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As I watched the incredible spectacle of the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris this summer, a city that has been at the forefront of traffic reduction, I wondered whether we in Ireland would have the courage and the sense of pride in our capital city to put it on display to the world like that.
Considering cities like Paris’ transformative ambition for traffic reduction, the initial stages of the Dublin City Transport Plan have experienced disproportionate media coverage relative to their gentle impact on the everyday lives of citizens. While I acknowledge that this article contributes to that volume of coverage, I think it is worth looking at the issue with a wider lens.
In his recent book, The City of Today is a Dying Thing, Des Fitzgerald comes to the realisation that the consistent objective of town and city planning in the twentieth century, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities to Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin was “not really an attempt to transform urban space. Rather, it was an attempt to do away with the lively, messy, unpredictable city altogether” [1]. The title of Fitzgerald’s book comes from Le Corbusier’s 1929 work Urbanisme, which was feted on its publication as a solution to the “problem of the city” [2].
This idea of cities as problems to be solved may explain some of the attitudes towards progress in our own capital city. In his seminal book on transport in Dublin, James Wickham reports that one of the reasons that people use cars in cities is to protect themselves from threats of violence, real or perceived, coming from outside the car [3]. In this context there is an obvious attraction to being able to drive from your safe, leafy suburb into a city-centre multi-storey car park, from where you can directly access the shops you wish to visit. You can be in the city without ever having to engage with the city.
And perhaps there is good reason to view Dublin as a dangerous place, best avoided. The riots in Dublin city late last year and attacks on tourists have fed a narrative that the city centre is in decline and that people don’t want to go there. This narrative is not borne out by the reality.
People still want to visit Dublin city and to spend their money there. Dublin City Council’s most recent Canal Cordon Count, from 2022, records that close to 180,000 people enter the city centre each day at the morning peak period. Of those entering the city only 28% do so by private car [4]. The latest report from the Dublin Economic Monitor records a continuing upward trajectory in retail spending going back to 2018. Even the impact of the Covid lockdown, which saw a dip in retail spending for quarter two of 2020, saw a return to the upward trajectory by quarter four of the same year. The biggest increases in spending have been in overseas visitors and in the entertainment sector [5].
Therefore, the predicted negative impacts of the reduction in private cars in the city centre appear to be at best, exaggerated, while the benefits have perhaps been undersold. Recent supportive commentary on the Dublin City Centre Transport Plan has focussed on the need to reduce congestion and improve reliability of the bus network, the benefits of which are self-evident. Separately, the recent publication of a Noise Action Plan for Dublin has identified the Transport Plan as an important measure to “provide significant indirect noise reduction benefits” for the city centre [6]. The memory of the idyllic, quieter urban environment that prevailed during Covid lockdown still lingers, but we now know that reducing noise pollution is as much a public health issue as it is an aesthetic consideration [7].
Amid the recent debates about the alarming increase in road deaths there has been little discussion about the direct relationship between the number of vehicles on the road and the number of traffic-related deaths and serious injuries. Reducing car traffic will make our cities safer for all, including car drivers.
But perhaps the least discussed and the most important benefit that can accrue from a reduction in cars is the impact it has on social cohesion and community wellbeing. It is over fifty years since Don Appleyard first drew the connection between how heavily trafficked a street is and how well people know their neighbours [8]. He found that the isolation caused by heavy traffic was particularly acute for children and older people. This lack of a sense of community on heavily trafficked streets, he found, was tolerated by those who treated the street as a transient residence. Those who found it intolerable, especially families with children, moved elsewhere if they could. Those who were too poor to move, or too old, were left living in conditions they found intolerable. This is evidently not a good recipe for a strong and resilient urban community [9].
A recent study found that Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe [10]. Ireland also has the second highest level of car-dependency in Europe [11]. This is no coincidence – the correlation between car-dependency and social isolation is well documented.
Two and half weeks after the Olympic games first put Paris on display, we saw 20,000 people gather on the magnificent urban stage that is O’Connell Street in Dublin, to welcome home our Olympian heroes. Seeing this spectacle of young and old celebrating on the street gives me hope. perhaps we can learn to love the “lively, messy, unpredictable city” that is our capital, and that we can have the courage to make the decisions that will deliver a healthier, more attractive, and more liveable city.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2024.
1. D. Fitzgerald, The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow, London, Faber & Faber, 2024.
2. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1972.
