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Perhaps more than anywhere else in Europe, our peatlands are an active cultural landscape. [1] Liked or loathed, most people have experienced ‘a day on the bog’, [2] time spent with neighbours and extended family that has created a strong emotional tie to peat cutting. The state has encouraged this too: the establishment of Bord na Móna in the 1940s created whole new communities, building housing and fostering economic development. [3] Coupled with the economic necessity of a cheap fuel source, a desire to be self-sufficient, and the sense that a way of life is being brought to an end without consultation, significant resistance to peatland restoration has emerged in the midlands.
Ireland’s peatlands contain 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon, [4] but 1.9 million tonnes are lost every year as drained, exposed peat releases stored carbon into the atmosphere. [5] Left alone, the peatlands would continue to contribute hugely to our carbon emissions, and fragile, scarce habitats would continue to vanish. Doing nothing is not an option. Restoration requires huge work: drains to be blocked and filled, invasive species to be removed, sphagnum inoculation, and monitoring of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. People are needed.
However plans for much of the peatlands see rewilded landscapes combined with wind or solar energy parks powering data storage. [6] These futures show the bog returned to an imagined natural state, a depopulated wilderness, all trace of its unique industrial heritage removed. It would become a place devoid of people, aside from those passively using the bog as a recreational amenity.
Against this narrative of wilderness stands a history of vernacular architecture and construction in the bog. Relatively unsuited to human beings, bogs have forced us to employ technology, tools, and architecture whenever we encounter them. The nature of that construction can tell us about our changing relationship to these landscapes.
Throughout prehistory, timber toghers (causeways), platforms, and crannogs were built in the bogs. The toghers sometimes crossed the bog, but often stopped abruptly in the middle. It has been speculated that as well as a means of crossing from one side to the other, they may have provided access for foraging, or even spiritual labour, many toghers contain or are surrounded by ritual deposits. [7]
There is also much documentary evidence of Irish society’s changing relationship with the bog over the past 200 years. Accounts of people evicted from their houses finding temporary refuge on the bog are common; houses built from the barest of materials: the turf itself, brushwood, and sometimes even using the facebank of the bog as a rear wall. [8] Photographs from the nineteenth century onwards show woven creels and slide cars, turf barrows, footings, clamps and ricks. [9] Carefully assembled, temporary constructions for the processing of the turf as fuel.
From independence onwards, the government sought to use the bogs as an indigenous source of fuel, and for economic development of rural areas, finally establishing Bord na Móna in 1946. This period saw the bog itself transformed as a built artefact, a rural-industrial landscape of parallel peat fields and deep drains, a network of railways connecting to power stations and factories, workers’ housing and facilities, huge chimneys and cooling towers visible for miles around. Irreparable damage was done to the bog, but a physical legacy of a unique industrial vernacular was created, much of it now threatened or sadly already gone. [10]
The architecture of the peatlands is ingenious and economical, made from the materials at hand, and often designed to be easily dismantled or moved. It reveals that our presence on the bog is temporary, peripatetic, but at times it has also been a place of a place of refuge. We are guests of the bog. But for the most part we have also come to the bog to work, to forage it, or cut it for fuel, our relationship with the bog is defined by labour.
It is difficult to imagine a future where whole communities are again employed by the bog, but it is not difficult to imagine one where they maintain their emotional relationship and physical connection to the landscape. Across the midlands, community groups are engaging with one another and discussing ways to maintain their stake in their bogs, many are fully aware of the contradiction they face in trying to preserve the bog for future generations while still cutting it for economic or emotional reasons. Some are forming meitheals to engage in the work of peatland restoration and citizen science, importantly they seek to continue active roles in the stewardship of their bogs.
These are inventive and ingenious communities. At the outset of industrial harvesting, technology and expertise from across Europe was brought in, loanwords like ‘ganger’, ‘bagger’, ‘haku’, and ‘peco’ became part of a midlands vernacular, the imported technologies and machinery were reproduced and transformed in the Bord na Móna workshops to respond to the needs of specific landscapes and times.
