A PLACE OF RUPTURES AND BONDS: THE (RE)MAKING OF A DUBLIN SUBURB A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 1 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 1 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 A Place of Ruptures and Bonds: Založila The (Re)making of a Dublin Suburb Založba Univerze v Ljubljani Avtorica Izdala Alina Bezlaj Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani Recenzenta Jaka Repič Za založbo Sandi Abram Gregor Majdič, rektor Univerze v Ljubljani Zbirka Zupaničeva knjižnica, št. 56 Za izdajatelja (ISSN 1855-671X, e-ISSN 2630-3922) Mojca Schlamberger Brezar, dekanja Filozofske fakultete UL Jezikovni pregled Paul Steed Ljubljana, 2024 Odgovorni urednik zbirke Naklada Boštjan Kravanja 150 izvodov Uredniški odbor zbirke Oblikovna zasnova zbirke Bojan Baskar, Mateja Habinc, Vito Vasja Cenčič Hazler, Jože Hudales, Božidar Jezernik, Miha Kozorog, Boštjan Kravanja, Uršula Tehnično urejanje Lipovec Čebron, Sarah Lunaček, Jure Preglau Mirjam Mencej, Rajko Muršič, Jaka Repič, Peter Simonič Prelom Eva Vrbnjak Slika na naslovnici Community Vaults Project by Axis To delo je ponujeno pod licenco Creative Ballymun with Lead Artist Maeve Stone. Commons Priznanje avtorstva-Deljenje pod enakimi pogoji 4.0 Mednarodna licenca Foto: Alina Bezlaj. (izjema so fotografije). / This work is Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Tisk licensed under a Creative Commons License (except photographs). Birografika Bori d. o. o. Knjiga je izšla s podporo Javne agencije za Cena znanstvenoraziskovalno in inovacijsko dejav- nost Republike Slovenije. 17,00 € Knjiga je nastala v okviru programske skupine Prva e-izdaja. Publikacija je v digitalni obliki P6-0187 (Etnološke raziskave kulturnih znanj, prosto dostopna na https://ebooks.uni-lj.si/ praks in oblik socialnosti), ki jo financira Agencija ZalozbaUL za znanstvenoraziskovalno in inovacijsko dejav-DOI: 10.4312/9789612974510 nost RS (ARIS) iz državnega proračuna. A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 2 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 2 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 A Place of Ruptures and Bonds: The (Re)making of a Dublin Suburb Alina Bezlaj Ljubljana 2024 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 3 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 3 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7 INTRODUCTION 9 Theoretical Overview 12 Structure of the Book 18 Methods in Field Research 21 Conclusion 25 Appendix 26 Dublin under British Rule 29 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW 29 Suburbanisation of the City 32 Urban Decay and Living Conditions 33 The Birth of the Irish Welfare State 36 Working-class Housing in the Time of Independence 39 Urban Planning in Modern Ireland 41 Ballymun’s Beginnings 43 Conclusion 47 Appendix 48 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 4 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 4 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 FORMATION OF COMMUNITY 51 Main Concepts 52 Community 52 Boundaries 55 Meanings of Community in Ballymun 56 Outside Boundaries of Place and Community 58 Unity of the Ballymun Community 62 Differentiation and Internal Boundaries 64 Conclusion 67 Appendix 68 Socio-economic Profile of Ballymun 71 COMMUNITY AND LOCAL AUTHORITIES 73 Changes in Governance 74 Changes in Community 76 Relationship with Local Authorities 78 A Changed Community 80 Conclusion 82 SENSING URBAN GENERATION 85 Regeneration of Ballymun 88 Sensory Memory of Heat 90 Different Heating, Different Heat 95 Conclusion 99 Appendix 100 TWO PLACES, TWO MORALITIES 103 Moral Undertones of the “New Ballymun” 104 Reproducing Moral Visions on the Ground 106 The Morality of “Old Ballymun”: Contesting Official Visions 108 Care for People, Care for Place 109 Conclusion 112 FUSED BOUNDARIES BETWEEN SELF, COMMUNITY AND PLACE 115 Attachment to Ballymun 116 Attachment and Temporalities 119 Self, Community and Place 120 The Tearing Out of Ballymun’s Heart 122 Conclusion 126 Appendix 128 CONCLUSION 129 LITERATURE AND SOURCES 135 LIST OF INTERLOCUTORS 155 INDEX 157 POVZETEK 163 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 5 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 5 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 6 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 6 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is above all based on the narratives and experiences of my interlocutors, namely the residents of Ballymun and others involved in the community there. I am thus indebted and immensely grateful to them; for their help, for the stories they shared with me, for the time they took to meet me, for their warmth, and for the kindness they showed me during my visits to the area. Up the Mun! I want to express my thanks in bringing about this book first and foremost to dr. Jaka Repič, who was involved in the project from its very beginnings and remained available for advice and help throughout my research. It was his initiative that started the process of publication of this work. I would like to also acknowledge dr. Steve Coleman for his con- tribution to this work - conversing with him during the time of my fieldwork was instrumental in finding the direction which this book takes. Furthermore, I would like to wholeheartedly thank dr. Ana Sve- tel, dr. Sandi Abram, and Jure Preglau for their invaluable help with the publication process. Finally, the publication of this book is funded by the ARIS research agency and the Department of Ethnology and Cultural An- thropology of Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. I am grateful to both institutions for awarding the funding for the book. 7 Acknowledgements A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 7 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 7 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 8 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 8 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 Introduction Dublin is a city which, as most locals would affirm, is both loved and hated. The town centre on both sides of the River Liffey is a vi- brant meeting point, full of restaurants, shops, pubs and clubs. Par- ticularly so Temple Bar, since its revitalisation at the beginning of the 1990s Dublin’s emerging cultural quarter (Montgomery 1995). Close to Temple Bar are Dublin Castle, the city’s main shopping district on Grafton Street, and Trinity College. East of the Dublin central business district is the area known as Docklands, once char- acterised by social deprivation and material decay (Moore 2002), and today a vibrant area full of new and luxurious apartment com- plexes and the headquarters of various companies, many of them foreign. Tourists, easily distinguished from the locals and expats who are hurrying to work in the offices or service sector, crowd on the streets. Students, both foreign and Irish, fill up the Asian, 9 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 9 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 9 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 Mexican, and Italian restaurants. It is a city that buzzes with eco- nomic activity and growth. Still, the many homeless people on the streets reflect the linger- ing poverty, and are a reminder that Dublin has been facing a housing crisis for at least the last few centuries. Drug abuse is common and hap- pens in public, and the soup kitchens that are set up daily around the city demonstrate the extent of the deprivation that is still present here. With property prices skyrocketing, many people find it hard to find af- fordable housing close the city centre. Buses, trams and trains connect the various near and far suburbs with the centre. These suburbs stretch to the south, north and west of the city, with rows of often monoto- nous red-brick low-rise houses unfolding on each side of the road, and the streets increasingly emptier and quieter as you move further from the inner city, as the number of pubs and restaurants decreases. Much of what Dublin is today is relatively new, a consequence of the period of unprecedented economic growth that started in the 1990s, known as the Celtic Tiger (see e.g. Ó Riain 2014). Up until just a decade earlier, the 1980s, long-term economic stagnation had result- ed in a high level of unemployment and in derelict and decaying urban sites in Dublin. The presence of international companies in search of countries with low-tax regimes – such as Ireland offered (MacLaran and Kelly 2014b: 25) – along with urban renewal and office building projects (Ó Riain 2014; MacLaran and Kelly 2014b), as well as rising immigration to a country which had traditionally been an exporter of labour (Fahey and Fanning 2010), are all characteristic of Dublin in the last few decades, and a consequence of its sudden and recent eco- nomic development. It is a tangibly neoliberal city (see Massey 2007), and as the Irish government oriented itself to the pursuit of neoliberal policies, this turn resulted in a transformation of the functioning of local authorities and the urban planning of which they were in charge (MacLaran and Kelly 2014b). Although polarisation between highly skilled information workers on the one hand and low wage service in- dustry workers on the other had already increased in the 1960s as a re- sult of economic restructuring (Drudy and Punch 2000; Sassen 1991), it further deepened in the 1990s. Affluence and poverty in the city, argues Massey (2007), have long been intimately linked. These inequalities also became spatially articulated in Dublin (Pratschke 2005; cf. Massey 2007), although this is not a new oc- currence, as the city has been becoming increasingly spatially segre- gated for over a century. The divisions between working class areas and those primarily inhabited by white-collar workers have by now been firmly etched into the materiality of the city (Brady 2016), and 10 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 10 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 10 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 people’s cognitive maps of Dublin are today in line with the social structuring of place. I became interested in the spatial articulation of disparities in Dublin soon after I had first moved there in mid-September 2021. Upon my relocation, I found accommodation in the northern part of the city, in a neighbourhood called Glasnevin. Living just near the boundary between Glasnevin and a suburb called Ballymun, I was at first often unsure how to explain to people the location of my new abode. I would describe it either as “it’s north Glasnevin” or “it’s just off the Ballymun road, just at the beginning of the road”. Coming from Ljubljana, a town that is much less spatially polarised than Dub- lin, the reactions I would encounter to these two different descrip- tions were intriguing. When I located my home as part of Glasnevin, people would approvingly tell me that this was a good neighbour- hood and asked if I had already visited the botanic gardens. When I mentioned Ballymun [Figure 1], instead, the reaction was quite the opposite. Conspiratorially lowering their