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The pervasive belief that owning one’s home is the only path to qualitative living has not only hindered the emergence of alternative forms of tenure, but has influenced the under-reform of the rental market for decades. Why is it that in a post-modern world, in which so many resources no longer have to be owned, but can be shared or rented, homes still have to be owned to feel truly ours? It is worthwhile taking a step, back and above, and looking at how homeownership ideology has served a precise purpose in governments’ agendas.
As seen over and over throughout history, the link between politics and housing is an untieable one. During the twentieth century, governments began to market the ownership of one’s home as a basic need of society. Interestingly, as Richard Ronalds writes in The Ideology of Homeownership, there is no evidence to suggest that owning one’s home is an indigenous need of the modern individual [1]. Rather, it consists simply of a preference, forged by policy-making and social norms. The consolidation of such preference and the marginalisation of other forms of housing provision through specific policies can be observed predominantly in anglophone countries in the latter half of the previous century. In England, the Conservative movement recognised the full potential of homeownership as an activator of social stability. For a citizen to own one’s home meant having an active stake in the state and an invested interest in maintaining lifelong employment. The owner-occupied home becomes the only other space in which the labour class spends time outside the workplace, and family life inside the home becomes a societal ideal. Homeowners, through their choice of tenure, were believed to form an instantaneous conservative constituency [2]. Moreover, Kemeny (1992) contends that the preference towards homeownership stemmed from a re-moralisation around privatism and individualism.
Both Protestant and Catholic beliefs favoured a tenure that facilitated privacy and family life, reinforcing the perception that the ownership of one’s home was the sole path to virtuous living. The ‘superior’ idea of privacy materialised tangibly in the structure of the middle-class home with its dividing walls, separated accesses, series of rooms, gardens, and hedges. Private property was seen as an individual right and homeownership ideology became intrinsically linked to class perception, exacerbating class differentiation. Additionally, rented tenures became stigmatised as precarious and ontologically insecure, further solidifying homeownership’s superior status. The marketed idea of owning one’s home becomes an obdurate ideal and a “self-fulfilling prophecy” [3].
With the commodification of housing, from being a tool for social stabilisation, the purchase of one’s home brings forth another phenomenon: the mass entrance of the population into the financial sphere. Arguably, the government's push for privatism in housing could be attributed to its desire to distance itself from housing provision responsibilities, capitalising on the public’s inclination towards homeownership. With homeownership becoming the preferred form of tenure, and with a significant part of the population becoming homeowners and entering the financial market through private mortgages, housing prices start to soar. As housing became closely tied to processes of consumption, the market became the primary agent that facilitated the freedom and progress that the middle class required. Saskia Sassen [4] writes that the financialisation of mortgages for modest-income households becomes a circuit for high finance for the benefit of investors, with a total disregard for the homeowners involved. The appreciation of housing becomes interlinked with the foundation of the global economy [5]. An additional bias is made through the middle class’s perception that estate assets would be of eternally growing value and that investing in a home is not a mere need but an opportunity to store wealth. Owning one’s home is now perceived not only as preferable but also as highly desirable because of the monetary gains associated with it. The idea of a ‘home of one’s own’ was no longer simply seen as a practical necessity but also as a marker for self-identification and self-realisation [6]. As a result of these complex, somewhat stochastic processes, the rented market lost all desirability and remained under-reformed.
Since post-war times, homeownership ideology has grown roots so deep in the public imagination that despite it now being financially impossible for a new middle-income family to purchase a house in a larger city, the paradigm remains unquestioned. In Ireland, The recent unsustainability of homeownership and the shortcomings of the market-based provision of housing are evident in the numbers contained in a recent report by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) [7]. The report states that, in Ireland, while 80% of adults over forty years old own the home they live in, only a third of adults under forty are homeowners.
High rents, precarious contracts, and a shortage of rental housing make it virtually impossible for young adults to make consistent plans for their futures. The imperialist manner in which homeownership-centric policies have dominated the public and private housing provision system has resulted in a residualised rental market and a deeply undiversified housing landscape. The trajectory that homeownership ideology has traced in the twentieth century tells a compelling story of how policies influence preference. The problem of the persistence of a preference becomes evident when the ideology gains so much ideological weight that it becomes self-evident and perceived as ‘natural’ (Kemeny, 1995), not allowing other strategies to even be considered or imagined. Architects must detect the fallacies of the standardised ownership-based housing system and advocate for additional ownership solutions, to create a counter-speculative strategy for housing.