The labour of the bog was supported by social spaces created by the workers, buildings known officially as ‘production centres’ are colloquially known as ‘tea centres’, likewise the mobile staffrooms on rails or sleds known as ‘tea huts’. These objects, sitting somewhere between machine and building, are made simply and directly using the materials and techniques available in the workshops, the design language of industry was domesticated by the workers, with spaces for sitting by a stove, making tea and frying sausages. [11] Regional variation emerged, with some structures common on the Longford / Roscommon bogs being unknown in Offaly.
Can this vernacular architecture be transformed from an agent of the exploitation of the bog, to an agent for its restoration? The truth that restoration of the peatlands will be labour intensive suggests that it could be. The communal nature of this work will require social and support spaces as peat harvesting before it did. Spaces for communities to gather that might partly replace the social function that peat harvesting currently provides; places for shelter for those visiting the bog or to safely pass through it; places that make space for people; and secure our bogs as living cultural landscapes.
Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2025.
1. UNESCO describes cultural landscapes as ‘the combined works of nature and humankind’. UNESCO World Heritage Convention, Cultural Landscapes, [website] https://whc.unesco.org/en/culturallandscape (accessed 17 April 2025).
2. The Living Bog Project, Day On The Bog, [website] https://www.raisedbogs.ie/day-on-the-bog/ (accessed 17 April 2025).
3. MacCabe, F.,Civic Ambition and Achievement – The Civic Visions: of Frank Gibney, Dublin, Castles in the Air publications, 2018.
4. F. Renou-Wilson, K. A. Byrne, R. Flynn, A. Premrov, E. Riondato, M. Saunders, K. Walz and D. Wilson 'Peatland Properties Influencing Greenhouse Gas' Environmental Protection Agency, Report no. 401, 2022.
5. E. Aitova, T. Morley, D. Wilson and F. Renou-Wilson 'A review of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from Irish peatlands', Mires Peat, vol. 29, no.4, 2023, p.17.
6. Bord na Móna, Bord na Móna announces Amazon Web Services as first business to join Eco Energy Park in a strategic collaboration that will see significant investment in the Midlands, [website] https://www.bordnamona.ie/bord-na-mona-announces-amazon-web-services-as-first-business-to-join-eco-energy-park/ (accessed 17 April 2025).
7. C. Moore, 'Old routes to new research: The Edercloon Wetlands Excavations in Co. Longford' National Roads Authority, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, 2008.
8. Feehan, J. et al, The bogs of Ireland: an introduction to the natural, cultural and industrial heritage of Irish Peatlands, Dublin, University College Dublin Environmental Institute, 2008, pp. 60-61.
9. National Museums NI: Green Collection, Turf stacked on a rampart road in Sluggan Bog [online image], https://collections.nationalmuseumsni.org/object-hoyfm-wag-1985. (accessed 17 April 2025).
10. RTE, Bellacorick cooling tower pulled down, [website] https://www.rte.ie/news/2007/1014/94704-bellacorrick/ (accessed 17 April 2025).
11. Bord na Móna Living History, 1940s, [website] https://www.bordnamonalivinghistory.ie/timeline/1940s/ (accessed 17 April 2025).
Our present unequal urban structure is not accidental, but by design [2, 7, 13]. It emerges from systemic failure to acknowledge the needs of women and other genders that do not conform to the heteronormative, able-bodied white male default. This is evident in the restricted mobility of women in the city, the scheduling of the workday that often interferes with caring responsibilities and the threat of Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) [1] that exerts control over women’s bodies and how they inhabit space. Darkness alters perception, diminishes passive surveillance, and reshapes social dynamics, often concentrating alcohol-fuelled economies and male-dominated activities in specific zones. After dark, streets feel dangerous, spaces of refuge are inaccessible, and mobility options are more complex. The mental map of the city shifts according to the geographies of fear and perceived unsafety. [2, 3]
Women’s mobility becomes constrained not only by physical design but also by cultural expectations, risk calculations, and the burden of self-protection, the all-too-familiar and emotionally exhausting ‘safety work’, such as altering routes to get home safe, keys in the pocket, private taxis at night to avoid public transport, and journey-tracking text messages. Feminist scholars have described this as a temporal injustice: access to the city is structured not only by where one can go, but when and under what conditions [4, 5]. The “right to the night” thus extends Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city into the temporal domain, asserting that equitable urban citizenship must include a safe and meaningful presence after dark [6]. Lefebvre imagined the city as a process, not finite, which aligns with Doreen Massey’s consideration of urban space as dynamic “never finished, never closed…as a simultaneity of stories-so-far’.