voice, people would tell me that this was a “rough” area, and I should be careful walking around. In the next few months of living in the city I also learned, through conversing with various others who lived there, to associate parts of the city with high- or middle-class residents and high-end services, and other parts with working-class people, often suffering from high rates of crime and drug use. I quickly came to associate the southern areas, particularly the south-east of the city, with high socio-economic status, whereas the northside, particularly north-west, with famously working-class and “rough”. As I became more and more familiar with the socio-spatial pat- terning of the city, I also became more and more aware of the notion of Ballymun in the imagery of Dubliners. Its name was usually and imme- diately associated with the seven idiosyncratic, 15-storey high towers that used to stand there. Presented in Irish cinema as the prototypical Dublin ghetto (for example, in the classic Irish film Into the West from 1992, or Roddy Doyle’s four-part television series Family from 1994), Ballymun is “invariably reduced /…/ to ‘consistently negative’ image- ry” (Free 2007: 60). Becoming increasingly familiar with this negative reputation of the place and with the way it was discursively constructed from the outside, I also became more interested in the place itself – in the way it was built, how it fit into the wider context and history of the city in which it stands, and the regeneration process it went through. However, by becoming more acquainted with people from Ballymun what started to intrigue me most was the way the residents were mak- ing and shaping the place themselves, narrating and memorialising it, 11 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 11 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 11 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 feeling and engaging in it. The “making of place” of Ballymun is thus what I became intrigued by, and what I will explore further in this book, as it also became the focus of my fieldwork research. To study “the making of place” in Ballymun is particularly in- teresting for several reasons. First, at the turn of the millennium the area has undergone a process of urban regeneration, one that has de- molished and reshaped much of its previous materiality. Second, the regeneration process was conducted not only to transform the physi- cal aspects of the area, but also with the clear underlying intention to transform its residents into “moral” and “good” citizens (Boyle 2005; Boyle and Rogerson 2006). Third, Ballymun has a historically strong community, known for its resistance to the visions of the local author- ity on the one hand, and its internal solidarity on the other (Boyle 2005; Boyle and Rogerson 2006; Power 1997). As the topic of place- making lies at the heart of this book, some theoretical consideration of place is due first, and thus follows in the next section. THEORETICAL OVERVIEW In the 1990s, scholars in anthropology and the wider social sciences be- came increasingly interested in topics of space and place. The origins of this turn, known as the spatial turn (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 1; Bachman-Medick 2016: 211-244), reach back to the 1970s and en- compass the works of French social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel De Certeau, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Fou- cault and Henri Lefèbvre (Low 2017: 11-32). The increased scholarly interest of the social sciences in space and place in these decades re- placed the previous hegemony of the analytical concept of time (Soja 1989), with its focus on progress and development. In the context of a globalised world with its increased flows of information, capital and people, the previous analytical lens of time and history, separated from space, was no longer suitable to offer an understanding of the “global synchronicities and the spatial political entanglements of the First and Third Worlds” (Bachmann-Medick 2016: 213). As topics of place and space came into the focus of anthropol- ogy, space was no longer treated as a neutral and passive container of social action (Hubbard and Kitchin 2011: 4), or as a background for culture (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 1), but rather as an impor- tant social category in its own right and with its own social conse- quences. This new research on spatial topics primarily stemmed from 12 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 12 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 12 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 three anthropological traditions: materialist/Marxist approaches to place, emphasising the history and political economy of the built en- vironment; social constructionist approaches, encompassing social in- teractions, symbols and language; and phenomenological approaches, focusing on lived experience, embodiment and affectivity (Low 2017). Though place is often used interchangeably in anthropologi- cal research with the concept of space (Baskar 2013: 31), there have been many attempts to distinguish them. Space in anthropology is most commonly understood as a fact of life, a primary “pre-given me- dium” or terrain (Casey 1996: 14), while place is the space or location which is invested with meaning (Cresswell 2004: 10). While such an understanding conceives space as neutral and passive and always-al- ready-there, alternative accounts offer alternative conceptualisations. Low, for instance, underlines the cultural aspects of space and defines it as that which is “produced by bodies and groups of people, as well as historical and political forces” (2017: 32), referring primarily to its materiality and the built environment. Places, on the other hand, she construes as spaces that are inhabited and appropriated through investment of meanings and feelings. Consideration of space (that is, the generalised, the global) as that which is prior to place (that is, the particular, the local) was then challenged by Casey (1997), who argues for the primacy of experience (of local knowledge) and thus of place. He thus turns around the general conception of terms and construes place as that which is general and space as that which is particular and derived from place. His conceptualisation was criticised by Harvey (2009), who finds in Casey a separation between the categories of time and (absolute) space. Instead, using a Marxist dialectical argument, Harvey stresses the necessity of their union, achieved in the concept of “relational space”, where space is a process, internalising past and future events. From a position similar to this, Merrifield (1993) at- tempts to breach the divisions that were created between the concepts of space and place and calls for their dialectical union. He argues that the global (space) grounds itself in the local (place), just as the local (place) engenders the global (space). Places, understood within the framework of the spatial turn, are thus produced, constructed and experienced (Low 2017), they are continuously constituted through social action, while at the same time providing a template for that action as well as “conditions of possibil- ity for creative social practice” (Cresswell 2004: 39). Places are conse- quently products of action while they at the same time also structure action (Löw 2008: 28). As such, they are also “marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence” (Cresswell 2004: 13 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 13 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 13 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 39). When looked at from this perspective, the concept of place shifts from a territorial to a relational one (Bachmann-Medick 2016: 216); places are about “relationships, about the placing of peoples, materials, images, and the systems of difference that they perform […] [but] also about proximities, about the bodily copresence of people who happen to be in that place at that time, doing activities together” (Sheller and Urry 2006: 214). While places are thus made through shifting and fleeting rela- tionships of material bodies and non-material forces, they are at the same time also enmeshed in “economic, political and cultural social relations, each full of power and with internal structures of domina- tion and subordination, stretched out over the planet at every differ- ent level” (Massey 1994: 154). These relationships of interconnected places are infused with power relations, creating hierarchies and dif- ferentiations between places (Massey 2009). Within this theoretical prism, the isomorphism between culture and place as well as between identities and place that rests on ideas of places as bounded and dis- connected starts to be questioned (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) – the associations between a certain place, a certain people and a certain culture are an historical and social construction, and they need to be understood as such. Instead of treating them as natural facts, an explo- ration of “the intertwined processes of place making and people mak- ing” is needed within the wider field of power relations (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 4). The numerous ways of interpreting the difference between space and place, the multiple definitions of the concepts and the va- riety of approaches taken in the study of this subject matter are also translated into issues of place-making. While the term often appears in anthropological and ethnographic texts, it is used variably and “under- stood in different ways” (Karge 2018: 2010). It was even argued that – since entering into the discourses of a variety of disciplines – the term has “lost any clear conceptual contours it may have had” (Roberts, Parker and Steadman 2017: 521). The concept of place-making found its way into research and studies on numerous topics: urban gardens and agriculture (Karge 2018; Tornaghi 2014), environmental steward- ship (Murphy, Enqvist and Tengö 2019; Sen and Nagdendra 2020), activism and protests (Buser et al. 2013; Ghaziani 2021), conflict and peacebuilding (Svašek and Komarova 2018; McEvoy-Levy 2012), art and culture (Rembeza 2016; Gadwa Nicodemus 2014), indigenous peoples (Medina 1999; Myers 2000; McGaw, Pieries and Potter 2011; Nejad, Walker and Newhouse 2019), migrants and diasporas (Harney 2006; Palmberger 2022; Kaplan 2018) and more. Place-making is thus 14 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 14 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 14 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 a concept used extensively in the social sciences (Akbar and Edelenbos 2021; Serin 2018). Moreover, while here I only mentioned those au- thors who explicitly apply the concept of place-making in their studies, there is an even larger quantity of studies focusing on the practices of place-making without employing the concept explicitly. Despite – or perhaps precisely because of – such a wide usage of the term of place-making in multiple disciplines, there is no consensus about what the term refers to, except perhaps