ireland, across the world landscape architects are leading on infrastructural urban design projects that are absorbing the shocks of these crises at the intersection of urban and living systems.
An unspoken premise within urban design discourse is often that the work of landscape architects is responsible for unmooring architectural quality from urban space. To be sure, there are endless examples of poorly executed work by landscape architects, just as there are from architects. Yet for prominent architect and urban designer Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, the emergence of landscape architecture in recent decades from within parks and gardens – at least where he is looking – into streets and the rest of the urban fabric has resulted in his call for a total abandonment of landscape in the city: “If we want to respect and preserve nature, we must not confuse it or mix it up with the city … The city must withdraw into its own space, develop distinct boundaries and concentrate on itself, becoming dense, solid and as hard as stone" [3]. Lampugnani’s admiration for the historic Italianate urban fabric and the writings of Aldo Rossi have caused conceptual upset and led to the reasoning that denser and harder cities mean more space for nature in the hinterlands. But cities are not closed systems.
Landscape urbanism is being internationally embraced in the discourse of urban design to organise the urban fabric around biophysical systems. Yet discursive formations of urban design in Ireland, at least as suggested by the recent Research, Discipline, and Practice: UCD Urban Design Symposium 2023 seem to consider landscape only in its pictorial dimension. For example, in the symposium’s published proceedings the only engagement with a landscape framework is by Finola O’Kane. Here it is engaged as a “landscape perspective” (or viewshed) comparison of Irish town squares using late nineteenth century photography with more recent equivalents. O’Kane’s lesson is that both incidental developments that have taken place in town squares – such as at Moville, Co. Donegal – and deliberate design attempts – such as at Eyre Square in Galway – are both responsible for “the loss of significance in urban space" [4]. The historical photographs certainly attest to the existence of a kind of character which Irish architects are perennially preoccupied with. Yet these historical examples show either acres of sealed ground or lawn with trees as framing mechanisms. In other words, these spaces are highly impoverished biophysically, and while this may seem to be less of a concern in very small rural towns where opportunities may be more widely available to slow down and remediate surface water pollutants and capture airborne particulates through green infrastructure – these areas are increasingly inundated with water from more frequent storm surges and fewer opportunities to slow and absorb water upstream. These examples may be even less appropriate as visions for our urban future in Ireland’s larger towns and expanding cities.
The project of the city in the twenty-first century will need to reformulate urban conceptions of character and aesthetics to grapple with compounding environmental and social pressures. Core to this project will require engaging plant and landscape material as figures in the urban fabric as they encounter and mobilize landscapes’ logic. Such a reorientation however is likely to prove challenging as they have historically featured as backdrop, framing, or embellishment to architectural logic and form. Compounding this challenge is the identification in recent decades of the complex phenomenon of “plant blindness” in Western society - that is the failure to notice or account for plants in daily life [5]. Although there are many theories that aim to account for landscape architecture’s inferior position in the design and planning fields, perhaps its association with plants which evolved to “avoid recognition” is perhaps one of the more compelling versions. Yet the collaborative endeavour with plants, soils, and water, mark landscape architects as the primary design experts working at the intersection of the built environment and living systems and such professional commitments are a critical contribution to leading the development of the twenty-first century city.
I am sometimes asked whether architects can also do landscape architecture. Can landscape architects also make buildings? Prominent American landscape architect James Rose did design both gardens and houses for his clients. And if trained architects seek to become landscape architects through practice, then more power to them. But as design professionals operate in increasingly complex global conditions, I think we need to clarify the core knowledge of our fields and the relative value of those contributions to the built and unbuilt environment. Current discussions to provide an urban design accreditation for architects calls for broader conversations about what constitutes expertise in urban design, and how such accreditation would affect other built environment professionals who have as much of a claim to this work as architects. While the proceedings to the UCD Urban Design Symposium showed balanced views on who should be involved in urban design projects, some fervently advocated for this role to be led by architects. From where I stand, urban design constitutes a broadly interdisciplinary domain – it is hubris to suggest that the range of challenges which emerge here could only be uniquely led by architects. If the end goal is to design environmentally resilient, socially just, and beautiful Irish towns and cities – rather than to, as Matthew Carmona argues in the Symposium’s proceedings, “grab the territory professionally and define its limits through accreditation” [6] – then interdisciplinary venues to advance this project should be pursued. As landscape architecture slowly emerges as a profession and area of intellectual enquiry in Ireland, architects should embrace its possibilities for Irish cities, work to include landscape architects in urban design’s discursive developments, and support its emergence in the academy.