Caroline Criado Perez exposes the pervasive gender data gap, which perpetuates the gender inequalities and promotes a neoliberal agenda which seeks to protect male supremacy [7]. She argues the lack of sex-disaggregated data results in a world designed by and for men, effectively rendering women invisible and creating significant, often dangerous, inequalities. Architecture, urban design, and planning have historically privileged male norms of movement, visibility, and occupation, resulting in nighttime landscapes that intensify vulnerability for some and enable freedom for others. Can we play a role in addressing this inequity of freedom by reflecting on the status quo and challenging the lived reality that restricts women at night?
Through a radical feminist lens [8], which understands intersectionality [9] and seeks to dismantle patriarchy as the social system of women’s oppression, we can reframe our approach to designing public spaces to promote greater social justice. Emerging feminist research positions co-design as a gender-responsive architectural method that can translate lived experiences into spatial change.
Rather than treating participation as a procedural requirement, these examples advance co-design as a supportive knowledge-producing practice that can challenge the male-normative assumptions embedded in briefs, standards, and spatial typologies. Feminist urbanism has long argued that everyday experience - particularly the embodied, emotional, and temporal dimensions of navigating the city - constitutes a form of expertise [8]. Women’s diverse narratives of fear, avoidance, and adaptation are spatial data that reveal how environments function in practice. This data then emboldens architects and urban designers to act with purpose, respectful of the needs of those the public space will serve.
What methodologies might we employ to understand lived experience at night? One such critical framework is Doreen Massey’s theory of Power Geometry [10]. Massey argued that space is constituted through relations of power that enable some groups to move freely while constraining others. Applied to night-time urbanism, Power Geometry reveals how the ability to inhabit darkness is itself a privilege. Men, particularly those aligned with dominant social groups, often move through nighttime space with relative autonomy. In contrast, women, girls, and other marginalised groups experience heightened surveillance of their own behaviour and curtailed spatial freedom.
Co-design, a participatory design approach, when informed by feminist principles seeks to redress gender inequality and elevate lived experience as design expertise, redistributing epistemic and spatial power. When women and girls participate in defining problems and generating solutions, they expose the micro-geographies of safety and danger that conventional planning overlooks: poorlylit desire lines, bus stops without escape routes, dead frontages that eliminate refuge, or thresholds where harassment routinely occurs. Translating these insights into architectural parameters can reshape environments in ways that support presence rather than avoidance. Importantly, such changes are not limited to token gestures like brighter lighting, increased surveillance or police presence. Feminist design emphasises relational safety: the presence of other people, diversity of activities, and spaces that support care, waiting, and rest.
Massey’s framework also cautions that co-design does not automatically equal empowerment. Power relations persist within participatory processes themselves. Whose voices are heard, whose knowledge is deemed credible, and who ultimately controls implementation remain critical questions. For co-design to translate into spatial change, it must occur early enough to influence briefs, budgets, and land-use decisions, and must be supported by institutions capable of acting on its outcomes. Otherwise, participation risks becoming symbolic, leaving the underlying geometry of power intact. State systems must support the opportunity for meaningful engagement and the dynamism that is required for context-specific approaches to emerge, led by the community [11].
Architecture has the capacity to materialise social relations. Nighttime environments are not neutral backdrops but active agents shaping behaviour and perception. By treating women’s diverse lived experiences as architectural knowledge, designers can move beyond security-driven responses, applying defensible architecture strategies [12], such as Safety by Design, toward supportive environments that promote inclusivity. Democratic planning processes in the form of gender-responsive co-design do not simply act as a tool for consultation but a mechanism for producing new forms of space - spaces where the right to the night is not aspirational but meaningfully constructed. Co-design then becomes an architectural practice of spatial justice, promoting equitable access to the city after dark.
The design of our cities stems from long-standing patriarchal power systems that govern urban development, influence financial allocation, compound social inequality, and subjugate women. These inequalities are further amplified at nighttime. Within a patriarchal planning system, how can we design safe, inclusive and accessible urban spaces which remain agile to the demands of all genders?
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Although scattered voices have raised concerns over the years, debate within the field on the problems associated with architectural renderings have remained scarce. The heightened visibility and public concern surrounding renderings would seem to warrant greater scrutiny; yet, broadly speaking, this has not yet materialised [1].
Instances of public critique and backlash against renderings continue to surface in public discourse. Earlier this year, an Instagram reel depicting the contrast between early renderings and photos of realised public constructs in Copenhagen received over 2.7 million views and thousands of comments [2]. Also recently viral was AntiRender, a website allowing users to upload a rendering and, in return, receive a bleak, ‘realistic’ reinterpretation of it, stripped of ‘happy families’ and ‘impossibly green trees’ [3]. In the past decade or two, more consequential cases have emerged, including instances in which renderings became central to an organised community protest[4], a pre-emptive project closure and resignation [5], and even the unlawful replication of a project [6].
A reason for the passivity towards the responsibilities of renderings may lie in the tendency to frame present concerns through a ‘this-has-always-existed’ lens. A recent news article on manipulative images, amid widespread anxiety over the harmful spread of AI deepfakes, illustrates how concern is raised only to be quickly shut down [7]. Its central takeaway is that manipulated images are nothing new: the author alleges such images have long existed. Attempts to discuss renderings, whose current debates on imagery deception and societal harm are not too distant from those surrounding deepfakes, are similarly curtailed by this reflex.
This appeal to a limited interpretation of tradition is problematic. While it is sensible to situate contemporary concerns within their histories, it is specious to use historical resemblance to trivialise and undermine present problems. By assimilating current issues to past instances, the view risks turning a blind eye to key differences, such as scale and access, that may significantly alter their impact.
More importantly, this tendency assumes that direct continuity or lineage can be traced among imaging technologies; for example, that renderings today are essentially the same as those referred to in the past as renderings. Yet, as John May argues, imaging technologies have undergone foundational transformations such that they may share ‘virtually nothing in common’ with earlier iterations of the same technology beyond name and resemblance [8]. However, making sense of what has changed, and how, is complicated. Architecture, he suggests, has struggled with this confusion [9].
Susan Piedmont-Palladino similarly notes foundational shifts in the evolution of architectural renderings and how such shifts altered and obscured their understanding [10]. In earlier eras, she observes, architectural renderings were ‘more akin to paintings,’ but later they were more closely aligned with photography. These categories carry widely diverging public associations, with the former tending toward imaginative connotations and the latter toward associations with truth. Renderings’ sly movement between these fields has led to what Piedmont-Palladino describes as an ‘almost exquisite confusion between real and unreal.’
Renderings became entangled in interpretive ambiguity not only through visual changes, but also through their increasing alignment with data-driven simulation. This trajectory persists today, as rendering practices rely on increasingly sophisticated digital models, environmental data, and physics-based simulations. Previous literature indicates that improvements in accuracy were often presented as a means of mitigating renderings’ ethical implications [11]. However, the realisation of such aspirations has, in many ways, had the opposite effect. By incorporating greater fact-resemblance, renderings have reshaped how seriously their imagery are perceived. This has and continues to intensify public expectations of trust and validity, raising the stakes of their representations.
These technological and associative developments affect public judgment and understanding. There remains significant confusion regarding how architectural visualisations should be framed and how their truth-values versus their imaginative status ought to be assessed, despite their ubiquitous presence in decision-making processes. This evolving ambiguity should not be overlooked. However, ethical concerns and questions of trust surrounding renderings have become so entrenched that the topic is often treated as settled, and new calls for attention are readily dismissed. Much like the cautionary tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, concerns regarding renderings are discounted because they resemble earlier alarmism. Yet it is worth recalling that, in the tale, despite the town’s seemingly justified dismissal, in the end the wolf was dangerously real.
In professional discussions around architecture today, renderings are the elephant in the room. They are a principal means of communicating large-scale project proposals and frequently face widespread criticism on their accuracy and ethics. As a general subject, however, they remain marginally studied. Are attacks on their realism merely hysterics, or a cause for concern?