in that it encompasses those processes which transform space into place (Low 2017; Motta and Fatah gen Schieck 2016). Aucoin thus writes: “Those cultural activities in which people engage in order to render spaces meaning- ful, whether these spaces are built, worked over, lived in, or part of a space imaginary, are place-making practices” (2017: 397). However, definitions widely differ and sometimes oppose each other. Chaudhuri (2017: 2) defines place-making as composed of those “social processes through which various events, subjective place-based attachments and physical experiences are discursively linked to create a shared sense of place-identity”. Beza and Hernandez-Garcia (2018: 193) particularly stress the aspect of community in place-making, stating that “place- making is a socio-political and geo-specific community engagement process where value and meaning of a setting are used as a platform to achieve positive public space related outcomes”. In contrast, Trigg (2012) uses the concept to refer to more personalised remembrances and imaginings of place. Little unity can be found in these approaches, definitions and accounts of place-making, with some authors stressing the individual experience of it, others the community and cultural practices, and still others the role of urban designers and architects. Indeed, in the defini- tions taken from various academic disciplines the term place-making is often understood very differently, with occasionally even conflicting meanings ascribed to it. In general, they seem to differ in two main areas – in their understanding of what place-making practices are, and in their ideas about (and consequent focus on) who the primary agent of place-making is (or should be). Studying place in a non-essentialised manner, as something practiced and performed continuously and as constituted through “re- iterative social practice” (Cresswell 2004: 39), orients the attention of the researchers on those practices through which place is constituted. Most of the studies of place-making approach the concept from a so- cial constructivist or phenomenological approach. As such, the prac- tices encompassed under the term place-making – even if implicitly, without using the term as such – have generally led to studies of the 15 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 15 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 15 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 following: movement and dwelling (e.g. in Komarova 2018; Har- ney 2006; Christensen and Mikkelsen 2013), pilgrimage (Tsimouris 2016), rituals and festivals (Schulte-Droesch 2018; Wynn and Yetis- Bayraktar 2016; Robertson 1991), narrating, storying (Palemberger 2022; Myers 2000), naming (Oliveira 2009; Nejad, Walker and Ne- whouse 2019), imagining (Trigg 2012; Riaño-Alcalá 2002), feeling and sensing places (Navaro-Yashin 2012; Fennell 2011; Feld 1996), remembering and commemorating events in places (Dziuban 2014; de Young 2018), and sociality (Motta and Fatah gen Schieck 2016; Fried- mann 2010). Place-making is sometimes also studied in a literal sense of shaping and changing the material environment purposefully by in- vesting it with meaning, such as through setting monuments (Harney 2006), temples and shrines (Mazumdar and Mazumdar 2009; Katić 2016), opening ethnic shops and restaurants (Kaplan 2018), paint- ing graffiti (McEvoy-Levy 2012), and so on. Whereas place-making in anthropological studies is primarily related to practices of imagining and sensory, bodily, linguistic, and political practices of constructing meaningful locations (Low 2017), its connotations differ when looked at from within the disciplines of urban design, planning and architec- ture, where the focus is turned towards the material components of places. Place-making in these disciplines is understood primarily as a participative and community-oriented practice of creating urban landscapes that foster place attachment and sense of belonging (Al- Kodmany 2013; Røe 2014), and includes activities such as “building and tearing buildings down, cultivating the land and planting gardens /…/ making neighbourhoods and mowing lawns, taking over build- ings and understanding cities” (Schneekloth and Shibley 1995: 1). Yet place-making is also a process that is enacted by a multiplic- ity of different agents. As summarised by Akbar and Edelenbos, place- making may also take on different meanings depending on who the agent is: For urban designers and governments, place-making is often seen as the physical change of a place as an end-product of a project. The beautification of public spaces with iconic architecture, monumental artworks, sculptures and other artistic expressions, has been a critical factor in creating images of and identity for cities, villages and towns wanting to profile themselves. From the practitioners’ perspectives or self-funded initiatives, such as volunteers and non-profit organi- zations, place-making is a process of adding value and meaning to the public realm through community-based revitalization projects rooted in local values, history, culture, and the natural environment. Lastly, place-making is usually a construct of places or experiences that the communities can display and offer from the local community perspectives. (2021: 3) 16 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 16 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 16 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 Consequently, place-making is a process that is performed in multiple different ways and by an array of people and institutions, often with differing amounts of power and with conflicting interests (Rodman 1992). It is a process that takes place at various different levels, and is ongoing, with place continuously being produced, con- structed and enacted: as one is always emplaced, “place-making [is] a universal and constant human activity (and/or outcome of human practice)” (Pink 2008: 179). As mentioned before, place-making within anthropologi- cal research has been particularly productive in the area of the social construction of place. However, if taken to exclusively encompass the experiential and social constructionist aspects of the process, the con- cept, I fear, is at risk of separating much of the social practice from the materiality with which it is inextricably linked (see Lefebvre 1991), as well as separating it from the history which is inscribed into it (see Harvey 2009). Encompassing within the framework of place-making the dialectics of place construction and space production, is, I believe, a more secure way to unite within the concept the physical, social and mental aspects of space/place (see Lefebvre 1991). As Merrifield ar- gues: “If we are to understand place construction and transformation” – which place-making, as we have seen, attempts to do – “we must simultaneously capture how they [the realms of place and space] are in fact forged together in a dialectical unity” (1993: 520). There have been various attempts to analytically relate the dif- ferent ways and levels at which place is being made. Such accounts have sought to unite in discussions of place-making the material production of places with existential/phenomenological aspects of the experience of places and their social construction, interrelating it with discus- sions on power, governance and control that shape both places and the people who inhabit and create them (Low 2017). For Svašek and Komarova, place-making thus ranges from “the smallest scale of indi- vidual intimate sensorial experience to the large scale of political ge- ographies of nation and state” (Svašek and Komarova 2018: 4). Lems also argues for an approach to place-making that “accommodates both – the larger structures that attempt to order and regulate places, and the walkers of the everyday, who constantly appropriate and challenge these efforts” (2018: 34). It is such a comprehensive understanding of place-making, en- compassing both the everyday practices of the inhabitants of a place and the top-down forces which shape that place, that I will employ in my study of Ballymun. In my research, I will focus primarily on various aspects of place-making through everyday practices and dwelling in 17 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 17 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 17 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 places. I will be primarily concerned with the concepts of community, boundaries, governance, senses and transformation, affectivity, anima- tion of place and place reciprocity, memory, nostalgia, and discourse, and will use these concepts as lenses through which to explore the ways in which the place in Ballymun is experienced and lived. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK Writing about Ballymun is not an easy task. An immense number of scholarly and newspaper articles have already been written about it, mostly focusing on substance abuse, crime and the decline of the infamous Ballymun housing estate. A great deal has been said about Ballymun as well. As is expressed in the unpublished Oral History of Ballymun:1 Ballymun is written about all the time. The Corporation, the Dept. of Social Welfare or the Gardaí record information about people in Bal- lymun as ‘cases’: owing so much rent, entitled to specific payments, with or without record. RTÉ and the national press report stories about Ballymun: building and regeneration, suicide and drug abuse. Artists from U22 to Roddy Doyle use Ballymun as a symbol. In these records, which form the bulk of the written record of Ballymun’s his- tory, the voices of ordinary people in Ballymun appear rarely, edited to suit, fictionalised and paraphrased. (Ballymun Oral History Project, n.d.: 5, emphasis mine) It is for this reason that I wanted to give a voice to people them- selves: to include, whenever possible, direct quotations of the indi- viduals I talked to. It is for the same reason that I find it important to focus on the side of the Ballymun’s story that its residents found most important and were most willing to talk about: its positives – the com- munity and the love they feel for the place. The purpose of the following work is thus to describe and ana- lyse past and present place-making in Ballymun. The work interrelates 1 The Ballymun Oral History Project was a project of collecting oral histories from the local community, sponsored by Ballymun Regeneration Limited between September 2000 and September 2001. The resulting text was never published, however, as accord- ing to the documentary The 4th Act (2018), the officials did not like the direction the project had taken. 2 In their song “Running to Stand Still”, about heroin addiction, U2 refer to Ballymun’s seven towers: “Sweet the sin, bitter the taste in my mouth / I see seven towers, but I only see one way out / You gotta cry without weeping, talk without speaking / Scream with- out raising your voice”. 