Architects and housing experts must not limit their focus solely on typology, because the systemic issues embedded within the housing crisis will not be improved by alternative typological formulas alone. We need a fundamental revaluation of how we own and access housing, not solely relying on a bottom-up process through the work of building cooperatives, but also through the development of national frameworks for alternative ownership models. By challenging the entrenched preference for homeownership, we can begin to imagine forms of tenure that truly meet the needs of our diverse society.
Working Hard / Hardly Working is supported by the Arts Council through the Architecture Project Award Round 2 2022.
1. Richard Ronald (2008), The ideology of home ownership societies and the role of housing. Palgrave Macmillan: New York.
2. Reinier de Graaf (2017), Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession. Harvard University Press.
3. Jim Kemeny (1995), From Public Housing to the Social Market: Rental policies strategy in comparative perspective. Routledge: London. Extract: “Policy, therefore, creates a rental system that – perhaps at first unintentionally – steers household choice towards owner occupation. This in turn creates a consumer ‘preference’ for owner occupation which then leads the government into a policy of actively encouraging owner occupation as a response to demand ... The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the more that one-way biases are built into tenure choice the more households will begin to express a ‘preference’ for the policy-favored housing”.
4. Saskia Sassen, (2012), “Expanding the Terrain for Global Capital: When Local Housing Becomes an Electronic Instrument,” in Manuel B. Aalbers (ed.), Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets, p. 78.
5. Pier Vittorio Aureli, Leonard Ma, Mariapaola Michelotto, Martino Tattara, and Tuomas Toivonen (2019), “Promised Land: Housing from Commodification to Cooperation”, e-flux [website], https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/collectivity/304772/promised-land-housing-from-commodification-to-cooperation/. Accessed 20 October 2023.
6. Anthony Giddens (1991), Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press: Stanford.
7. Peter Flanagan (July, 2020), “Barely one-third of adults under 40 in Ireland own a home, report finds”, The Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/07/20/ireland-has-one-of-lowest-rates-of-home-ownership-for-under-40s-esri-says/. Accessed 20 October 2023.
“There was originally a bench here”, we were told. We had brought our own bench, fabricated in a garden in Inchicore, made from fragments of marble from a gravestone mason in Shankill and metal from a scrapyard in Rathmines. The previous bench was significant to at least this one bypasser, who stopped to talk to us, remembering how she would sit there with her son.
For a few minutes our replacement reintroduced a place to stop, to rest and to look, and whatever else you might do with a bench, on the banks of the Grand Canal. And then with its aluminium legs removed and carried on bungee cords, marble bench top tipped onto the caster wheel tucked beneath the seat, it was rolled away, cold autumn sun once again hitting the old bench’s phantom outline in the tarmac. Invited by the Irish Architecture Foundation to build a bench as part of Dublin’s Open House Festival, reflecting on Dublin’s approach to public infrastructure through the vehicle of a humble seat, we transported our bench from place to place and talked to those we met along the way, about public space, and about Dublin.
The bench has its own personality, made from bits of Dublin, yet looked quite at odds with everything around it. The seat consisted of three broken fragments of Carrara marble fastened to an armature of metal grating, laid on a pair of mismatched legs. The thing itself is quite different to what we sketched out when discussing what an object that embodies the character of Dublin might be. Yet somehow it must be a reflection of the city - it reveals another side, maybe an unexpected one, some hidden identity. Built through DIY methodologies, it was designed through the act of construction, in relation to the materials we found, the constraints of the city’s transport, and the skills we could learn from other friends here. The object manifests as an almost automatic response to that which was offered to us circumstantially, by the city; a reconstitution of ruined bits of urban waste, discarded things which nevertheless played some previous part in the grand narrative of Dublin. Breton described this as “the emergence of a solution, which, by its very nature, could not come to us along ordinary logical paths”, deciding that such spontaneously developed solutions are “always superior…rigorously fitting and yet somehow in excess of the need” [1].
This sense of excess is not something which could be ascribed to many public amenities in Dublin - the general discourse tends to be more one of lack, of exclusion. While excess is not an approach which should be generally applied to the city’s urban spaces in terms of material, there is definitely cause for more generosity of intention. In its excessive-ness the bench represents an attitude towards the shape and feel of our public spaces. It offers a portrait of a place which reveals itself rather than one which is preordained, a place which might offer many yet-unknown possibilities to the city’s inhabitants, which might embody its own value to our collective public life.
