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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.
The innermost tip of the estuary is where the wild Atlantic Ocean meets the River Shannon, the body of water that shares its name with Ireland’s first new town. Building work on this new community began in the 1950s, with Shannon emerging as a symbol of the excitement and optimism, seeking to manifest the ambitions of the newly established Irish Free State. Envisioned as a ‘‘city of tomorrow", it attracted industries and factories from England, the United States and Europe, encouraged by the development of the nearby airport and Ireland’s first free trade zone in the nearby industrial estate. Architects Downes, Meades, and Robinson, along with town planner Frederick Rogerson, designed the town’s housing and infrastructure.
I live in the Cronan Estate, at the end of the terrace, in a four bedroomed home that my grandparents moved into in January 1975. The most exciting part of Cronan is the layout and urban design. Architects traveled to Europe and England, looking at examples of innovative post-war housing developments, inspired by the seminal Garden City Movement that emerged in the early 1900s. This movement imagined built up urban centres surrounded by green belts, providing inhabitants access to nature while also dividing different civic spaces. Inspiration was also gathered from the Radburn Design developments, first implemented in New Jersey in the 1920s, taking an approach to planning that separated pedestrians and cars, creating distinct zones within housing developments with defined uses. This division of spaces is achieved by having the fronts of houses facing onto a shared green space while the backs are used for more functional purposes. In both of these examples there is a clear division, separating the green areas from the more functional built environment.
Following these principles, in the Cronan estate, houses enjoy large green spaces at their fronts, with parking, roads and access installed to the rear. The front, the focus of the estate, is carefully designed so that it is working hard. The backspace by comparison is hardly working, a leftover space that over time has had to compensate for changes in use and increased spatial strain. This layout of greens along the front allows one to walk from one side of the estate to the other without crossing a road. This is replicated in many of the original estates in Shannon, creating a meandering pedestrian green band, with very few roads between. Through this well planned out organisation, these spaces flow into one another, as if the houses and greens naturally sat in perfect harmony from the beginning of time. They are working well, and for me, while growing up, it would have seemed inconceivable for the estate to be laid out differently.
The low garden walls are the perfect height for my neighbours to sit and chat. When I dig up my garden at the start of the summer, people stop to chat, to talk about their own gardens; there is a pride in maintaining their fronts. Neighbours and local groups come together to maintain the greens, planting trees and flowers. The trees fill the views from my living room, allowing me to watch the seasons changing from within my home.
The communal front areas are an extension of the home and gardens of the people living here. They provide a safe and inner sanctum, meaning that people feel at ease leaving their children to run outside. This outside space is working hard, and is an important space to the people of Cronan. When I was a child I would play at the front, sometimes running back through the alleyways, my feet clanging the metal manhole covers as I ran between the front and back of the houses. Lying in bed at night, I still hear the sound of someone travelling that same route, with the same loud clanging of the metal manhole echoing into the silence of the estate.
The backs of the houses by comparison are hardly working, serving a more functional purpose, providing access to the roads and parking. The patchwork of well considered green areas and walkways along the front are a stark contrast to the backs that are formed by leftover space rather than intentional planning. The roads slink their way through the estate, allowing for cars as a mere afterthought.
The back is where you park your car, unload groceries and dry your clothes. Neighbours work on their cars and people might sit outside on summer nights drinking. This space has many uses and functions. Between arguments over parking and the most direct route to the pub, this space is noisy and overused causing the backs of the houses to struggle to contain the noise leading to its overspilling.
Part of the problem lies with the limited space designed for parking in the 1970s, with an increasing number of cars crammed into the small space. This is reflected in the changing materiality of these backlands over time. When the estate was in its infancy, small green spaces were peppered across the back with beech trees. Green was interwoven with the practical use of the space for parking and access, linking the two spaces through its shared materiality of the front. These spaces have been replaced with tarmac and concrete, strained by efforts to provide room to accommodate everyone.
This once vibrant public space has been sterilised. Still, it holds the potential to work hard to serve the needs of its residents each day. A return to its previous state is still possible, however, green spaces beside parking have recently been tarmaced over due to them being viewed as untidy. If these could be replanted with grass and trees, this small change would unite the front and backs again. Planting along the alleyways would further enforce this link and also help to improve biodiversity. These small changes would return the spaces to the original vision of the planners and architects of Shannon and in turn improve the quality of spaces for everyone, it would lead to a space that is able to work hard again.