18 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 18 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 18 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 crucial moments of the history of place, beginning with the construc- tion and formation of both a town and community in Ballymun in the late 1960s. Starting as a model estate for ideal (“model”) social ten- ants, the area quickly declined economically and socially and became one of the most undesirable places to live in. On the other hand, the local residents were well-organised and developed strong community solidarity. Beginning in the 1998, the estate went through a more than a decade-long regeneration process, initiated by Dublin City Council, earlier known as the Dublin Corporation (LAP – Part 1 2017: 1). In the process, its notorious high-rise architecture was demolished and replaced by low-rise buildings. It was not just the physical aspects of the area that underwent a regeneration, as at the same time its econom- ic, social and cultural counterparts also changed (Kintrea and Muir 2009; Boyle and Rogerson 2006). While the success of the urban and social regeneration projects are contentious, they do present an inter- esting case of the (attempted) transformation of a particular environ- ment and its community. It is this interrelation between the material environment of Ballymun and the residents’ agency in it that will be in the focus of this book. Taking the spatial turn in anthropology as a starting point of my research, I will address the way Ballymun was cre- ated in the 1960s, what forces have shaped and transformed it since, and how it is being produced and constructed today. The structure of the book will therefore follow a chronological order, with each chapter focusing on the main topics that informed par- ticular periods. The first chapter on the history of Ballymun begins with the 12th century and ends in the late 1960s when the construction of the Ballymun estate was finished. The second chapter on community and its activism is concerned primarily with the 1970s and 1980s, when the formation of the community began. The third chapter on the topic of governance is related to the period from the 1980s on. The chapter on regeneration and sensing place is concerned with the changing environ- ment at the turn of the century and with a comparison of sensing place between the years before regeneration and the time of my fieldwork. The fifth chapter then builds on the findings of the fourth, and presents two different frameworks of morality which coexist, overlap and con- test one another in Ballymun. The last chapter on people-place bonds is primarily concerned with the affective experiences of people with regard to this place, and encompasses the time period around the eco- nomic crisis in 2008 and at the time of my fieldwork, that is, in 2022. More specifically, in the first chapter I look at the ways urban place was produced through the interrelation of political and econo- mic forces on local and global levels. As Ballymun’s iconic seven towers 19 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 19 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 19 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 were named after Irish revolutionaries [Figure 2], I felt the appropri- ate starting point for the historical overview was the British colonisa- tion of Ireland. From there on, I follow the entanglement of forces and decisions that brought about the building of Ballymun in the 1960s. Throughout this, I give an overview of the development of social poli- cies in Ireland, of suburbanisation and the perpetual housing crisis, and present the symbolic value of Ballymun within that context. In the second chapter, I explore the way Ballymun became pop- ulated, and the ways it was experienced by its residents as a bounded entity, separated from its surroundings. I look at how spatial bounda- ries informed the boundaries of sociality in the area in the formation of a local community. By looking at the history of the place and the events from the arrival of the first tenants at the end of the 1960s up until the late 1980s, the transformation of the community’s bounda- ries throughout these years is put at the centre of my attention. The third chapter continues with the focus on urban commu- nity, yet rather than with its boundaries it is concerned with the rela- tionship of the Ballymun community with the local Dublin authori- ties and the ways the community has since the 1980s, with the neolib- eralisation of Ireland, slowly become co-opted into functioning as a “technique of government”. The fourth chapter proceeds with explicating the ways that the global neoliberalist shift has been reflected in Ballymun. Through the practices of heating and sensory experiences of heat, I demonstrate how the economic and social welfare transformations that have ac- companied this shift were the driving forces behind the regeneration programme at the turn of the century, and how these economic chang- es were bodily and sensorially experienced by the residents within their homes. In the fifth chapter I continue to focus on the way regeneration has changed the place and community, and attempt to further build on the findings of previous chapter on the ways in which regeneration has attempted to change the subjectivities of the residents. I take this into account when making the argument that two contesting frame- works of morality exist in Ballymun, one imposed by the regeneration through the creation of New Ballymun, and one drawn by residents from their memory-place of Old Ballymun. In the sixth chapter, I am concerned with the affective relations of the residents to their sense of place in post-regeneration Ballymun. I show how Ballymun is affectively charged and experienced by its resi- dents, and how such affective bonds blur the lines between the selves of the residents and the place. As an example of a particularly potent 20 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 20 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 20 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 place, I describe an empty field where a shopping centre used to stand before regeneration. I argue that strong affective bonds between peo- ple and place engender the personhood of a place, and the emplace- ment of selves. In the conclusion, I connect and tie the discussions on the vari- ous aspects of place-making by bringing out a common theme that runs through all the chapters: memory, and in particular, nostalgia. METHODS IN FIELD RESEARCH Making place is not only the topic of this research, as the research itself has been part of a process of place-making that I have been engaged in. I experienced, upon my arrival to Dublin, a process of developing a sense of the place. Roaming the streets and taking in the sights and at- mospheres, I was slowly building my knowledge of the place. I was be- coming acquainted with the names of the streets and the various areas, as well as the values ascribed to them. I felt a dislike for the city, and felt uncomfortable living there. I felt that it was not a friendly place, as with only few benches scattered around the centre sitting down to spend time in public felt impossible, and so I was forced to keep mov- ing. Indeed, resting or sitting down only seemed to be possible if you paid for the privilege in a café, pub, or restaurant. Crossing a road at a traffic light would usually take longer than I was accustomed to in Slovenia, and the green light to let pedestrians cross would only stay on for a very short amount a time. I felt it was a city made for cars, and that the public transport that was available was expensive, slow, and unreliable, with the suburbs of Dublin stretching in all directions and at great distances from the centre, or “the town”, as it is often referred to. My interest in the way the place was structured, lived and evaluated was thus not accidental, but was an attempt to gain knowledge and at least some sense of control when I felt lost in it. The suburban calm of where I lived felt much more comfortable and the topography of it easier to grasp than the centre of Dublin itself. While my interest in Ballymun was soon sparked through con- versations with Dubliners, it took quite some time for me to actually visit the area. Though I lived very close to Ballymun, it was in the op- posite direction to the city centre from where I was staying. Having no stores, cafés or entertainment places where better than those of the inner city, I simply had no reason to head to Ballymun. It was only in December 2021, i.e. three months after my arrival in Dublin, that for 21 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 21 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 21 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 the first time, when reaching the Ballymun Road, I decided to turn north and not south as usual, and thus to walk away from the city cen- tre. After about 20 minutes of walking by the six-lane road, the image of two tall, grey and green buildings on each side of the road appeared in front of me – aptly termed the Gateway [Figure 3] – and immedi- ately I felt that I had entered the area known as Ballymun. Ballymun felt different from the rest of Dublin that I knew. There seemed to be fewer of the red and brown brick houses that line the streets in many other areas, and instead the buildings seemed grey- er then elsewhere. They were also taller than in most of the suburbs, especially so around the main road, where high housing complexes a few stories high gave me a feeling of familiarity and home. Empty and rather sad green spaces, however, were to be found on each side of the main road [Figure 4], and to a certain extent these conflicted with the feeling of comfort I was getting from the place. Nevertheless, compared to the rest of Dublin, Ballymun felt much more like home. Choosing Ballymun as a fieldwork site and research topic was thus no accident – it was my way of making a place I could feel comfortable in, in a city which I struggled to grasp and understand. It was my way of making a home. I started conducting fieldwork in Ballymun at the end of Jan- uary 2022 and finished it at the end of July 2022. Using the ethno- graphic method of participant observation, I joined in local events and activities, recording my experiences in a fieldwork diary and tak- ing photographs and videos. I joined a group called the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU), a supranational tenants’ organisation, and joined their regular “door-knocking” activities around the area to recruit new members and discuss local issues. I participated in the formation of the new branch of CATU operating in the areas of Bally- mun and Finglas, and volunteered to take a chair on the Committee in the area of recruitment. I participated regularly in gardening activities in the Muck and Magic Community Garden, and took part in many conversations while gardening and during the tea-time we had after the work was done. I took part in a four-week boxing class, organised by the Child and Family Resource Centre in Ballymun, and attended community events in the area. I was a regular in the local Rediscovery centre café and in the Ballymun library, took walks in parks and on the streets in the area, did my grocery shopping there, visited the exhibi- tions and theatre at