3. J. Wickham, Gridlock - Dublin's transport crisis and the future of the city, Dublin, tasc / New Island Press, 2006.
4. National Transport Authority, Canal Cordon Report 2022, [document from website], 2022, https://www.nationaltransport.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/NTA-Canal-Cordon-Report-2022-Final.pdf , (accessed 30/08/2024).
5. Dublin Economic Monitor, Dublin Retail Spending Growth Maintained in Early Summer 2024, [webpage], 2024, https://www.dublineconomy.ie/insights/dublin-retail-spending-growth-maintained-summer-2024-18214/, (accessed 30/08/2024).
6. Action Planning Authority Working Group supported by Noise Consultants Limited, Dublin Agglomeration Noise Action Plan 2024-2028, [document from website], 2024, https://www.dublincity.ie/sites/default/files/2024-08/13354a-20-r014-04-f08-dublin-agglomeration-noise-action-plan_compressed.pdf, (accessed 30/08/2024).
7. Environmental Protection Agency, Noise and your health, [webpage], 2024, https://www.epa.ie/environment-and-you/noise/noise-and-your-health/, (accessed 30/08/2024).
8. D. Appleyard and M. Lintell, Environmental Quality of City Streets: The Residents' Viewpoint, [document from website], 1971, https://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/hrr/1971/356/356-008.pdf, (accessed 30/08/2024).
9. More recently, the Welsh Minister for Transport, Lee Waters, who introduced a 20mph default speed limit in urban areas, described a similar phenomenon: "Lowering the speed reduces the number of deaths, reduces the number of casualties but also, critically changes the feel of a neighbourhood and allows more social interaction. So, when there is less noise and less sense of danger, people are more likely to go out and about. They are likely to talk to their neighbours, they are likely to allow their children play in their street. Their community feels different, and that then encourages and enables a different type of behaviour".
Carspiracy - You'll Never See The World The Same Way Again, [online video], 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4GZnGl55c, (accessed 30/08/2024).
10. S. Mulgrew, 'Ireland has the highest levels of loneliness in Europe, new study finds', Irish Independent, [webpage], 2023, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/ireland-has-the-highest-levels-of-loneliness-in-europe-new-study-finds/a1717927937.html, (accessed 30/08/2024).
11. S. McCarthaigh, 'Irish have second-highest car dependency in the EU', Irish Examiner, [webpage], 2022, https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40984532.html, (accessed 30/08/2024).
This year’s presidential election made visible a dynamic that is often overlooked in political analysis: how campaigns operate as a form of civic infrastructure, and to what extent design plays a role in their efficacy. Far from being peripheral or decorative, the visual strategies deployed by candidates’ structure how people encounter political life; they shape perceptions long before policy is discussed or manifestos are read. Political design occupies a unique position within democracies, somewhere at the intersection of communication, civic identity, and public trust.
In Ireland, this relationship between design and democratic expression has been strained by a decades-long pattern of executive neglect. Successive governments have systematically deprioritised design and aesthetic quality in public communication and built infrastructure. Senior ministers increasingly frame design as an optional consideration, an unnecessary add-on rather than a fundamental part of how the State articulates care, competence, and regard for its people. As Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers stated during a debate concerning escalating costs at the National Children’s Hospital (NCH), ‘there needs to be much better discipline in cost effectiveness… That means making choices around cost and efficiency over design standards and aesthetics in some instances’ [1].
This position, widely cited and contested, exemplifies a broader ideological shift which sees design treated as a dispensable luxury rather than an essential civic tool [2].This framing misunderstands the function of design within public life. Design, in this case, is not ornamental; it is a mode of communication through which the State makes itself legible. When design is neglected, the consequences extend far beyond the aesthetic and shape the conditions under which political meaning, public trust, and civic visibility are formed.
In the aftermath of Catherine Connolly's election as President, commentators highlighted the design and visual expression of each candidate as decisive factors [3]. Connolly’s campaign offered me a rare opportunity to explore what an authentically Irish political visual identity might look like when grounded in cultural memory rather than branding for the sake of visuals alone. While designing, I drew directly from Ireland’s vernacular signwriting tradition: the hand-painted shopfronts, gilded fascias, and serifed letterforms that once defined the visual texture of towns and villages. These were not simply aesthetic references. They embodied authorship, locality, and a sense of civic care.