Open Space is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024.
1. Michael Hayes and Alan Mee (eds.), Research, Discipline, and Practice: UCD Urban Design Symposium 2023, Dublin, Type, 2024.
2. Bas Smets, "Nature Design," Harvard Magazine, July 5, 2023.
3. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, "Cities are Not Landscapes", Domus, July 2020.
4. Finola O'Kane, "A Very Short History of Urban Design in Ireland or Classic Irish Towns of Middle Size", Research, Discipline, and Practice: UCD Urban Design Symposium 2023, Dublin, Type, 2024, p. 19.
5. Ainara Achurra, "Plant Blindness: A Focus on its Biological Basis", Frontiers in Education 7, 2022.
6. Matthew Carmona, "Urban Design, No Boundaries", Research, Discipline, and Practice: UCD Urban Design Symposium 2023, Dublin, Type, 2024, p. 46.
Essay, known in French since the twelfth century, stems from the Latin base exagium, the scale; ‘to try’ derives from exagire which signifies ‘to weigh’. In proximity to this term we find examen: needle, long narrow strip on the beam of the scale, thus follows weighed consideration, control. But another meaning of examen designates a swarm of bees, a flock of birds.
Jean Starobinski, ‘Can One Define The Essay?’ 1983
Receipt of the European Essay Prize in 1983 occasioned Starobinski’s musings above on the literary form for which he was being fêted. He suggests here that the essay’s role is to precisely measure the things constituting its subject, to ‘assay’ their substance, their force. He pairs this image of careful scrutiny, however, with another more dynamic one, brimming with the lives of these things themselves as they murmurate under the writer’s nose. For Starobinski, the essay should both pin its subjects down and follow them into flight.
In 2018, the architect, critic and historian Irénée Scalbert valued ‘A Real Living Contact with [the] Things Themselves’ (Goethe’s formulation for the relationship between nature and art) to the point of adopting it as the title for a collection of his essays, published by Park Books. These essays, all of which had appeared elsewhere over the previous twenty-five years, traced architectural ideas through studies of individual buildings or landscapes. Careful and detailed constructions in words, they matched the heft of the architecture they treated. I still recall how formative his account of Caruso St John’s New Gallery at Walsall was for me when it first appeared during my student years. Reading it was to feel the slow emergence of the building out of the Black Country through the space of the page itself.
Scalbert has now produced a new book in a somewhat similar vein. Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture is also a collection of republished essays from the past quarter century, reflecting its author’s decades-long immersion in architecture, its culture and critique. Like the previous volume these works are born out of direct contact with places, buildings, designers and clients — the last word in Totems is ‘architecture’. This new collection, however, ranges more widely in form, from shorter focused meditations on intense personal encounters with the world (a cold day at the San Cataldo cemetery, for example) to longer, expansive and speculative analyses of buildings and their cultural environments.
The title of the previous volume foregrounded ‘things’. Architecture writing tends to be object-oriented, that is to say it can often treat buildings as fully formed, complete — achieved, in the way that the patrons of architecture require them to be. ‘Things’ are not quite the same; as cultural theorist Bill Brown reminds us ‘things’ are what we encounter when we look simultaneously at and through objects ‘to see what they disclose about history, society, nature or culture—above all what they disclose about us’ [1]. Brown’s things are yielding, inclined to give of themselves in unexpected ways when coaxed. They are relational, and flourish through interaction. This is also true of Scalbert’s things, be they buildings or ideas.