Axis cultural centre, and rested on the benches in the Ballymun plaza. I participated in the Better Ballymun festival, drank with friends in their “gaffs” (homes), took part in various com- munity celebration events in the area [Figure 5] [Figure 6], joined a 22 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 22 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 22 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 vigil for a woman murdered in Ballymun at the plaza, witnessed the private rehearsal of a Ballymun band and joined the celebration of the 22nd anniversary of Axis, when the band performed in public. I walked, cycled, was driven in a car, or used public transport to move around the area. Throughout the whole time, I was thus engaging in conversa- tions with people I met in Ballymun at various occasions and at various places. As part of my fieldwork, I conducted semi-structured and non- structured interviews with individuals who were in some way involved in Ballymun – either by living in the area or being involved in the com- munity life there. I conducted 22 interviews, many of them over one or two hours long. I conducted the interviews orally in cafés or pubs, while walking around the place, sitting on benches, at interlocutors’ workplaces or in their homes. On the insistence of the interlocutors, I also conducted two interviews with three interlocutors via video-calls and one via email. As some of the interviews were conducted with more than one person at once, I gathered accounts from 31 interlocu- tors. Of these, one interlocutor was a local councillor, and two were representatives of the Dublin City Council area office. I attempted to gain a sample of interlocutors with different ages, gender and educa- tion levels, as well as varying with regard to how long they had lived in the neighbourhood (“long-term” and “new” residents). Altogether I interviewed 17 men and 14 women, aged from 18 to 83. In addi- tion, I also refer twice within the text to accounts from shorter non- recorded conversations with friends and acquaintances from the area with whom I did not conduct formal, in-depth interviews, but whose accounts provided a valuable insight into their perception of Ballymun and their practices of place-making. In addition to the interviews with people living or working in Ballymun, I was also engaging in conversations with people who were in some way related to the area but were not a part of it. I had many talks with various people whose family had lived in Ballymun in the past, people who themselves had once lived there and remember grow- ing up there, and people who had simply heard stories about the place, both good and bad. In order to gather a diverse sample of interlocutors, I used vari- ous different channels to recruit them: asking people from my volun- teering groups for interviews, asking friends outside of Ballymun for any contacts who were “Ballymuners”, asking people I met at commu- nity events, as well as using social media to get in contact with poten- tial interlocutors. Despite such efforts, most of my interlocutors were long-term residents who were and are to a certain degree involved and 23 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 23 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 23 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 engaged in the community and local activities. As this book is strongly concerned with the history of Ballymun, they were the people who were also able to share their experiences not only of everyday life in Ballymun today, but also of that in the past. The story of place that I will be telling in the following chapters is thus primarily a story of a group of people who have lived in the area for many years, who have experienced Ballymun before and after its regeneration, and are mostly at least partly active in the community groups or social clubs in the area. While I did conduct several interviews with newer residents, their stories are not included in this book to the same degree, as this text is mainly concerned with the roots of contemporary Ballymun, and thus with its relation to the past. It should be noted, however, that I lacked access to residents who were less active and less engaged in community practices, whose voices are less present and less recognisable in the public space than those of more active community members. While the story of the ac- tive members dominates in the community, it was through my engage- ment in the door-knocking with CATU and chatting to strangers that I came to realise the limitations of the perspective of the group that represents the core of my interlocutors. Their narrative is sometimes also opposed and contested by other voices who may be quieter, less powerful, or even deliberately silenced. In addition to conducting fieldwork, I also conducted archival research, accessing the community archive at the Ballymun Library, the National Archives of Ireland and the Architectural Archive, as well as online archives containing photographic and video materials and newspaper articles on Ballymun. I read stories and novels written by Ballymuners on their experience of living in the area (Ballymun Tales by Anthony O’Malley, 2013; The Mun: Growing up in Bally- mun by Lynn Connolly, 2006); parts of the unpublished book The Oral History of Ballymun (n.d.), bringing together oral histories of its residents; and plays written about Ballymun (The Ballymun Trilogy by Dermot Bolger, 2010). I watched film and television series filmed (partly) in Ballymun (The Commitments, 1991; Into the West, 1992; Family, 1994; Adam and Paul, 2004), as well as documentaries about Ballymun (The 4th Act, 2018; RTÉ Investigates Crack and the Com- munity, 2021), listened to music made by Ballymuners (Glen Han- sard; Dextra; Ger Kellet) and music that is about Ballymun (U2’s “Running to Stand Still”). I studied academic books, journal articles and news stories on the construction of Ballymun, on its decline, its regeneration and its present issues. As I was trying to make sense of the experiences that people in the area were talking about, I was 24 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 24 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 24 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 delving in the history of the construction of Ballymun. To be able to contextualise the way the place was produced, however, I also felt the need to embed it in its wider context – as part of Dublin and Ireland – and to interweave the historical overview of the development of the city with that of Ballymun as one of its newer suburbs. Hence, I also examined historical, political, social and economic studies on Bally- mun, Dublin, and Ireland. CONCLUSION Understanding Ballymun, its edge condition and marginalisation, means understanding its relation to the city and the state. This re- quires placing Ballymun within the wider processes that evolved in the (history of the) city, as well as in the (history of the) state. Bal- lymun as a place has always been embedded in a set of relations with other places (Massey 2009), and is, as an always transmutable event (Cresswell 2004: 39), a product, continuously shaped by, among oth- er things, the “market forces, the socio-political context of the nation and region, and government policy (at both the national and local lev- els)” (Logan and Swanstorm 2005: 28). As Ballymun is a part of Dub- lin, it is important to address the social and economic changes in the city as well, and the relation of the city to other places. The economic restructuring that began around the world in the 1960s (Sassen 1991: 3) brought many cities to the centre of economic flows in the vari- ous networks of the global economy. Characterised as an “emergent market” in a global cluster of world cities (Taylor 2004: 123), Dublin was no exception to this trend. Since the 1990s, it has also become an important participant in the competition for the finite international investment capital (Moore 2004), and as such it “functions strongly as the control centre of the economy and of virtually all facets of Irish economic and social life” (Goodbody Economic Consultants 2000: 3). As an “emergent market” in the global economy, Dublin closely resembles other “world cities” shaped by market flows. Yet it is also unique insofar as each place accumulates specific histories and is a lo- cus of a “distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations” (Massey 1994: 156). To outline the origins of Ballymun, it is necessary to set it with- in the context of the mutable urban environment of Dublin. Placed within a web of changing power structures within Ireland, and glob- al political and economic trends, it is necessary to study Ballymun 25 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 25 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 25 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 in its relation to the wider local, national and global settings and historical currents. Urbanisation, suburbanisation, inner-city tene- ments and slum clearances, social housing policies and anti-urban attitudes, all make up part of the interwoven and complex strands and processes that ultimately led to the Ballymun estate’s construc- tion. While none of these processes or policies are unique to Dublin (see e.g. LeGates and Stout 2016), they do, however, follow a specific trajectory informed by Ireland’s specific (colonial) history. As Dub- lin used to be an internal colony within the British Empire, with its economic development being oriented towards producing agricul- tural products for its larger neighbouring island (Walsh 1980), this in turn tangibly shaped the city’s topography (Norris 2016; Hanna 2013; Kincaid 2006). APPENDIX Figure 1: Map of Dublin and location of Ballymun. 26 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 26 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 26 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:30 Figure 2: The seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation drawn on the wall of a youth club in Ballymun. They are associated with the seven towers of Ballymun, built 50 years after the 1916 Rising. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 4/3/2022. Figure 3: The Gateway complex – what I always perceived to be an ‘entrance’ to Ballymun. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 23/2/2022. 27 Introduction A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 27 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 27 29. 11. 2024 11:09:31 29. 11. 2024 11:09:31 Figure 4: High grey buildings and green spaces along the main Ballymun road. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 19/5/2022. Figure 5: Community event “Meet your neighbours” at Setanta GAA Club. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 6/5/2022. Figure 6: A gathering at “Community celebration event” at Muck and Magic Community Garden with free meals, sponsored by local SuperValu. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 1/7/2022. 