By incorporating hand-drawn lettering, a deep green and cream palette, and a postage-stamp motif, the campaign sought to restore the tactile warmth and humanity often lost in contemporary political design. The stamp, a quiet symbol of communication and exchange, is a reminder that politics is, at its core, a conversation carried between people. This concept frames Irish craft traditions not as relics, but as living cultural practices capable of shaping contemporary civic discourse.
In doing so, Connolly’s campaign made design itself an act of cultural continuity, a way of honouring the past while proposing a more grounded and participatory future. By the time Connolly declared on election night, “This win is not for me, but for us,” the sentiment had already been woven through posters, leaflets, and social media, a visual testament to a campaign that made the collective visible long before the votes were counted [4].
Across the Atlantic, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City attracted attention first for his democratic socialist views. It was the striking coherence of his campaign design, however, that propelled him into broader public discourse. Not since Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster, for Barack Obama, had a political image circulated so widely. It gained the kind of immediate recognition associated with Jim Fitzpatrick’s image of Che Guevara.
The Mamdani campaign was intentionally rooted in the material and cultural vernacular of the city itself. The cobalt blue and yellow palette was drawn directly from everyday sights in New York: bodega awnings, taxi cabs, MetroCards, hot dog vendors, and the signage of small independent businesses [5]. In this way, the campaign aligned itself with working-class infrastructure that defines the city’s public life, situating Mamdani not as an outsider but as a candidate embedded in the city’s social, cultural and economic rhythms [6]. Central to this strategy was the premise that design could serve as a communicative bridge to the constituency Mamdani sought to represent. In doing so, the campaign framed visual culture as a mode of continuity and care, a reminder that political communication can affirm belonging as powerfully as it persuades.
Irish election materials, as well as the State's political design more generally, don't attempt to convey substantive meaning through visuals. Their long-standing reliance on formulaic portraiture, generic slogans, and minimal graphic refinement mirrors a broader campaign strategy in which candidates are packaged as approachable local figures using highly-conventionalised visual cues. This approach reduces design to a mechanism for name recall rather than a vehicle for articulating political values or fostering civic engagement. The environmental waste associated with poster production only heightens the sense of outdatedness and underscores how Irish campaign materials often lag behind the more considered, narrative-driven strategies emerging elsewhere. As such, this tradition of visual identity crystallises the limitations of Irish political branding: a dependence on repetition, familiarity, and low-risk aesthetics at the expense of meaningful visual communication.
A strong democracy depends on sustained, accessible dialogue between the State and its people. Visual identity is structurally embedded within this exchange. Visual languages that are familiar or culturally resonant reduce cognitive load and strengthen affective engagement, whereas generic or stylistically flattened forms tend to weaken meaning-making [7]. In this sense, campaign aesthetics function as a form of civic infrastructure, shaping perceptions of authority, intention, and legitimacy before a single word is spoken.
When design is framed as a luxury rather than an essential component of civic life, it erodes the shared visual language through which democratic communication occurs. Such an approach initiates a feedback loop. Minimal investment in design yields fewer meaningful symbolic or material expressions of public life. As these expressions diminish, the State becomes increasingly illegible to its people. Over time, the corporeal presence of the State, its visibility in the everyday, degrades. What was once a free-flowing dialogue becomes generic, flattened, and emotionally inert. Political branding therefore mirrors the State’s broader orientation toward public infrastructure. When design is treated as secondary, a dispensable aesthetic layer rather than a civic medium, its communicative and democratic potential collapses. When taken seriously, however, design becomes a point at which cultural belonging, political intent, and civic participation converge.
Ireland’s future civic health depends not on dispensing with design but on recognising it as a central component of public life. It is the medium through which the State becomes visible, legible, and trustworthy.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Highly visible and emotionally charged, electoral campaigns are often the first instance in which a state’s people encounter their elected representatives. In this article, Anna Cassidy, designer for Catherine Connolly's presidential campaign, examines how political design is indispensable to the democratic process.
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“[W]asn't this all started by some terminally online moron in trinity? … Nobody gives a shite so long as the statue isn't actually being damaged” wrote [Deleted] on the reddit page r/Ireland in a thread to discuss Dublin City Council's proposals to stop the repeated groping of the Molly Malone statue on Suffolk Street — her breasts repeatedly touched by the sweaty hands of tourists, so much so that the dark patina has been worn away to reveal the earthy metallic dark orange of the bronze from which the mythical fishwife was cast. Thousands of images of Molly #mollymalone circulate on TikTok. A group of men dressed in Jack Chalton-era Irish football jerseys stand in line to rub their faces in her breasts. In the comments section one user posts, “reminder she’s 15 in this statue,” others disagree, claiming she was older, as if somehow the behaviour would be permissible if the statue represented Molly as 17 – the legal age for consenting sexual acts. Others use the platform to protest the behaviour.
If you ask Google’s AI Gemini about the practice, it tells you that “this practice is now discouraged by authorities for preservation reasons.” This is artificial stupidity, a view blind to a far more important problem, one that philosopher Sylvia Wynter described as an urban planning that assumes the male-coded subject as the norm, while others—women, Black, Indigenous, and colonised peoples – are excluded, marginalised, or rendered invisible [1]. For Wynter, urban space is ontologically male, in that its logics of design, governance, and belonging reproduce a gendered and racialised “Man” as the universal standard of being. Speaking to RTÉ Radio One, DCC Arts Officer Ray Yeates (a man) suggested that one solution could be to “just accept that this behaviour is something that occurs worldwide with statues” – human stupidity [2]. Perhaps Yeates might agree to a plaque being added, inscribed with a quote from Wynter: “Man …overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself”[3].
As images of the statue circulate online, they both promote and raise awareness of this deleterious practice. But this is the means and not the end of their circulation. These images turn Suffolk Street into a space for the production of a strange kind of economic exchange. With one sweaty hand on a breast, and the other on a smartphone, tourists become workers. Here, as in all of everyday life, a distinction can no longer be made between work and play. In our age of contemporary digital technology all of everyday life is a factory. To play is to work; the digital proletariat; to use a technological prosthesis is to be used by that prosthesis. These interfaces, designed for the many by and for the benefit of the few, manage life by means of ‘fun’. Spaces like Suffolk Street are, as Letizia Chiappini writes, where “[a]ffect, desire, pain, and love, are digitally mobilised for direct spatial impact” [4].
Henri Lefebvre called this abstract space – “[t]he predominance of the visual (or more precisely of the geometric-visual-spatial)” [5]. He described this kind of logic as a planetary mesh that has been thrown over all space [6]. Any space, anything, anywhere, no matter how banal is subject to this logic. 13,461 km away from the Molly Malone statue is an underpass in the Chinese city of Guilin. Each night crowds of outdoor live streamers gather to steam content on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), their faces glowing in the phosphorus white of selfie lamps. Geolocation means that if they are closer to more prosperous neighbourhoods then they make more money from the wealthy clients who live there. These leftover urban spaces that are seen as unattractive and once disregarded in a capitalist economy have become spaces where new economies and ways of working emerge. I have written elsewhere about the disproportionate role that Ireland plays in facilitating the infrastructures that produce these kinds of spaces [7]. This is a new kind of geopolitics, one facilitated by State fiscal policies, such as in Ireland, home of one of lowest standard corporate tax rates in the EU.
This is capitalism incarnate – capitalism become flesh. Everything has an exchange value. There is not a thing that cannot be transformed into a commodity to be circulated in an economy of flesh, thoughts, drives and desires. This is an economy governed by images, subject to what legal scholar Antoinette Rouvroy calls algorithmic governance – the governance of “the social world that is based on the algorithmic processing of big data sets rather than on politics, law, and social norms” [8]. The statue of Molly is a public surface subject to an extractive logic, via the lens she is engineered for constant circulation, interaction, and capture. The statue as code has her meaning flattened into content for the purpose of data extraction and ad revenue. This kind of collapsing together of work and leisure is a weapon of mass distraction. It removes us from everyday life, producing what philosopher Henri Lefebvre called a “transcendental contempt for the real” [9].
Lefebvre also called for a right to the city, by which he meant the right to the production of truly democratic space. Space that is not subject to capitalist abstraction. To what extent this is even possible in our precarious age of algorithmic governance is questionable - but nonetheless we must seek to understand, hope and act.
The groping of the Molly Malone in Dublin reveals a complex new urban condition – the algorithmic production of space. Social media, viral images, new modes of capitalist production, foreground the emergence of an entirely new logic of spatial production. What does this mean for the possibility of a right to the city?
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On visiting the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, one might be struck by a couple of things. First, on entering the building, the air in the hallway is stale, a result of the inoperative original air-conditioning system. Secondly, the planning of the basement service floor is surprisingly chaotic. These two observations suggested to me a narrative about modernism’s dependence on technology and about Mies’ attitude to that technology – and the situation of architecture in general in relation to technical measures.
Mies worked in more than one register when designing the villa. The top floor, with the entrance hall and bedrooms, is fairly straightforward: lucid and rational. The floor below, what I suppose in German could be called the Beletage, has a flowing and expressive plan comparable to his single-storey Barcelona pavilion. Like the Barcelona pavilion, it has a representative purpose: it contains spaces for entertaining, constructed with fine materials which convey the wealth of the inhabitants. The basement below is half-buried in the hillside and contains mostly service spaces. The layout of the basement feels strikingly unresolved in comparison to the other floors.
The plan of the basement is not often published. It contains, among other things, a boiler room, a laundry room, the room-like processing chambers of the air conditioning system, a photographic darkroom for Mr Tugendhat, and a “moth chamber” where fur coats were stored. These functions are arranged in a way that is partly determined by the layout of the floor above. For example, the dumb-waiter is at the end of a narrow corridor around which a contorted storage room is wrapped. It’s as if the occupants of the basement scurry around this warren of spaces to pick up the loose ends of the freely-planned floor above. There is no functionalist virtue on display here. Indeed, the tiled and napthalene-impregnated moth chamber, accessed through the darkroom, is at the end of a chain of five rooms. It gives a claustrophobic impression tainted by the idea of moths as vermin, and of a cruel method of industrial extermination. The technology of circa 1930 is reflected in the primitive air conditioning system: a piece of apparatus firmly fixed in history, but one in service of the apparently timeless perfection of the upper floors.
It seems that Mies did not consider the basement floor to be part of his architectural expression. He didn’t optimize it. The terse open-plan geometry of the main living spaces reflects not just freedom of movement for the inhabitants, but Mies’s freedom of design. It is simple in comparison to the complex technicalities of actually keeping the house running.
The closest thing the villa has to a centrepiece is the orange onyx wall, non-load-bearing and composed of five slabs. While one could interpret this as a pure display of luxury, it is also an object of contemplation (or at least a talking point). The Tugendhat family were cultured as well as wealthy, and I want to attribute to them some kind of elevated curiosity about this object. What can we recover, in the way of intellectual depth, from reflecting on the onyx slabs? A suitable source might be the French philosopher Roger Caillois, who, in his book The Writing of Stones [1], discerned in geological patterns “some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.” In relation to the Villa Tugendhat, where the setting sun causes the backlit onyx to glow translucently, Caillois’s words evoke an understanding beyond the codes of architectural modernity. Mies’s obsessive refinement of his constructional poetics certainly has something to do with striving for a universal syntax, and the connotations of cosmic grandeur must have been intended as well, but the awkward, “puny” insignificance of humanity, in contrast, doesn’t seem to find a direct expression in his design. A stone is an indifferent thing.
Caillois wrote “Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.” [2] Although Caillois did not have architecture in mind, these vivid words evoke, in contrast to the timelessness of the onyx wall, the more fragile reality of the Villa Tugendhat, a reality of uncertainty that undermines Mies’s confident form-making. At the most basic level, the presence of humans means the presence of water vapour and all manner of microbial impurities. These are perennial problems for the architect: problems of climate control and hygiene. The handling of the response to them (the concealed inventions and intricacies of the air conditioning equipment) is arguably a truer token of humanity than the stony perfection of polished onyx panels.
The flight of the Tugendhat family from Brno in 1938 in the face of the impending Nazi occupation is emblematic of the precariousness of civilization and of an industrial society gone astray. The grand formal spaces of the villa have an appropriately monumental character, as Mies intended, but the technical floor tells another story of historical contingency, unresolved difficulties, and of all the problems we try to sweep under the carpet.
Editor's Note: An exhibition on the architecture of the Villa Tugendhat will run in the Irish Architectural Archive from January to March 2026.
Throughout its evolution, architecture has been required to engage both with imperfect technologies and the contingencies of life. This is clearly evidenced in Mies Van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat. The villa has a public face of rare perfection, but other aspects make one wonder about the architect’s ethical stance in relation to functionalism and humanity.
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