The second city's second city

Enclave ReviewDown on Docklands this week even the leaves on the trees are smiling. Long evenings are on their way to midsummer and the tree-­‐green canopy over Centre Park Road frames strollers, joggers, cyclists, mothers with little daughters, sleeping babies in three-­‐wheels all-­‐terrain buggies, intertwined lovers and rushing power-­‐walkers – all moving through the ruins of a past economy. Leading to the Marina and the small harbour at Blackrock, this boulevard of tall verdant hedges hides the old factories, warehouses and yards that once heaved with industry, turning out tractors and cars, tyres, fertilizer and other products whose precise form is lost, but whose presence lingers in the design of the workshops. Glimpses into vacant lots through wire fences reveal a population of dusty lorries and vans that look like they might have been parked for years, together with machines in various shades of steel blue, yellow and mustard, whose obscure uses conjure up images of manufacture and days spent labouring...

Re-ordering the urban archipelago: Kenya vision 2030, street trade and the battle for Nairobi city centre

The urban morphology and social and economic topography of Nairobi is sharply distinguished, heavily fortified and distinctively regulated. This form of urban territorial organization is an outcome of the legacies of colonialism and deeply inequitable local practices which continue to enforce Nairobi’s relationship to the foreign investor and the tourist rather than support the rights of the urban inhabitant. The accelerating impact of neo-liberal economic planning continues to worsen these urban inequalities. In this context, this paper explores the influence of Kenya Vision 2030 on the restructuring of Nairobi and assesses its implication for street vendors, who have been increasingly displaced from trading in the City Centre. Their future and the attempts to re-order Nairobi city centre has emerged as a key site were debates over the global and local versions of the city and the contest between different developmental futures are acted out

The lost city: Recovering the Cork City Architect, Eamon O'Byrne

In this essay I will reclaim from both field-work and the archives, Eamon O'Byrne's impacts on Cork City and to explore his contribution to public architecture between 1948 and 1973. I will consider ways in which O'Byrne developed agency within a dense context that circumscribed his creative input but also offered opportunities to develop distinctive architecture. What I hope to find is an architecture of becoming - one showing distinctive innovation and development, influenced by some international trends, shaped within the political context and labour movement in the city, attentive to neighbourhoods, and debates in Ireland about modernization. In taking this approach, I will pay particular attention to the conditionality of the city architect - whose autonomy required constant negotiations in a vexed system, crossing between tenants, labour unions, builders and politicians. In the opening section, I will explore some of the key contexts shaping the development of municipal housing after World War II in Cork, and in the sections that follows consider different aspects of O'Byrne’s planning and house design during his work in the 1950s and 1960s

Walls of Money: financialization in Dublin

In 2014, NAMA completed €7.8bn worth of such sales to a multitude of global equity funds: Cerberus Capital Management, Blackstone, Deutsche Bank, Patron Capital, Lone Star and Car Val Investors. Another €12.9bn is likely to move through NAMA’s books in 2015. This process pulls global equity funds into Irish suburbia, particularly as a significant segment of NAMA’s portfolio is residential.Set beside the shocks of austerity, these enormous financial transactions have significant implications for both the management of the city and how its future is imagined