28 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 28 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 28 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 Historical Overview DUBLIN UNDER BRITISH RULE The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in the 12th century, along with its subsequent segregation and land distribution policies, resulted in strong ethnonationalist inequalities. These later evolved into religious inequalities, that is, inequalities between the Protestant, often land- owning class, and the mostly tenant class of Catholics. The control over Ireland by the Crown was consolidated with planter colonialism and Cromwell’s violent undertaking of land dispossession and redistribu- tion in Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries (Solar 2015; Boran 2000). This resulted in the land being owned by the few privileged landlords – by 1770, only about 5% of land was left in the hands of Irish Catho- lics (Lyndon 1998) and by the 19th century only about 8,000 to 10,000 people were landowners in a population of 5.4 million. Most of the 29 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 29 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 29 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 landlords were of Protestant, i.e. Anglo-Irish background (Dooley 2000: 3), and as many of these were absentee landlords (Dooley 2000: 3; McGowan 2017: 88) a system of middlemen was created, which sup- ported division of land and its sub-letting to smaller farmers (Dooley 2000; Norris 2016: 48). In the late 17th century, Dublin began to prosper. Trade and commerce in the city were being revived (Killeen 2010), its port be- came the leading one on the island (Kilfeather 2005: 53), and after 300 years of economic stagnation and depression it even became the “sec- ond city of the British Isles” in the late 17th century and through the 18th (Jordan 2010: 252). With the Catholic resistance mostly quelled in the mid-18th century under Cromwell, administration and govern- ment were stabilised, and Dublin became the sole seat of the Irish Parliament – composed only of Protestants – after having previously moved between various towns on the western coast. The 18th century saw a continuation of the rise and expansion of Dublin, along with a boom in building, mostly commissioned by active politicians with seats in the Parliament (Kilfeather 2005: 44-70). Georgian houses for the wealthy were built, roads were widened, and many parks, squares, museums and hospitals were constructed (Boran 2000; Killeen 2010). While much of the construction was taking place on the northside of the town, in 1753 Leinster House was built by Earl of Kildare south of the River Liffey, and fashionable society soon followed him to the south. Consequently, the southside of the city – more specifically the southeast – became established as the fashionable quarter, a status it has maintained to this day (Killeen 2010; Usher 2012). Parliament sit- tings created a social season in Dublin, and the landed gentry started spending winter months there and consequently created more employ- ment opportunities, in areas such as domestic work, sex work, con- struction and so on (Kilfeather 2005: 54), with a number of industries developing to cater to the tastes of the upper classes (Green 1969: in Craft 1970: 306). In this period the population of Dublin also grew rapidly. In the years from 1600 to 1700 it rose from some 10,000 to around 60,000, and by 1830 it stood at approximately 180,000 (Boran 2000). This was a result of the general growth in population throughout the country, as well as of the migrations from rural areas to towns, and particularly to Dublin (Whelan 2008; Ó Gráda 1999). While Dublin became a city of wealth, thriving in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th, this prosperity was not equally distributed (Bo- ran 2000). Throughout the state there was poverty, with at least two serious famines in the first half of the 18th century that caused more 30 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 30 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 30 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 migration to the towns and cities, as well as overseas (Engler and Werner 2015: 1043-4). A series of Penal Laws, introduced from 1691 onwards as a re- sult of Catholic insurgencies (Pašeta 2003: 2), did much to prevent the Catholic population of Ireland from gaining access to the grow- ing wealth on the island. Moreover, in addition to the laws suppress- ing the linguistic and religious practices of the Irish Catholics, there were also laws implemented that prevented the Irish from entering a profession, from studying law or medicine, or sending their children abroad to be educated. Moreover, Catholics were not allowed to buy land or obtain a lease for longer than 31 years, and Catholic property could not be inherited by the oldest son but had to be fragmented and distributed among all the owner’s children equally (Kilfeather 2005: 44-5; Connolly 1992). The population explosion that occurred in Ireland during this time also meant that pressure for land increased, as did agrarian violence up to the end of the 18th century. Despite the loosening of the Penal Laws toward the end of the century, Irish discontent culminated in the failed United Irishmen uprising in 1798 (Pašeta 2003: 14-5). The Irish Rebellion of 1798, though unsuccess- ful, seemed to combine “a nightmare junction of Catholic peasant re- vival and French revolutionary principles” (Killeen 2010: n.p.), and was seized upon by the British as an excuse to abolish the Irish Parlia- ment and form a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. To keep Ireland under control, 1800 saw the passing of the Act of Union, which came into effect on 1 January 1801 (Kilfeather 2005: 58) and abolished the Irish Parliament, transferring Irish representation to Westminster (Pašeta 2003: 16). This had disastrous consequences for Dublin. With the exodus of peers, MPs and their families abandoning the city in favour of Lon- don as a consequence of closing of Parliament, the city went into a decline. Despite this, construction continued on both sides of the Riv- er Liffey even after the Act of Union, the homes of the higher classes were bought by the professional middle classes, such as barristers and doctors (O’Brien 1982), and Dublin maintained its status as a centre of law and medicine, second only to London in the UK. In the post- Union years, while some industries were failing others were peaking due to competition with the British market and other market forces (Dickson 2014; O’Malley 1981), and partial de-industrialisation fol- lowed combined with a shift toward commercial enterprises (Galvan 2017: 3). In the city the consequences of the gradual decline of various trades were visible in rising unemployment, which was already high due to the expanding population (Craft 1970: 307). Social segregation 31 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 31 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 31 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 continued, although with Dublin town at the time still relatively small – contained between the Grand Canal to the north and the Royal Ca- nal to the south – poor and overcrowded areas, where disease was com- mon, remained in close juxtaposition to the wealthier, middle-class areas (Killeen 2010). SUBURBANISATION OF THE CITY The declining public health (O’Brien 1982) in the city and the decay- ing urban environment at the beginning of the 19th century spurred a movement of the middle classes, most of them white-collar workers, to the suburbs (McManus 2018: 15), while the inner-city remained for those who did not have the means to move out (Dickson 2001). With the gradual increase in power of the emergent Catholic mer- chant middle class, the Protestant business elite moved beyond the canals (Galvan 2017:4), where they formed independently governed suburbs, known as townships, and thus no longer paid taxes to the city (Galvan 2017: 4; McManus 2003: 39; McManus 2018: 15). The lack of tax money from the wealthier inhabitants caused a further decline of the inner city, parts of which transformed into overcrowded and disease-ridden slums – the “attics of former artisans were converted into rack-rented housing accommodation” and “houses on formerly fashionable streets” (Ó Gráda 1999: 160), particularly in the northeast part of the town (Galvan 2017: 5), “were converted into tenements” (Ó Gráda 1999: 160). The increasingly developed transportation tech- nology (such as the opening of the first train line in 1834) eased the rising suburban tendencies of the well-to-do parts of the population, particularly towards the southside, which was by now firmly estab- lished as the affluent and fashionable side of town (Galvan 2017: 13). With the Irish Famine in the 1840s, caused by potato blight, Dublin’s population of poor people grew rapidly in the decade from 1841 on, as migrants from rural parts, most affected by the crop fail- ure, sought refuge in the city, where workhouses and soup kitchens were set up. The epidemics and diseases that followed in the over- crowded conditions of Dublin’s slums were responsible for most of the early deaths in that period (Ó Gráda 1999: 165-6). During these years suburbanisation increased, as the middle classes hoped to escape proximity to the increasingly impoverished slums in the inner city (Kilfeather 2005), or sought homes in the autonomous suburbs in order to pay lower taxes (Dickson 2014). This increasing movement 32 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 32 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 32 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 towards the suburbs changed the connotation of suburban living and their value – while suburbs were once considered as places for the less- privileged, who were “outside the protection of the urban walls and the rights which the status of urban citizenship conferred” (McManus 2018: 9), their status gradually changed during the 19th century and they transformed into places where the middle classes aspired to live. The pull of suburban living slowly percolated down to the lower classes as well, and suburban life became the goal of everyone in society (McManus 2018: 15). With the rise of the lower middle classes in the 19th century – those working in the increasingly important transport jobs, public services, retail or insurance and banking sectors – new suburbs, containing modest housing, were being built to the north and west edges of the city (Galvan 2017: 7), and the number of first- class housing developments declined, with a simultaneous increase in the building of second- and third-class housing (Daly 1984). Little new building was being done for the poorer classes (Galvan 2017:7), however, reflecting the low level of industrialisation in Dublin (Daly 1984), and older inner-city buildings were used for their housing (Gal- van 2017: 7). The suburbanisation of the middle classes thus signifi- cantly changed the urban fabric and spatially divided the poor from the rich, who were hitherto living in close proximity to one another (Daly 1984). Older Georgian mansions in the inner-city were being progressively subdivided (Galvan 2017: 