This essay focuses on Shannon New Town, exploring its history from the development and conception by architects to the personal and social history of Aoife’s family. Comparing two spaces within the housing estate of Cronan, highlighting the architectural and social significance, as well as the broader social importance within Shannon.
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Two cities, both alike in dignity: one vibrant, revelling in its love of watching and being watched; the other smug and staid - watching and watched but neither advertised. This article takes its inspiration from Dublin and Paris, though equally it could be London and Rome. One is on the continent of Europe: full of piazzas and long balmy evenings attracting walkers and maunderers. There are buzzy bars, café’s and bistros and the city feels like one large open air exhibition of sociability. The other is not continental, though might sometimes fancy it. The Victorian obsession with manners is still being shaken off and the idea of openly advertising your curiosity is too vulgar for words.
A recent trip to France and Italy left me feeling full and satisfied; not just because of the good food but the good cities, where sociability is prioritised resulting in safe, happy and diverse places to meet. In this article I wish to look at the importance of celebrating and observing the social life of cities, in essence: people watching. It is no coincidence that le flâneur, a wandering observer of urban spaces, is a French term with no direct translation into the English language, or that the Italians have a specific word for an evening stroll which is taken to both exercise and socialise—to look at others and be looked at: La Passagiata.
The value placed on people watching is most obvious in Paris where café’s and bistros on boulevards and squares offer row upon row of chairs, all facing outwards allowing their sitters to simply wait and watch the world go by. It is a form of urban theatre with the prime spots being those at the front - a ville spectacle. A city that encourages people watching does more than just enabling nosiness, it allows for moments of connection between human beings and in so doing, generates an understanding of the importance of great public spaces in cities. A great public space is a democratic space, [1] a forum for strangers to interact but more than this, it reduces isolation and increases social support. Affection between human beings can, depending on the space, increase in public rather than decrease. In turn, these moments of affection and closeness ‘draws upon and contributes to the richness of public life’. [2]
The ‘English Pubs’ or ‘Irish bars’ in Paris offer an interesting study into the difference between these countries’ when it comes to public life and how it is viewed, or, as is most often the case, not. In all that I witnessed, these spaces of libation and meeting were lined with seats and benches facing not outward but inward, toward each other. Though this article is not about the seating arrangements within the hospitality industry, I do believe this to be a microcosm of a wider social issue: countries that are yet to value the beauty and importance of people watching, a spectator sport that should not just be limited to meetings of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). The café culture of Paris, where residents are encouraged to sit and linger over their coffees on streets and sidewalks, has extended into other realms of public life and planning. Its residents no longer need the excuse of coffee to enjoy the city from a vantage point: it is a city that espouses this ethos at every turn, offering public seating and places for lingering in abundance. ‘Whereas cities were once dominated by necessary activities, cafés brought recreational life into play with a vengeance’, [3] streets are for staying rather than merely passing through.
In his checklist for convivial public spaces, Jan Gehl lists twelve qualities that public spaces should strive for, one of which is ‘opportunities to see’. [4] Gehl is an architect and urban designer who understands the importance of the human dimension in cities stating that ‘the quality of a dwelling and city space at eye level can in itself be decisive to everyday quality of life’. [5] Thinking of Dublin city, where I lived for many years, I struggle to think now of its truly public places - spaces where people can gather and socialise, people watch and exist; where the enjoyment of the city and its urban spectacle are afforded without paying a premium for a coffee or a drink. At the heart of this issue, is a capital with a disturbing lack of public seating, squares and places of congregation. Two obvious examples that come to mind are Smithfield square - so large in scale it results in a dwarfing of any human form - and Portobello Harbour which has now, controversially but unsurprisingly, become the front yard of NYX Hotel.
In recent years Dublin has also become a city that has seen a decrease in public perceptions of safety. According to a poll conducted in 2023, residents of Dublin felt less safe in the capital than in 2016. [6] An increase in Garda presence could be one answer but is there also an argument for ‘eyes upon the street’? [7] Jane Jacobs’ great cry for safety in cities could be as relevant in 2025 as it was in the 60’s. To achieve this we need cities that encourage people onto the streets, to enjoy and watch. So, in the name of happier, safer and more human cities let us facilitate, not inhibit, our natural gregariousness and curiosity.