Totems are a subset of things. For Brown, the term denotes ‘the excess in objects, their quality of force that causes them to surpass their function of presence’ [2]. It re-appears as the title of the longest essay in the collection, in which we peer over Scalbert’s shoulder through the strange forms of Neutelings Riedijk’s idiosyncratic, diagrammatic buildings to the other improbable objects amongst which he places them (an elephant, hand-shaped confectionary, the Manneken Pis and the outlines of a Tintin comic strip). Settled in Scalbert’s material cultural landscape, the hyper-formalist Dutch architecture of the late-twentieth century seems both more approachable and less ‘flat’, as Aaron Betsky and Adam Eeuwens have put it elsewhere, though at greater length [3].
The same is true of another kind of totem. ‘Things do not exist without being full of people’, as Bruno Latour (a recurring reference in Scalbert’s texts) reminds us [4]. Scalbert’s elaborations of buildings and places are enlivened through his contact with their creators and inhabitants. Amongst these are some of the ‘big men’ of late-twentieth-century architectural culture, figures of excessive mythology like James Stirling, for example, whom Scalbert humanises by playfully turning over his ludic sketches and diagrams, just as Stirling himself undoubtedly did when first making them. Rather than trivialise his subject’s playful creations (a risk of such an approach in the hands of the hands of a lesser writer), Scalbert carefully pins his airy speculations to a finely understood, tautly described background of the prevailing architectural culture of the period. Like Stirling’s drawings, Scalbert’s description of them is lively and spare in equal measure.
As the book unfolds, we move with the author from buildings to cities and environments. Images of formal making give way to those of growing. We learn of London through its verso of shaggy parks and unprogrammed spaces, swelling with the actions of their passing occupants. Scalbert brings us through ‘cities of small things’ which, like gardens, rely for their continuity less on formal planning than on ‘the ongoing practice of maintenance, […] cleaning, upgrading, repairing, renewing’. Robinson Crusoe shows up in ‘The Architect as Bricoleur’, inviting us to join with the things we find around us in a sympathetic evolution of our environment. Crusoe’s cosmetic spirit, his careful cultivation through ‘A Real Living Contact with [the] Things Themselves’, is also evident in Scalbert’s approach to writing. Time served in the workshops not only of architectural critique but of human geography, ecology and anthropology has equipped him to make a culture out of fragments.
These essays are a pleasure to read as much for their light, crystalline language as for their conceptual content and argument. Some formulations are so succinct as to seem inevitable: ‘Identity is the reward of habit’ we are told, and Hardwick Hall is an ‘artefact inside a gasket of stone’ [5]. Others speculate on the thingness of language itself: ‘Icon is a beautiful word. Its elongated vowels make a warm sound, underscoring a profound idea that signifies, in the context of Christianity, what the totem does in pre-literate societies’ [6]. And some, maybe the most beautiful, are resonant simulacra of personal consolation: ‘The first house in London that I lived in was, for a while at least, large enough and empty enough for me to fill it with a sense of dread and possibility’ [7].
The book mostly discusses British and continental European ideas, figures and buildings. Scalbert is no stranger to Ireland, however, having taught in the architecture school at SAUL for many years. His constituency of readers here will be glad to see these works reappear in a single, handsome and comfortably-held edition. How lucky its new audience, though, as yet unacquainted with these essays, who will undoubtedly find in them the fulfilment of Virginia Woolf’s requirement for the form itself: ‘it must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture’ [8].
Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture by Irénée Scalbert, is published by Park Books.
Kevin Donovan reviews Irénée Scalbert's book 'Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture', published by Park Books in 2026.
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Most people call it crypto but for the purposes of this exercise we’ll use the term "blockchain".