7) and sub-let as tenements to the poor (Craft 1970: 309). URBAN DECAY AND LIVING CONDITIONS Tenement dwellings were well established in Dublin even before the Act of Union, and their origins go back as early as the 16th century. In 1798, in the glamour and buzz of Georgian Dublin, a report stated that two thirds of the city’s population belonged to the lower classes, and most of them lived in overcrowded conditions. As the wealthy gentry left Dublin for London after the Act of Union came into force in 1801, the growth of tenements accelerated: the property value of the grand Georgian mansions fell, as dwellings worth some £8,000 in 1791 were worth £2,500 in 1801, and were going for mere £500 in the 1840s (Kearns 1994). As suburbanisation gained speed in the second part of the 19th century, in the post-famine years, and those with money continued to abandon the city in favour of the clean air of the suburbs (McManus 2018: 11, 18; Kearns 1994), entire inner-city 33 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 33 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 districts transformed into tenement slums (Kearns 1994). The term “tenement” refers to multi-family occupancy of a single house (Daly 1984), and in the context of Dublin these were usually old two- to five- storey brick Georgian houses, initially built to house one upper-class family, often unkept and in decaying conditions in the 19th century, that were owned by profiteering landlords who subdivided the houses and rented the units out to many families (Dickson 2014). The houses, which by this time were 100 to 150 years old, were in a state of decay, and any repairs would be expensive, with the owners having neither the means nor the will to make such an investment. While the owners identities were generally kept secret, the buildings mostly belonged to small businessmen or politicians, with some even being members of the Dublin Corporation3 (Kearns 1994). Living conditions in these tenements were inhumane – up to 100 people were crammed into a house, sharing one toilet among them, and with up to 15 or 20 family members sharing a single room (Kearns 1994). Tenements most often deteriorated into slums, as the overcrowding and lack of sanitation caused dire conditions, though not all tenements met this fate (Daly 1984). Slums are defined as ar- eas characterised by “substandard housing and inadequate provision of public utilities (especially water and sanitation), inhabited by poor people in high densities” (Gregory 2009: 688). Uniquely for Dub- lin, slums were not the consequence of industrialisation, but rather of urbanisation and a lack of maintenance of existing housing stock (Rowley 2019: 246). Beyond disease, the slums held other dangers, as fires and collapses, the latter due to their structural weaknesses, were common occurrences (Kearns 1994). Still, most tenement deaths (and there were many), were attributable to disease, due to the deadly com- bination of overcrowding, lack of sanitation and poor diet. Figures from 1920 reveal that infant mortality in the inner-city was five times higher than that of healthy suburbs. Yet contrary to the population trends for Ireland as a whole, where the number of people was decreas- ing in the famine and post-famine years due to death and emigration, the population of Dublin was growing. As such, the competition for housing was high and excessive rents could be charged by the tenement landlords (Kearns 1994). By 1900, one third of Dublin’s population, that is, more than 21,700 families, was living in one room tenement housing (Clear 2018: 157; Matheson 1903: 208), and a report a few 3 Joseph Meade, Lord Mayor of Dublin in the years 1891-1892, was one of the biggest slumlords, acquiring nine Georgian houses on the northside and remodelling them into crammed tenements (Dickson 2014). 34 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 34 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 34 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 decades later (in 1938) determined that 60% of the tenements and cot- tages investigated were unfit for human habitation (Dillon 1945: 14). The Dublin Corporation was relatively powerless in reform- ing the tenements. It was not able to coerce the private landlords into investing in the maintenance of the buildings, and it could not shut them down as this would create large-scale homelessness. At the same time, the Corporation was in a relatively weak financial position, as the main population of Dublin was represented by unskilled labour- ers, while the white-collar workers and those with means had moved to autonomous suburbs, and thus contributed nothing to the tax rev- enues (Dickson 2014). The first housing legislation, directly copied from the earlier British one, was applied in Ireland in 1866 due to a series of epidemics in Dublin, but had little real effect on the urban landscape. A second set of legislation, copied from Britain to clean the London slums, came into effect in Ireland 1875 and attempted to support non-governmental organisations in building working-class housing (Prunty 1998), yet again was largely unsuccessful in the Irish context, where the philanthropic housing sector failed to establish it- self (Norris 2016: 42). Moreover, the dwellings that were being built toward the end of the century were primarily intended for skilled and securely employed members of the working class who could afford the new housing, and they comprised only few of those bound to tene- ment dwellings (Kearns 1994; McManus 2003: 40). As the electoral reforms of the late 19th century (e.g. 1884) ex- tended voting rights within the population to include working class men without property (Acemoglu and Robinson 2000), the agenda of working-class housing entered the city council’s concern. In 1885, the building of municipal social housing began on a significant level. The lobbying for urban social housing continued (Norris 2016: 43), and there was a recognition by the British that the living conditions of the Dublin poor could later become an impetus for violence (Kin- caid 2006). Consequently, the first central government fund was set up in 1908 with the aim to subsidise the construction of homes in the city (Norris 2016: 44). The question of working-class housing became more significant in the year 1913, when a combination of labour un- rest and two tenement collapses created fears for public order, and the provision of decent working-class housing was seen as necessary to keep the peace (McManus 2003: 41-2). Even the Catholic Church, hitherto firmly rooted in the agrarian struggles, became engaged in lobbying for better housing, relating the concepts of morality and decency with suburban living away from the inner-city slums and their lack of respectability (McManus 2003: 42; Rowley 2019: 96-8). 35 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 35 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 A report in 1914 stated that the housing crisis in the city was getting worse, as an extraordinary number of people were living in dwellings unfit for habitation but could not be rehoused due to the lack of avail- able housing stock. The report called for new building schemes, and the recommendation that they be located in the suburbs gave such locations official approval as desirable addresses (McManus 2003: 42- 3; Prunty 1998). Yet with the First World War, followed by the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War, any large-scale improvement of the working-class housing situation was postponed (Kearns 1994). The failure of the government to improve the living conditions of the urban poor until much later also reflects the anti-urban bias present at the time. With the growing power of the middle-sized farmers after the famine, and the binding of the Irish nationalist ideology to the agrarian struggle for land among the rural peasants, urban hardships were largely ignored in favour of rural struggles (Norris 2016). THE BIRTH OF THE IRISH WELFARE STATE In the 19th century Dublin saw a consolidation of Catholic rights and an expanding Catholic middle class (Daly 1984), which held in- creasing political and economic power (Delaney 2020: 1437). Yet despite the city’s rising population in the 19th century (Daly 1984), the majority of the Irish population still lived in rural areas (Ó Gráda 1999), and in 1841 about two thirds of the people were dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods (Nowlan 1961: 7), reflecting Ire- land’s lack of industrialisation and poor employment in its towns (Norris 2016). With the population explosion throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries (Dooley 2000), land was in short supply and demand for it was high (Nowlan 1961: 7). Most Irish land was owned by a handful of landlords – by 1870, the percentage of farmers who owned their land was already as low as 3% – and most farmers were tenants, renting the land they worked (Norris 2016: 2). Only a third of the rural population lived on farms larger than 15 acres, thus capa- ble of producing surplus sustenance (Gibbon 1975: 132). The mid- dlemen system that characterised the agricultural experience of the time created friction and exploitation between the different classes. Middlemen would become the link between the (often absentee) landlord and the tenants, paying rent to the landlord and subdivid- ing the land to sublet it, profiteering in turn by charging higher rent than they were paying themselves. This was further repeated by the 36 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 36 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 36 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 large tenant farmers, who would sublet the land further to smaller scale farmers and even smaller scale cottiers. Alongside this, the farm work was supported by the economically weakest and landless waged agricultural labourers (Norris 2016: 48; Dooley 2000; Nowlan 1961: 8). Agriculture in Ireland was thus not well developed, as investment in it was obstructed by the middlemen system (Nowlan 1961: 9), and there was an over-reliance on the inexpensive potato as a staple food, with the failure of the crops due to blight the cause of the Great Famine from 1845 to 1850 (Ó Gráda 1999: 210). The high compe- tition for employment and land caused a drop in wages and rising rents (Nowlan 1961: 8). Poverty and destitution were thus prevalent in early 19th century Ireland (Ó Gráda 1999), and those who could not afford to pay rent faced eviction. This was the cause of sporadic outbreaks of agrarian unrest; yet it was not until the late 1870s that a nationally coordinated mass movement of tenant farmers would come to exist (Nowlan 1961: 12). While the nationalist agenda in the post-famine years interwove the issue of an independent nation with that of land ownership, and saw its nemesis in landlordism, agrarian unrest in the pre-famine middlemen system was often not between farmers and landlords, but between larger farmers and the classes below them (Dooley 2018). The post-famine years saw many transformations in the agri- cultural production. First, increasingly impoverished and indebted landlords sought to remove the middlemen system that was preventing them from pocketing much of the rental income, and they attempted to consolidate their subdivided scattered holdings into larger units and thus achieve an economic recovery (Dooley 2000). Second, there was a shift in farming from tillage to pasturing (Clear 2018: 151), and the cattle export trade expanded (Daly 1984). But the effects of the famine were most visible in the sharp population decline, with about three million people having died or left the country within the five years of famine (Nally 2008: 714), and a continued decline in the dec- ades following. Indeed, from the years 1845 to 1911, the population of Ireland is estimated to have fallen by a half (Guinnane 1994: 303). This decline was concentrated in the rural areas of the country and primarily meant the loss of the poorer sections of the agrarian popula- tion – the biggest fall was seen among the economically weak cottiers and agricultural labourers. The changing composition of the rural classes caused a polari- sation between the remaining landless labourers and the middle- and large-scale farmers, with the latter becoming the dominant political force in post-famine Ireland, aligning themselves with the increasingly 37 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 37 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 powerful nationalist movement and the Catholic Church. It was with- in this scope of changing class structure that radical land reforms came to pass from 1879 to the beginning of the 20th century, which enabled and subsidised the transfer of land from landlords to tenant farmers. This was followed by similar demands from landless farm labourers, who were hitherto excluded from the reforms, and the early 20th cen- tury was thus characterised by high government investments into rural social housebuilding. It is here, in the context of land wars and govern- ment subsidies for agrarian land distribution and ownership, that Nor- ris (2016) places the primary origins of the Irish welfare state and re- lated policies. These government interventions abolished the landlord system and decommodified land and labour, shifting them from the sphere of the market to that of the family. As land came to be owned by those who laboured on it, it became a family possession. As a con- sequence, rural wage labour, common in the landlord system, declined and was replaced by family labour on a family farm (Fahey 2002). Whereas these initial reforms were focused on the consolidation of a rural smallholder class and facilitating its accompanying familism, and later oriented to agrarian labourers, they soon expanded and started to (at least partly) include the classes of the urban social fabric as well (Norris 2016: 113). Nonetheless, a bias towards the rural remained even after Irish independence in 1922, and the late intervention into and funding of schemes for urban housing (Norris and Fahey 2011), along with continued urbanisation throughout the decades following independence (Rowley 2017), meant that slums persisted in the city for decades to come. Subsidisation of housing and socialised housing policies led to a large increase of homeownership in Ireland in the later part of the 20th century, with the welfare policies from the land wars (which re- sulted in the decommodification of land) percolating further in other contexts. The social housing tenants thus drew their demands from the context of the land war and land acts, and demanded the right to purchase their dwellings at subsidised prices. This was first granted to rural social housing tenants in 1936 and was only later, in 1966, transferred to the urban context (Fahey 2002: 59). Social housing in Ireland thus became an alternative route to homeownership for those with less means, and is the reason why the country had one of the high- est levels of homeownership in Europe. The policy of tenant purchases, taking off more strongly in the 1970s, also contributed to a relatively even homeownership distribution among the various social-economic classes (Norris and Fahey 2011: 463). 38 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 38 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 38 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 WORKING-CLASS HOUSING IN THE TIME OF INDEPENDENCE Anti-urban attitudes continued into the 20th century. First, Éamon de Valera’s post-independence government pursued policies aimed at facilitating rural rather than urban development (Rowley 2019: 89). De Valera, who was at the forefront of Irish politics from independ- ence until the late 1950s, aimed to grow local small-scale manufactur- ing and businesses, following his vision of Ireland as a self-sustaining nation with some industry but primarily agriculturally oriented and grounded in traditional values (Bartley and Waddingon 2001). Under his policies of economic protectionism, Ireland entered a decade-long period of poverty and isolation (Hanna 2013: 7). Political independ- ence in 1922 replaced the colonial state rule with a “new conservatism, favouring the propertied, farming, and middle classes” (McManus 2003: 44). Second, the Catholic Church was firmly based in the agrar- ian landscape (McManus 2003) and opposed urbanisation, although seeing suburbs as an acceptable compromise in their offering refuge from urban corruption (Rowley 2019: 99) In the 1920s, during a severe housing shortage, the state focused on providing middle-class housing and encouraging home ownership through subsidies (McManus 2003: 44-5). Whereas the first building projects of Dublin Corporation in the 1920s were suburban estates meant for purchase by tenants, it soon became clear that they were unaffordable to those at the bottom of the housing needs spectrum, so in the 1930s policy shifted towards renting rather than sale, and re- mained so until after the Second World War, when shortages of build- ing materials also ended (Brady 2016). Housing provision in post- independence Ireland was a state-building process, and the building projects of the new state reflected the dominant ideologies of the time, intertwining the concepts of nationalism and development. This was seen in the focus on rural sites, using indigenous building materials and building primarily what Rowley (2019: 104) calls the “vernacular” form of housing, in this case low-rise cottages. Dublin’s population during that time continued to grow. From 1935 to 1961 it grew by 30%, transforming it “from city to city-region” (Rowley 2019: 6), with Dublin city extending its boundaries, primar- ily in the direction of the northside (Brady 2016). The 1920s were the beginning of the politicians’ efforts to construct “a new capital which would both articulate the power, prestige, and identity of the new state and successfully house its citizens” (Hanna 2013: 22). At the heart of the housing debate at the time was the issue of slums, seen as shameful for the 39 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 39 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 nation itself (Rowley 2019: 60; Brady 2016). In the 1930s flats4 also be- came an important building typology. A dual policy thus began whereby flats would be built in the inner-city sites to take the place of the demol- ished slums and house the poorest of Dublin’s inhabitants, whereas the suburbs were reserved for cottages (McManus 2019; Rowley 2019). The question of urban modernist flats versus suburban traditionalist cottages was of significance for decades in the town planning context. However, the plan to build more flats was soon undermined, because inner-city land was more expensive than suburban land, the materials needed to construct flats cost more than those used for cottages, the rents charged for flats were lower than those for cottages, and as they housed the poorest members of society they soon became linked with poverty and stigma (Rowley 2019: 68-9; Brady 2016). Against the backdrop of the anti-urban attitudes of the Irish middle classes (epitomised in de Valera’s ideology, which combined nationalism and rurality), suburban cottages thus proliferated as the preferred housing typology. In the context of the Emergency Years in particular (i.e. during the Second World War), sub- urban low-rise estates seemed the only viable option, as they were not only cheaper to build, but due to having gardens also enabled residents to practice self-sustainability in times of food shortages (Rowley 2019: 99). Suburbs were thus seen as the answer to the moral and economic questions of the slum clearance process (Prunty 1998). However, relo- cating to the suburbs from the inner-city was often opposed by the ten- ants themselves, as there was a lack of affordable transport in the suburbs, few community services, and weaker social bonds among neighbours than in the tenements. Despite this, the official policies continued the push for suburbanisation. From the end of the 1930s onwards, plans for redevelopment promoted the “thinning out” of the city centre, with the relocation of the inner-city working classes to the continuously ex- panding suburbs at the increasingly distant city edge (Rowley 2019). The vision was to create a dualistic city, “with its monuments of civic, religious, commercial and academic authority at the centre and its lowly population commuting via new transport networks and modernist roads from the edge” (Rowley 2019: 77). Despite this, systematic urban plan- ning efforts were weak in the post-independence years from 1922 to the 1960s, and Dublin was developed and expanded in a piecemeal fashion (Hanna 2013; Rowley 2019). From 1930 to 1950 especially was a period of aggressive social housing building (Rowley 2017: 60-91), attempting 4 Flats is the term used in the Dublin vernacular and academic literature on Irish housing to denote the dwellings in blocks which were purposed for social housing, while private housing in multi-storey blocks is generally referred to as apartments. 40 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 40 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 40 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 to manage the house shortages created by rural depopulation and to clear the city of slums and dirt and so present it as a powerful capital of the new state (Kincaid 2006). Yet no matter the effort expended, by the 1950s tenement living, overcrowding and slums continued to persist. There were hopes at the time that the Corporation was finally coming to grips with the housing crisis, and that enough progress would be made over the years to catch up with the housing demand in the city – espe- cially as high emigration meant there was reduction in the need for hous- ing in Dublin. But this latter factor, alongside a continuous lack of funds, caused a deceleration in the production of new housing in the 1950s. URBAN PLANNING IN MODERN IRELAND In the 1950s Dublin experienced various changes in relation to hous- ing. First, as mentioned above, housing production slowed down due to the stagnant economy in Ireland as a whole (Somerville-Woodward 2002a), while the housing supply was slowly coming to meet the hous- ing demand (Brady 2016). