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The housing market: an unnatural disaster?

Shane Sugrue
2/6/2025

Future Reference

While issues of climate change, disease, or even conflict may be explained away by sceptics as natural phenomena, the global shortage of accommodation can only ever be man-made. This article considers the contemporary discourse around housing in Ireland, calling attention to inherent contradictions both in our diagnosis of the problem and in our prescribed treatments.

An un-natural disaster – UN Habitat estimates the world has to build 96,000 homes every day until 2030 to meet global housing need. Image by author

Under a market-led paradigm, the construction industry can never build enough homes to meet demand because, if it did, their product would lose its sale value and they'd go out of business. Our problem is one of distribution, not supply.

Of the many predicaments facing humanity today, arguably the most difficult to make sense of is the housing crisis [1]. Certainly, natural disasters, pandemics and wars destroy homes, disrupt supply chains and labour markets, and drive mass migrations. Population growth increases demand. But housing crises are not in the first instance created by these events. On the contrary, I argue, they are a matter of design [2].

In economic terms, housing is often framed as a simple problem of supply: If we just built enough homes, there would be no crisis [3]. This argument will be very familiar to anyone attuned to the current debate around housing in Ireland. Under a market-led paradigm, however, the construction industry can never build enough homes to meet demand because, if it did, their product would lose its sale value and they'd go out of business [4]. So really our problem is one of distribution, not supply, and its resolution therefore is a question of will, not fate [5].

A vacant house scheduled for demolition on Dublin's Phibsborough Road, May 2025. The Irish government estimates 300k new homes are needed by the end of the decade to meet housing demand. Meanwhile, according to the last census, there are currently more than 160k vacant dwellings across the country. Image by author.

In making sense of social and political problems, appeals to the laws of nature can be compelling – after all, they have a ring of truth about them: we don't control the weather; we never know when we'll be struck down by illness, injury, or death; violence and our vulnerability to it are unfortunate but inevitable by-products of our hapless existence as human animals [6]. This is a routine intellectual trick performed by liberal economists when they discuss the principle of the free market as though it were something akin to Darwin's theory of natural selection. The argument goes something like this: in the existential competition for scarce resources, there must be winners and losers ('survival of the richest,' if you will) and any attempt to artificially level the playing field is an unwarranted interference with Nature. The inevitability implied by this argument is exemplified in the notion of 'the invisible hand', Adam Smith's classic conceptualisation of market forces, describing how individuals acting in self-interest might unintentionally produce effects that benefit society as a whole [7]. Providing an apparent justification for the unfettered pursuit of profit, the invisible hand was famously adopted by proponents of laissez-faire economics [8]. However, these later theorists took the phrase out of context: the so-called 'grandfather of modern economics', Smith was in fact expressing his concern about the social, political and moral distortions produced by unregulated commerce [9]. The invisible hand may be rational, but it doesn't have a conscience.

A considerable body of research has examined the causes and effects of Ireland's emblematic post-2008 housing crisis. Much of this work focuses on how global processes of real-estate financialisation and the neoliberalisation of urban governance have intersected with the local dynamics of a parochial democracy suffering from a post-colonial property complex [10]. This research illustrates that, rather than expressing some uniquely deep connection to the land of our forebears, the emphasis on homeownership in Irish housing policy simply reflects the status of private property as the primary financial asset in a system of wealth accumulation upon which our economy depends [11]. This is reflected in a suite of government schemes that attempt to guarantee continuous growth in property values along with ever-wider proprietorship.

Deregulation, tax breaks, and development subsidies like the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme seek to reduce supply-side costs and minimise risk in order to encourage investors into the market and thus deliver more housing. Meanwhile, demand-side rent supports and help-to-buy schemes, along with loosening mortgage lending criteria, ensure that consumers have enough cash to keep up with ever-higher prices. These measures are based on the seemingly logical assumption that boosting construction and putting money into people's pockets will improve affordability [12]. However, supply-side savings are rarely, if ever, passed onto consumers, while greater availability of capital on the demand-side simply drives inflation. In any case, what does it say about the market if both buyers and sellers require some form of state intervention in order to engage in trade [13]? Is this not precisely the kind of unnatural interference that Adam Smith's disciples warn about? Perhaps the invisible hand is fudging the numbers.

Under the Croí Cónaithe (Cities) scheme, developers can claim a state-funded subsidy of up to €144k per unit on eligible housing schemes by demonstrating a 'viability gap'. Source: Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage

More importantly, what does it mean for a society in which self-worth is measured by one's ability to independently purchase a home, if most people can't manage to do so [14]? The late anthropologist and historian of debt David Graeber argued that, in contemporary western societies, the traditional hierarchy of value has become disordered such that the symbolic or cultural value of home, as well as its fundamental utility as a place to live, have been subordinated to its exchange value [15]. Put simply, we have come to confuse value with price. Often, questions of affordability are met with appeals to viability, a byword for profitability. Yet the assumptions that underly viability calculations – land and construction costs, contingencies, profit margins – are rarely interrogated. Instead, we question the protective, democratic mechanisms of planning and building control, subjecting them to a persistent smear campaign designed to pressure the state into underwriting an ever-greater share of development risk.

So what would it look like to meaningfully commit to the vision of a society that provides housing for all? The Irish Cities 2070 group points out that securing the health, wellbeing, and prosperity of Ireland's rapidly growing population – as well as achieving our ambitious and necessary sustainability goals – is entirely reliant on creating and maintaining attractive, compact, well-designed and connected urban settlements [16]. Yet, by centring commercial viability in debates around housing as though it were as natural a consideration as safety, comfort, beauty or belonging, we privilege the needs of enterprise over those of the people it ultimately serves. Perhaps a first step, then, is to question our assumptions about the nature and causes of housing crises – are they just unfortunate by-products of an otherwise reliable system? Or have we in fact designed a system that reliably produces crises? Most critically, we must ask: who benefits from the whole situation?

In considering such questions, rather than being led by an invisible hand, maybe it's time we followed our gut.

The assumptions that underly viability calculations – land and construction costs, contingencies, profit margins – are rarely interrogated. Instead, we question the protective, democratic mechanisms of planning and building control.

Future Reference is a time capsule. It features opinion-pieces that cover the current developments, debates, and trends in the built environment. Each article assesses its subject through a particular lens to offer a different perspective. For all enquiries and potential contributors, please contact cormac.murray@type.ie.

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Future Reference is supported by the Arts Council through the Arts Grant Funding Award 2025.

References

1. The housing crisis is not confined to Ireland, the Anglosphere, or the developed world; UN-Habitat estimates that the world would have to build 96,000 new affordable and accessible housing units every day to meet global housing need by 2030.

2. I am referring here not to the activities of architects and other spatial practitioners, but to the inalienable fact that the system of housing delivery is a product of the human imagination. In other words, housing crises don't occur entirely by chance. For an elaboration of this argument, see D.J. Madden and P. Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, London, 2016; and P. Ambrose and B. Colenutt, The Property Machine, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1975.

3. E. Burke-Kennedy, 'State Needs to Build over 200,000 Homes over Three Years to Solve Housing Crisis', The Irish Times, 24 June 2021. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/state-needs-to-build-over-200-000-homes-over-three-years-to-solve-housing-crisis-1.4601644

4. As the Australian Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta entreats: 'in order for economic growth to occur, there must be more demand than supply. Roughly translated, that means there must be more people needing basic goods and services than there are goods and services to meet their needs. Put another way, there must be a lot of people missing out on what they need to survive in order for the economy to grow, or in order for anything to have value'. T. Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How indigenous thinking can save the world, Melbourne, Text Publishing Company, 2020, p. 58). For a version of this argument specific to housing, see B. Colenutt, The Property Lobby, 1st ed., Bristol University Press, 2020.

5. For a good discussion on the demand-supply fallacy, see C. McCabe, Money, Síreacht: Longings for Another Ireland Series, Cork University Press, 2018.

6. For more on human vulnerability and its relationship to contemporary socio-political issues, see J. Butler, 'Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation', The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26/2, 2012, pp. 134-51.

7. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2nd edn, London, 1778.

8. Most notably Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, whose ideas came to form the basis of neoliberalism. See  'Laissez-Faire', Wikipedia, [website], 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Laissez-faire&oldid=1290681110 (accessed 16 May 2025).

9. J. Conlin, Adam Smith (Critical Lives), London, Reaktion Books, 2016.

10. On the former, see M.B. Aalbers, The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach, 1st edn, Abingdon, Routledge, 2016; and M. Lennon and R. Waldron,  'De-Democratising the Irish Planning System', European Planning Studies, 27/8, 2019, p.1607 25.  On the latter, see E.A. Byrne, Political Corruption in Ireland 1922 - 2010: A Crooked Harp?, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2012; and M. Dungan, Land Is All That Matters: The Struggle That Shaped Irish History, UK, Head of Zeus, 2024.

11. This argument is elaborated in D. Downey,  'The Financialisation of Irish Homeownership and the Impact of the Global Financial Crisis', in Neoliberal Urban Policy and the Transformation of the City?: Reshaping Dublin, S. Kelly and A. MacLaren eds, 1st edn, London, 2014.

12. Though it should be noted that, despite being a central tenet of the government's flagship Housing for All policy, there is no agreed definition of 'affordable' housing, meaning there is little clarity on what constitutes success. Without a robust metric, it is impossible to determine whether policies are achieving their stated goals.

13. According to the recent EU Construction Sector Observatory report, Housing Affordability and Sustainability in the EU, November 2019, some form of 'below-market' or affordable tenure is required to address housing needs in the lowest three income quintiles across member states. This is echoed by a recent ESRI report which suggests that assessments for housing supports in Ireland should extend to the 60th percentile of income distribution. See E. Corrigan and others, 'Exploring Affordability in the Irish Housing Market', The Economic and Social Review, 50/1 (2019), pp. 119-58.

14. Here we see what Michael Byrne terms the 'internal contradictions' of the Irish housing market. In the first instance, the withdrawal of state supports for housing provision, such as direct procurement and public mortgage finance, coupled with the de-regulation and incentivisation of the private sector, is part of what has made housing unaffordable for a majority in the first place. Meanwhile, changed labour market conditions, particularly the unwinding of the post-war wage-labour contract, have led to growing income inequality, causing a hollowing out of the middle classes – the traditional target market for individuated, private homeownership. In a society premised on such tenure, this unsettles a key element of the social cement. Byrne reminds us that state-supported housing programmes, and expanded homeownership in particular, were both the result of, and antidote to, historical class conflict; something we have a tendency to deny even exists in Ireland today. He thus speculates whether their erosion leads inevitably back to a politicisation of housing tenure and consequent unrest. Indeed, anyone familiar with the work of CATU might suggest this process is already well underway. M. Byrne, 'Generation Rent and the Financialization of Housing: A Comparative Exploration of the Growth of the Private Rental Sector in Ireland, the UK and Spain', Housing Studies, 35/4, pp. 743-65.

15. D. Graeber, 'Three Ways of Talking about Value', in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, New York, Palgrave, 2001, pp. 1-22.

16. D. Browne, J. Coady and C. Pollard, eds., 'Preface / Executive Summary', in Irish Cities in Crisis, Dublin, RIAI, 2024, pp. XIV-XX.

Contributors

Shane Sugrue

Shane is a registered architect based in Dublin and Belfast. He is a Creative Director of award-winning arts collective Unqualified Design Studio and a Marie Curie Researcher at Queen’s University Belfast, examining sustainable-affordable housing policy with the Horizon Europe C-NEWTRAL project. He holds an MPhil in Architecture & Urban Design from the University of Cambridge.

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For the want of a bike shop, we lose the city

Róisín Murphy
Future Reference
Róisín Murphy
Cormac Murray

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.

15/2/2026
Future Reference

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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The potential of political design

Anna Cassidy
Future Reference
Anna Cassidy
Cormac Murray

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.

Catherine Connolly’s presidential win social post (2025), digital graphic, sourced by author.

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.

Left: Anna Cassidy, Stamp motif for Catherine Connolly’s campaign (2025), Right: An Post, Ireland’s first ever commemorative stamp on the 100th birthday of Irish suffragette Anna Haslam.

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.

Aneesh Bhoopathy, Mamdani Official Election Poster (2025), source Mamdani campaign.

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.

26/11/2025
Future Reference

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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Molly Malone’s breasts and the production of space

David Capener
Future Reference
David Capener
Cormac Murray

“[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. 

27/10/2025
Future Reference

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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