Promoting people watching in cities may be more important than we think. In this article Phoebe Moore looks at two cities and their differing approaches to public places and curious eyes.
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When determining whether a space is working, in terms of accessibility, we often look towards details such as ramps and widened dimensions. However, for autistic people, atmosphere is perhaps an unexpected yet key element in whether a space is working hard or hardly working. Bright lights, uncomfortable textures, and certain sounds might deter autistic people from using a space so as to avoid becoming overstimulated and potentially having a meltdown.
The need for spatial alterations to facilitate the needs of autistic people is recognised in Ireland. Yet, the solution is often a momentary change of use in an existing building. For example, supermarkets (a typology notably found challenging by autistic people) often host quiet evenings, one night a week, when the usual bright fluorescent lights are dimmed and noise levels are controlled. Even Shannon Airport (the example I use for a building that is hardly working) has a sensory room which creates a space for autistic people to re-regulate themselves. However, these efforts are surface-level solutions for a deeper spatial issue. They highlight how unaccommodating these spaces are outside of limited quiet hours and singular rooms, and could be argued to be reminiscent of the spatial othering historically faced by autistic (and other disabled) people relegated to spaces parallel to the rest of society. [1]
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The Living Bridge on the University of Limerick campus, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, is – perhaps unconsciously – an example of a public space that works hard for autistic accessibility. Spanning a particularly wild stretch of the Shannon River, where cormorants dry their wings on small islands and swans fish under trees that seem to almost float in the current, the bridge twists and curves from the main campus to the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Upon stepping onto the bridge, two floor textures become apparent. On one side of an ebbing and flowing walkway, an aluminium surface gives walkers an extra spring in their step with a muted clunking sound underneath (which may appeal to sensory seekers). Meanwhile, a parallel path in a soft aggregated material seems to absorb force, muting the sound of walkers, joggers, and cyclists. Two alternative sensory experiences are available for bridge users to choose from or swap between.
The bridge is experienced almost as a series of rooms, with each stretch of ten metres or so offering a new view and a soft change of direction, resulting in a snake-like motion from one piece of land to the other. These bends provide a sense of privacy in what would otherwise be a long stretch of public land. This may be reassuring for autistic people due to their difficulties with social situations. The Living Bridge allows pedestrians to weave past each other almost on happenstance, thus avoiding anxiety about interacting with strangers.
In a similar vein, the concave wooden benches dotted along the perimeter of the bridge provide a sheltered resting space for the public to pause as they either relax or regather themselves with the help of the surrounding calming landscape. It has been noted that some autistic people may use their built surroundings to ‘ground’ themselves when overstimulated.[2] The slight nested nature of the benches with overarching glass sheets provides a momentary respite for someone overwhelmed by the bustling nature of a transitory space.
Lastly, the lighting on the bridge is coloured and soft. Positioned under the bridge, on the floor, and on the below-waist-level railing, the lights are in stark contrast to the bright white overhead lights often found in public space and are instead reminiscent of the colourful dark lighting often found in sensory rooms.
As previously mentioned, Shannon Airport has a sensory room. However, the spaces outside of the sensory room create the harsh environment which warrants the need for a separate accessible room in the first place. Vast empty spaces feel like interior fields and provide few opportunities for tethering an overwhelmed body to the comfort of a hard and secure surface. Fluorescent overhead lighting is almost startling as it beams not only from above but reflects off the white polished floors below. Loud and regular announcements on the intercom are discombobulating. A sense of intense interiority is formed by the lack of windows, creating a claustrophobic space which does not signal any relief from what might be read by an autistic traveller as what is colloquially termed a “sensory hell”.
In essence then, the atmosphere of a building can be seen as an essential element in determining whether a space is accessible or not (or rather, working hard or hardly working) to people with certain socio-sensory disabilities such as autism; perhaps best described by poet and art writer, Lisa Robertson: “...the entire body became an instrument played by weather and chance”.[3] Thus, in the case of autistic people, the small subtleties of the lighting, acoustics, textures – all the things which constitute atmosphere – can play the body like an instrument, leaving them overstimulated through no fault of their own.
The need for spaces accessible to autistic people has been increasingly recognised through the emergence of sensory rooms. In this article, Anna Blair takes a look at Shannon Airport and Wilkinson Eyre's Living Bridge, arguing that in one, accessibility is considered, and in the other, there is still work to be done.
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