Colonial hotels and histories of violence: Grande Hotel Beira, Mozambique

Colonial rule entailed multi-faceted physical, psychological and epistemic violence , which was expressed in diverse ways and sites. Colonial plantations, fortifications and prisons, to name just three, are among the most obvious physical sites of trauma and violence. Here policing, repression, punishment, body control were the norm. A more elusive site of violence is the Colonial Hotel, a common feature of the built and social landscapes of many colonial cities, a space which participated heavily in the capitalist production of colonial spaces and one of the institutions of colonialism. The Colonial Hotel constituted a centrepiece of colonial representations. It has often featured as a centerpiece of film and novels, discourses and practices focusing on sophistication, technology, progress, order and civility, which often triggered nostalgic views of cities, buildings, lifestyles, sweet colonial remembering and an imagined benign past. Contrasting with the above mentioned spaces, the Colonial Hotel cloaks the colonial project in progress and charm, promoting various emotional attachments, responsible for ways of knowing, being and doing the colony. Nevertheless, it is here argued, the Colonial Hotel is an equally exclusionary and unemancipatory site. Accompanied by the growth of tropical modernism, the Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, a colonial project which started to be imagined in the early 1940s, was advertised in the 1950s as the most luxurious hotel south of the Sahara. The Hotel was a key site for travel and tourism, part of the beach and safaris environments seduction, and central to the internationalisation and modernisation of the city and colony. For economic reasons, partially related to the unsustainable nature of the investment, partially due to an international changing environment related to Rhodesia, the Grande Hotel closed abruptly (it was only open between 1955 and 1963). While various performances continued to take place in the Hotel, as parties, balls, swimming events, beauty contests, dinners, etc. helped to create routines and a sense of harmony for the elites in the city at large, violence and instability were always at the Hotel doorstep. As instability grew the Hotel constituted a comfort and a contact zone where the white bourgeoisie encountered space for romance, intimacy, sport, social gathering, business, and for everyday normality. The after-life of the Hotel reveals an enduring decay, as the site hosted the military and more recently a growing number of families (between 2000-3000 residents). While this paper is neither about ruins and poverty, it attempts to reconstruct, mostly through the analysis of disperse but detailed archival materials, the cultural geographies that were present in the construction and functioning of the hotel and city at large. On the one hand, embedded in the processes of the Hotel construction, functioning, closing and ‘post-mortem’ life we can find the larger issues at stake that characterise the inherent violences attached to the colonial project. On the other hand, by reconstructing the aspirations, performances, discourses and imagined geographies enveloping the Hotel, we can discuss the ways in which the hotel's modernism is an inverse representation of the violence in the colony.info:eu-repo/semantics/draf

A transformação da paisagem irlandesa: o fim da geografia?

A ideia de paisagem tem sido revista e reconceptualizada significativamente ao longo das últimas décadas, sobretudo no seio da Geografia anglófona. Desta forma, após um período em que a paisagem era interpretada como uma combinação hierárquica de componentes físicos e simbólicos numa vista estática, valorizando o visual e estético, tendo valores bem definidos e palpáveis, vemo-nos confrontados com interpretações bem menos assertivas e definitivas, 116 que procuram posicionar e enquadrar as paisagens em contextos mais complexos, dinâmicos e instáveis1. Este artigo pretende discutir variadas representações da Irlanda contemporânea, posicionando-as nas recentes transformações das paisagem e identidade irlandesa, sobretudo em torno de Dublin, a sua capital, e contextualizando-as nas tendências contemporâneas de uma Irlanda global, inserida em processos económicos transnacionais, em redes virtuais, em discursos políticos, e numa Geografia que aqui apelidamos de desestabilizada. É dada especial atenção ao papel da arquitectura de City West, um novo parque tecnológico na periferia de Dublin, e à dialéctica que se estabelece entre localidade e globalidade.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Digital (Urban) Geography: Student-led research methodology training using smartphone apps

In the last decade, opportunities have emerged to deploy new digital technologies to research agendas and research-led teaching at third level. For instance, research methods such as surveys and questionnaires are shifting into the digital environment, while at the same time there is increasing evidence to support the view that people who have grown up with technology have acquired distinctive new ways of learning, and that traditional methodologies fail to maximise student engagement (Lafuente 2018). Thompson (2013) suggests that these ‘new learners’ are constantly using technology, multi-tasking in interactive environments, and collaborating online, yet research shows that many students are unaware of the potential of their smartphone to support learning (Woodcock et al, 2012). Despite a widespread interest in mobile devices facilitating teaching and learning in third-level education geography departments (Welsh et al. 2013), many research techniques are still taught using traditional ‘pen-and-paper’ methodologies. The ESRI Collector for ArcGIS is a mobile application (app) that can be used with iOS, Android, and Windows smartphones. Collector for ArcGIS is beginning to emerge as a technology to support spatial thinking in geography at second-level education and third-level education (Pánek and Glass 2018). Here we report on our strategy of integrating mobile technology in GG1015 Applied Geography, a large (250+) class introducing first year BA Arts Geography programme students to a number of techniques that we use in Geography. This module sits between GG1013 Environmental Geography and GG1014 Society and Space in the first-year programme. Both of these modules are a block of 24 1-hour lectures, with multiple choice quizzes (MCQs) and essay-based exams. Subsequently, GG1015 was developed to compliment these modules and introduce different teaching styles that facilitate learning across a range of diversities. Throughout this module, students engage directly in fieldwork, photographic activities, essay writing, presentations, and small group work. As such, this module offers an excellent case study to explore new techniques to engage students in learning, particularly in geographic research