The spaces around the Grand Canal in Portobello have already provided a case study for this accidental, or perhaps provoked, collective appropriation of public space. Earlier in the year, following the removal of an encampment of homeless people, many of whom were immigrants and asylum seekers, fencing was installed along the canal banks, displacing those living there, and excluding the public from a valued and diversely-used shared space. In response, a guerilla art installation was produced, led by Rank’n’File Collective, turning a physical marker of exclusion into a backdrop for works of protest, and expressions of disapproval from community members.
“This fence is racist. This fence is anti-homeless. This fence is anti-community. This fence will be torn down” [2].
The fence became the framework for a public exhibition space, easy to hang works from, lined along a busy pedestrian path, an accidental design language for a public space of dissent, before being torn down by protesters and finally removed by Waterways Ireland and Dublin City Council. Lefebvre writes that “The street is disorder… This disorder is alive. It informs. It surprises” [3]. The design of public spaces is not a fixed production, but something which grows through occupation, formulating itself functionally and aesthetically through its unpredictable use and misuse.
This was not the first time this part of the city found itself at the centre of Dublin’s battle for non-commercial public space. Portobello Square has become emblematic of this tension, between the living city and the intense council oversight attempting to enforce both a public order and a fixed public aesthetic.
The square was a popular social space and an important part of Dublin’s skate community, “a rare example of what can be on offer for anyone who wants a space to socialise in the city, without the need to pay for doing so” [4]. This was until its closure in 2021 to provide storage space for the construction of a new hotel, hoarding off a public amenity for the private use of a commercial entity, in return for the vague promise of future landscape redevelopment on the site. This came after a long period of protest and attempts by the square’s users to begin conversations around its development into a more sustainable public space through the provision of toilets and bins, actions which were returned with an increased Garda presence.
The harris fencing exhibition was an echo of a previous work by Reclaim Our Spaces, who pasted a participatory timeline on the sites surroundings in 2023, reflecting on the square’s value to the city and the implications of its redevelopment on local people. The fact that this redevelopment failed to reflect the character or use which the place previously embodied, in many ways actively suppressing those uses through the implementation of skate stopping furniture, shows the direct conflict of public infrastructure development with actual public sentiment. Between occupation, temporary closure, and potential formalisation, the square is in stasis.
The discourse around Dublin’s public spaces and infrastructures is a frequently negative one. As a symbolic object, the public bench represents many of Dubliners’ most deeply felt qualms with their city; homelessness, price inflations, diminishing cultural amenities, lack of non-commercial urban space. It embodies the idea of public infrastructure in general, as an object which invites anyone to stop and stay in a specific place, without cost or criteria. Public infrastructures are conduits for how we can interact with the city, as individuals and communities, and their presence implies a trust in the city’s inhabitants, simply to be and use their city as they see fit. As a designed, material object, a bench may proclaim the value we place on our shared urban fabric, on our city’s character.
Before arriving at the IAF’s exhibition space on Charlemont Walk, the bench travelled for one day around Dublin, hosting a series of discussions with local occupiers of public space and random passersby, who shared their time and views with us. What’s clear from these discussions is that, bench or not, people will find a place in the city to do what they want to. Yet a bench signifies a generosity, a shared amenity which somehow one expects as a right of the urban dweller, even for those who are less compelled or less able to carve out their place in the public realm through more unconventional means.
We are left to wonder - if so much happens in the absence of characterful, situated, or even basic infrastructure, what is possible if the public are supported in their inhabitation of our shared spaces?
The Irish Architecture Foundation commissioned rubble to make Benchmark on the occasion of Open House Dublin 2024. The commission is part of Rubble’s participation in GapLab, a programme of strategic mentoring and development for graduate architects to support and sustain risk and their critical practice in architecture.
Through the construction and installation of a portable bench, Rubble explore the ways in which public space is produced and maintained in Dublin city. Using Portobello Square at various points over the last few years as a case study for a space that both works and doesn’t, Rubble question who is allowed to make claims on public space, and how different approaches to public space can affect the development of the city and the communities which inhabit it.
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You’ll eventually ruin a good thing if you’re always questioning it.
Growing up in Longford you are conscious of the identity of this small town. A town which was stretched like a cloth in many ways and was never certain of what it wants to be. The Main Street, the Train Station, the Market Square and the Cathedral, each of the town's main focal points and civic centres all detached, becoming islands in their own right, separated by tarmac streams and rivers.
The rambling Park Road becomes Earl Street as it meets the station, then Ballymahon Street as it strides past the Market Square, and before you know it you are on Main Street with little give away that there has been any change at all; bar the street signs high on the corner buildings edges. As this long stretch of street intersects with the river Camlin it becomes Bridge Street, previously the gateway to the rest of the town, when Longford's centre was perched on the north embankment.
A path taken by many crossing Ireland along the Slighe Assail, an ancient highway running East to West from the Drogheda area, upon which the urban centre of Longphort is believed to date from. Born around the fifteenth century with its inception as a Gaelic market settlement, Longford once trickled parallel to the north bank of the River Camlin. The original town ‘square’ or trapezoid was capped by a market house, flanked to the west by O’ Farrell’s castle and St John’s Church to the East. This square, unnamed, was once the epicentre of the ‘old town’, yet now it's little more than a chicaned byroad and car parking for the solicitors and dentists which occupy the grandest buildings sitting nearby. Contrary to its place of origin, along the clay banks of the river, Longford never intended to interact with the river so intensely – it was always about overcoming an obstacle, acting as a resting stop, halfway across Ireland. A town of streets, an arguably linear settlement with unrhythmic public space due to its origination as that of a road, uncertain what its hierarchical formation is.
The development of the cavalry barracks in the early eighteenth century pushed public life south of the river, with industry and manufacturing happening along the south bank with businesses – such as a distillery, corn mill and tannery – making use of the fast flowing Camlin. But, as described in the Historic Towns Atlas of Longford, the greatest boost to the towns economic life came with the Royal Canal in 1830; in part due to plans for the canal to pass only eight kilometres from the town and local traders successfully convincing the canal company to build a harbour in Longford town. With this significant investment of infrastructure, many large-scale buildings began to pop up around the town. A new market hall, a market square adjacent and, of course, storehouses and warehouses. This area to the south of the town had at this stage totally taken over the old town as the commercial centre, as larger institutional buildings and residences were built to the north. It is these two spaces that act as the focus to this discussion, as one playfully juxtaposes the other.
The town, in many ways, is a town of urban iconography. Upon the sports shirts and school crests sits the cathedral; at the end of the main street stretch sits the Barracks wall’s and gate’s; while the market building stands free in the largest open ‘square’. Everyone knows these icons, yet rarely interacts with them, only in a way akin to how you might interact with a ruin that you might spot as you pass by. This iconography is personified by St Mel’s Cathedral, which was described as ‘an act of faith in stone’, or as I like to think of it, a cathedral at the junction of four roads. The fabric as I said is stretched, it doesn’t have a coherent pattern, perhaps why the town has behemoths like St Mel’s, the Market Square and Connolly Barracks; landmarks with such purpose that it didn’t matter where they rooted as long as they are seen to be there.
This is where I begin to wonder if it is Longford's relationship to modernity that caused the urban downfall of both the ‘old’ town square in the north and the new market square to the south. The market square could be looked at as a piece of pre-modernist planning, with the aim of creating a societal appreciation for the town's fabric through the creation of a larger, more accessible space focused on access; facilitated by barge, cart, and automobiles. It is through the use of the public infrastructure network surrounding the market square that the space thrives. Yet, it is these factors that have created its ‘island’ issue.
When I return to Longford and I walk between the Market Square and Church Street, I now realise that neither of these spaces are really working hard for the town; it is the icons that occupy them that are working hard for themselves while it is everything that connects them that is hardly working. A town born on the side of the road lost its identity somewhere along the way, and now in its hopeful adolescence, I hope these spaces can be seen, reimagined as possible palazzos, surrounded by institutions that beam the richness of the town's history. If we stop looking at these squares from the seats of our cars and occupy the street, we might really begin to understand what needs to change to allow the town to hardly work for its appreciation again.
In this article Luke Reilly examines Longford, his home town, noting that its character is indebted to the uncertainty it feels towards its own identity. Through providing a rich personal take on the town's history, Reilly offers a series of generous assumptions, aiming to portray that within these moments that are hardly working, there are opportunities for the town to hardly have to work at all.
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The living room
When speaking against mono-functional public space, Jan Gehl, architect and urban design author, suggested that the private living room provided a successful example of a space that allows for an independent yet connected experience: “in the living room all members of the family can be occupied with various activities at the same time, but individual activities and people can also function together”.1 Here Gehl’s metaphor captures part of the intuitive draw of public space, which can be considered more broadly in typologies such as public libraries and museums, where cognitive engagement oscillates between the individual mind and communal room.
Through the example of an historical landscape in Glasgow and one in Dublin, this article proposes a new type of outdoor ‘living room’: the Victorian Garden Cemetery. Inspired by their origin, this piece contemporises these spaces by making the argument that through collaboration and creative intervention, these spaces can offer a multifunctional experience that brings together open greenery, cultural engagement, and socialisation.
Garden oases
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of cities across the UK and Ireland boomed due to industrialisation. Consequently, deaths rose, and small burial grounds, often attached to modest churches, became overcrowded and unsanitary. The garden cemetery, an idea produced to cope with this rising demand, allowed dedicated burial landscapes to be built on the periphery of urban centres, providing a solution to concerns around air pollution and the inhumation of bodies, while offering spaces for recreation and peace segregated from growing working towns.
Le Père Lachaise Cemetery (Paris) opened for burials in 1804 and provided a blueprint for those that followed. Winding paths with picturesque backdrops of designed landscapes, and protruding monuments of architectural and artistic merit littered these new grounds. Beyond providing safer and healthier outdoor space, these gardens aimed to inspire contemplation and reflection. In 1843, John Claudius Loudon, the author of On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries, stated: “Churchyard and cemeteries are scenes not only calculated to improve the morals, the taste and, by their botanical richness, the intellect, but they also serve as historical records”. 2
Glasgow Necropolis
Ideas behind the garden cemetery movement are potent in Glasgow Necropolis, the first of its kind in Scotland. Its 50,000 burials and 3,500 monuments sit upon a prominent hill, north-east of the city’s cathedral. Victorian families with financial wealth could afford plots and the commissioning of tombs, gravestones, and memorial monuments were often used to reflect social status. Consequently, the necropolis is today an open-air exhibition of architectural follies reflecting examples of Classicism, the Gothic, the Romanesque, and Renaissance styles. The site is currently maintained by the charity Friends of Glasgow Necropolis, who graciously volunteer to preserve the grounds and share knowledge to visitors through guided tours and publications. The grounds are otherwise used predominantly as a thoroughfare and for general park activities.
Strolling through the winding pathways, surrounded by greenery and pockets of architectural and social history, provides a similar experience to other cultural typologies. Yet, historical assets like the necropolis have potential to be elevated and provide more diversity among people’s choice of public urban space; to inwardly reflect and respectfully socialise in outdoor recreation. Instead of remaining as a static remnant of Glasgow’s past, a layer of contemporary intervention would reinvigorate the necropolis to encourage this, which can be achieved through forms of artistic collaboration.
Goldenbridge Cemetery
Located in Dublin, Goldenbridge Cemetery was, like the necropolis, inspired by Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. Established in 1828 by Daniel O’ Connell, Irish political leader and activist, it was Ireland’s first non-denominational burial grounds since the century Reformation. Though just acres, it is anchored by a large neo-classical mortuary chapel, surrounded by mature yew, oak and cypress trees. Despite its small scale, local initiatives have innovated the cemetery’s use, pushing it to provide a more multifunctional experience for the public.
Common Ground, a community arts organisation, moved into the cemetery’s lodge in 2016, and now use the building as workspace and to house artist studios. The organisation offers artist residencies where creatives are invited to respond to the cemetery and local area. Other community groups and artists now activate the burial space through creative intervention, welcoming introspective socialisation into the grounds where the public can perambulate individually and engage in the work collectively. For example, in 2020, the mortuary chapel was used as the stage for two musicians in the making of a film, by the Family Resource Centre, to raise awareness around violence against women. In the same year, artist Kate O’Shea exhibited a print installation of her collaborative work that called attention to spatial injustice in relation to gentrification.
Goldenbridge’s creative engagement offers a precedent for cemeteries across Ireland and the United Kingdom. By developing a programme of considered, artistic interventions to unused garden cemeteries, an outdoor multifunctional experience of Jan Gehl’s living room would be available to the public; a space where people can fluctuate between internal contemplation and cultural participation in outdoor recreation.
Steeped in social and cultural history, our dormant garden cemeteries are often used solely as thoroughfares. In criticising Glasgow’s Necropolis, Aoife Nolan uses one of Dublin’s small cemeteries to argue that considered, creative interventions to these historical landscapes could provide a new multifunctional experience where the public can fluctuate between internal contemplation and cultural participation in outdoor recreation.
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