On 23-27th February we were in Dublin as part of the collective housing projects critics of 2nd year students at the UCD-University College Dublin school of architecture. In the free time that we had we visited new urban areas like Docklands, or Elmpark; spaces for the speculative consumption with a banal architecture, without public space. We were found more and more with this standardized image of the urban tertiarization, in any part of the world. After these repetitive landscapes we asked ourselves because while the present city orients towards the consumption and the leisure we admitted that the way to construct it is equal of fleeting and intrascendent that the false illusion of happiness that is sold in those new spaces.

Traveling towards the south of Ireland a pair of hours in train, we wanted to verify how the small Kilkenny responds to these transformations, one of the historical towns more outstanding of Ireland and also one of the most touristics… We walked around the two streets that conformed the historical center of the town, and later on along the outer perimeter where was the medieval wall. Our surprise was to find an historical center totally privatized, with buildings occupies by commercial uses without residents, that leave a center at dusk empty, where some of the buildings serve as facade to parkings, supermarkets, or warehouses. In this video we can see the atmosphere during the commercial hours, and observe like an image that sells as medieval locks up a great commercial center.

Kilkenny from edicions espontaneas on Vimeo.

As we can see in the pictures below, walking around the historical perimeter we were with the infrastructure that allows to give service to the commerce of the center, to assume the mobility of the inhabitants of the surroundings and to attract visitors. This landscape is an adition of spaces for parking in surface, ships for storage, and commercial centers, intermingled with some powerboat, train and residential areas with semi-detached houses… Instead of to consolidate the residential content of this center with a program of housing rehabilitation, it has been put “for sale” the most important part of the collective memory, transforming it in a value of change oriented to a transnational market, an urban space to be visited intensively and a part-time.

City, Dublin, historical center, Ireland, Kilkenny, privatization, terciarization, urbanization