At its core, a blockchain is simply a way of recording an event on a digital ledger instead of in a paper document. This could, for example, be a record of an agreement - the kind of agreement people have been making between one another for as long as agreements have existed. If you do X, I’ll do Y. In the past, we’d make the agreement official by signing some papers in a solicitor’s office. However, with a smart contract running on a blockchain we take a different approach: first, we set out all the conditions that have to be met before the contract can be entered into; then, instead of asking a solicitor to decide when these conditions have been met, we write the whole thing in computer code and let technology act as the referee. The terms of the agreement are implemented without fuss and in a way that’s difficult to undo. If I suddenly get cold feet about some commitment I may have made, I can’t wriggle free of my obligations by finding loopholes and stirring up trouble. That’s the first interesting thing about a typical smart contract: terms and conditions are fairly hard wired.
The second interesting thing about blockchain contracts is the way details of the agreement are stored. Once the computer confirms that all the conditions have been met, the record isn’t just dumped onto one big central server which would be an obvious target for hackers. Instead, a copy of the entire record is kept on many different computers (nodes) spread out around the world. Each copy is kept in a series of linked “blocks” and each block contains a sort of digital fingerprint of all the verified information on which it is based. If someone tries to change even the tiniest detail in one block, the fingerprints won’t match and the change will be rejected. For extra security, large files (a good example for our purposes would be contract drawings) can be stored separately using a system like IPFS. The main block can be primed to keep an eye on these files to make sure that important material hasn’t been tampered with.
It didn’t take long for the earliest blockchain experimenters to see how this new technology could work as a form of money. Money, after all, is just another type of agreement. And so, around 2009, the terms "Bitcoin" and crypto entered the public imagination. Almost immediately, Bitcoin became synonymous with dodgy financial dealings and the internet was soon full of stories about international criminal gangs getting around banking regulations by paying each other in this new invisible currency.
But if we ignore all the hyperbole and look again at what an Ethereum-type blockchain involves – a system that has the same secure, tamper-proof data blocks as Bitcoin but also supports smart contracts – you can see how it might be used for things far beyond dodgy money. Anything that needs a secure, verifiable agreement could benefit from a blockchain approach, including many of the processes that underpin building and construction.
One of the more interesting examples so far of the use of blockchain in the broader construction/real estate space has been in property transactions and land registration. Anyone who’s ever bought a house, no matter where, will know that the process is slow, bureaucratic, paper-heavy and prone to error. Blockchain offers a secure, transparent alternative. In recent years Georgia (the country, not the US state), Dubai, Sweden and other jurisdictions have been testing out blockchain systems to record transfer of title. Media reports suggest the trials have been generally successful with transactions being completed sometimes in a matter of minutes.
In construction, the potential is just as easy to imagine. Take the example of a contractor completing the installation of a complicated foundation on a new project. Instead of waiting weeks for manual inspections to take place, on-site sensors confirm in real time that the work meets the agreed technical specification. That verification is automatically logged on a blockchain, which triggers immediate payment. Large companies like Skanska and Bechtel have been experimenting with these and similar approaches for quite some time, tracking materials from their source to their final installation as well as checking authenticity and compliance.
Another interesting area for potential blockchain crossover is the use of BIM. In a big public building project the architect, engineers and contractors might each start out working on the same 3D BIM model. But as the job progresses, each consultant makes one tweak here and another one there and soon various "official" versions of the same model have come into existence. When a dispute eventually erupts over whether a particular detail was formally approved, no one can be sure whose version of the detail is the “real” one.
With a blockchain-based approach, each approved version of the BIM model could be time-stamped and stored in a tamper-proof way so that a clear, verifiable record of what was agreed can be referred to. We could take this concept one step further and link the approved building model to a city’s digital twin – say, Dublin or Cork – with the building’s latest data slotted straight into the digital city model. This would mean that planners, utility providers and emergency services would have a reliable, up-to-date digital version of the building to work from. And, in fact, this is something that is already being explored in Dublin where the City Council’s partnership with DCU on creating a digital twin has received favourable coverage in the trade press.
While there has been progress in these and other areas, particularly in the private/commercial sphere, wide-scale adoption of blockchain technology in the worldwide construction industry faces a number of hurdles. For a start, regulations vary widely from region to region, making international coordination difficult. Added to that, the technology’s reputation still suffers from its early association with international criminal activity and, more recently, its environmental credentials have also been called into question. Similar to the technology involved in AI, conventional blockchain technology depends on large, power-hungry infrastructure which raises legitimate concerns about energy use and environmental impact, although it must be noted that more recent developments in the field have significantly reduced the amount of electricity to power an Ethereum-type chain.
In Ireland, there’s the added challenge of slow adoption in the public sector. The Government’s recently revised National Development Plan makes passing reference to AI, but none to blockchain. And while some of the important crypto exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken have an established presence in Dublin, there isn’t a sense that blockchain technology has made an impression on the national psyche just yet. Without a clear strategy at government level, we risk falling behind countries already using the technology to speed up land transactions and improve on the construction workflow. How a more streamlined AI/blockchain approach could improve the delivery of, for example, much needed public housing is an interesting point to consider.
This doesn’t mean we should simply bemoan our misfortune and sit around waiting for the next tech opportunity to come our way. One of the more interesting things about the rise of AI, taken in its broadest sense, is its ability to tackle problems that feel too big or too unwieldy for heavy bureaucracies to sort out. So there’s no reason we couldn’t use AI to help us work through the practical and policy challenges of bringing blockchain into our construction and property systems. If we could get the two technologies working together – AI to design streamlined processes, blockchain to guarantee their integrity – the results could be extremely positive for everyone involved. And the countries that manage to combine AI and blockchain in this way will almost certainly enjoy some real advantages. There’s still an opporutnity for Ireland to put itself out in front – but time is running out.
Blockchain can offer a secure, transparent way to record agreements, and therefore holds potential across construction and property sectors, enabling real-time verification, automating payments, and improving data reliability. Yet its adoption in this context remains limited. In this article, Garry Miley discusses the possible impacts and limitations to the technology’s implementation.
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Open House Europe has chosen Future Heritage as its theme for this year.[i] This reframing of “heritage” urges us to consider not only what we have inherited from past generations, but what we would like to pass down to future generations. We are custodians of what we have inherited but we cannot preserve our cities to the point of stagnation. While building for the present, we must also negotiate a relationship to the past and to the future.
In considering the importance of the past and the future in the built environment, it is helpful to first consider the nature of the human relationship to time. This was explored by the philosopher Augustine of Hippo (354–430). In his reflections on the nature of time, Augustine speculates that where the past and the future actually exist is in the mind. The past and the future are present in the mind through memory and expectation, respectively. Augustine refers to this as the distention of the mind.[ii] In the human experience of time, then, the mind is always stretched towards the past through memory, and towards the future through expectation.
In this account, the past only exists through memory. However, memory also extends beyond our minds through the act of inscription. Inscription is described by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur as “external marks adopted as a basis and intermediary for the work of memory”.[iii] These “external marks” are what make up our written and visual histories and cultural narratives; crucially, they also make up our built environment. Our cities act as an intermediary for the work of memory. This is captured by Italo Calvino in his book Invisible Cities:
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the bannisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.[iv]
Layers of past inhabiting are inscribed in the buildings, streets, and squares of our cities. In our built heritage, we encounter the values and cultural narratives that previously guided the building of our cities. We reinterpret these through the lens of current sociocultural values in a perpetual renegotiation with the past. This is the work of memory.
The relationship to the past, cultivated through this work of memory, is an important aspect of the collective identity of any community. This is the case whether the place is one we have inhabited all our lives or is one that is inscribed with an unfamiliar past. For this reason, built heritage has a powerful role in the sense of identity of the inhabitants of the city. Its loss through war, natural disaster, decay, or development is often met with grief and even outrage.
In this regard, developing a city is a question of considering what memories we consider worth preserving and what future memories we would like to inscribe. The tricky balance of negotiating the relationship between the past and the future in a city can be seen in two late twentieth-century transport-infrastructure-led development projects: one in Amsterdam and one in Dublin.
In the 1970s, the city of Amsterdam’s development plan included the demolition of a large part of the central historic neighbourhood of Nieuwmarkt to make way for the city’s metro. The project proposed to replace the demolished buildings with New-York-style skyscrapers. At around the same time, the Irish transport authority planned to demolish much of the Temple Bar area in Dublin to develop a central bus station and underground rail tunnel. The historic neighbourhoods proposed for the sites of these projects were both in decline and in need of regeneration. The city authorities saw the opportunity this provided for introducing transport infrastructure for the future. A key difference in the circumstances of these projects was that Amsterdam’s had project funding readily available from government and commercial backers; Dublin’s did not.
In Amsterdam, many Nieuwmarkt buildings that had been cleared of their residents in preparation for demolition were occupied by artists and conservationists in an effort to preserve them. However, this local opposition to the demolition did not prevent it from going ahead. Instead, it culminated in some of the city’s worst ever riots, with violent clashes between those who had taken up residence in the district and the police and army sent to forcibly remove them.
Like Nieuwmarkt, Dublin’s Temple Bar area was in need of regeneration as a result of years of decline. However, in this case, funding delays led to the state transport authority letting out the properties it had acquired and earmarked for demolition. The cheap short-term rents attracted artists and small businesses. This brought new life to the area and revealed its potential as a cultural quarter. With intensifying local resistance to the plan and a new civic consciousness of the area’s potential, plans for the bus station were abandoned.
In Dublin, as in Amsterdam, there was a dissonance between the values of those altering the city and the values of those inhabiting the city. However, the delays to the Dublin project sowed the seeds of an alternative approach to the area’s development. Eventually, as part of Dublin’s tenure as European City of Culture in 1991, a competition for the rehabilitative Temple Bar Framework Plan was launched. This was won by Group 91[v] with their plan that proposed preserving much of the existing network of streets, with a handful of interventions including squares, streets, and a few key buildings.
Similarly, in Nieuwmarkt, even though a large number of buildings were demolished and the metro was built, plans for a motorway and tall office buildings were abandoned and Nieuwmarkt was ultimately rebuilt on its original street layout. This is notable as memory is not only inscribed in the materiality of the city, but also in its layout and design. In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard points out that “over and beyond our memories [our formative space] is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits”.[vi] Memory is inscribed in our cities, and the space of our cities is in turn inscribed in us through choreographing our habits of use.[vii]
Learning from past instances is valuable in deciding how to develop our future heritage and recognising what values are driving our decisions. It is evident from the above examples that changes to a city should be approached with care and follow the “principles of cooperation, equity, and democracy”[viii] that underpin much of Europe’s recent history. A good guiding principle to making interventions in the city that create inclusive socially responsible future heritage is perhaps the generosity of spirit invoked by Grafton Architects' concept of “freespace”.[ix] This includes generosity to current inhabitants through collaboration and the promotion of agency and belonging, and generosity to future inhabitants, particularly by taking measures to mitigate climate change and to make our cities inhabitable in the future.
Like the mind in Augustine’s account of time, the city is stretched towards both the past and the future. Our own values determine how we approach our relationship to the past and what we desire for current and future inhabitants. Where the future exists as expectation in the mind, it exists as possibility in the built environment. The past is present in the built heritage of a site and the future is present in the possibilities that the site presents. In deciding how to alter our urban spaces we are renegotiating our relationship to our past and drawing out the city we want future generations to inherit.
In this article, Dr Sally J. Faulder, referencing this year's Open House Europe theme of "Future Heritage", considers how we ascribe value to our inherited and inhabited built fabric, and to the built heritage we seek to pass on.
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