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McCormack’s was established in 1984, its current owner is Daire O’Flaherty. At only 18m2, this shop had a powerful presence. It poured out onto the footpath with negotiations of punctures, pedals, pumps, prices, all conducted in the plein air of Dublin's Appian way: Dorset Street. Pronounced in dublin-ese with two distinctly independent syllables: Dor-set, the common pronunciation is miles from the English variant, and lightyears from the ancient route it is descended from: Slige Midluachra [1].
Unlike the case of the ill-fated Delaney’s bike shop in Harold’s Cross, allegedly Dublin’s oldest [2], it was not the increasing cost of business that shut McCormack’s. Right up to its closure, this institution was hopping, with a lively mix of locals and commuters dropping by. According to the shop owner, it was closed because the landowner valued the site more highly once it was vacant [3].
The bike shop was part of a three-storey suite of early Victorian buildings, with a modified-Georgian terrace lining the west of it. Over the past few years its neighbouring buildings have similarly been drained of residential and retail tenants. Relatively recently this city block was home to a multitude of residents and traders. Today the signature calling card of vacancy is visible: permanently-opened windows in the upstairs accommodation, allowing the elements in. Nobody lives or works here to shut them, to provide essential daily care for the properties.
Daire is well-versed and articulate in what makes a city both at the ground level and also the urban theory behind it. On Dorset street, he had a frontline view of Dublin’s traffic congestion during the morning rush hour, the worst it has ever been. He sees an opportunity in the widespread overhaul of the city’s transport system, which is being redesigned to prioritise public transport for decarbonisation and public health: more and more people are choosing bikes to get into work, and live healthily in the city. In his view bikes are a key component of any liveable city, like Paris or Amsterdam perhaps. What good will the ambition to encourage cycling be, without centrally-located facilities for bike repair and maintenance? It is akin to building a motorway without including for new garages or fuel stations.
McCormack’s now has a premises in Drumcondra, not far from its former home. Daire has yet to establish whether business has actually improved. However the same lack of protection exists in the new premises. While there are limitations to hosting a bike shop in a small retail unit (cycling shops are ideally suited to larger premises), McCormack’s 41 years of business clearly evidences the ability to adapt and survive in small, tight spaces. Shutting small independent retailers down will make larger out of town suburban shops more tempting to customers. It also offloads a responsibility to repair the existing urban fabric – an essential and under-practised aspect of the circular economy.
At a municipal level, there are no obvious consequences for ousting an established small business tenant in pursuit of greater profit, nor any meaningful incentives for landlords to help their continued operation. The desire to sell off buildings with a clean slate of no sitting tenants is widespread in Dublin, and the results are most keenly felt by the communities who make use of small businesses.
The closure of specialised small businesses, like bike shops, locksmiths, butchers, grocers, are part of a broader list of fatalities to our city, with the loss of art and cultural spaces, pubs and restaurants regularly causing public outcry. In an ecosystem of property speculation, few tenancies are safe. The liveable city we aspire to is increasingly precarious.
While these changes can seem inevitable and often happen stealthily over time, the failure of policy to protect small independent businesses will cost the city in easily-measurable ways. Daire famously once broke up a fight between two locals arguing over money; he, and many others like him, are eyes, ears and a friend to the street. This is increasingly relevant when the media and political debate focus on inner-city crime and public safety.
The fight for the city is not just in art spaces, pubs, heritage properties, it is the fight to protect small independent retailers and those committed to living and doing business in our city. If Dublin is to stay open for business, it has to protect them too. If indeed ‘we are Dublin Town’ let us aim to be like Paris or Berlin, with a feast of small independent retailers providing vibrancy to streets [4]. Task forces looking at the bigger picture of our urban centre, encouraging external investment in the city, need to be clear-eyed on the draining of its smaller, but equally essential, tenants. Otherwise fixing the city through grand gestures will be like trying to save a marriage, while having an affair.
After forty-one years in business, what was probably Dublin’s smallest bike shop: McCormack’s on Dorset Street, pulled down the shutters for the last time. In this article, Róisín Murphy uses the closure as a lens on the wider disappearance of small, long-standing businesses from the city, asking how liveable Dublin can remain if independent traders and venues continue to vanish.
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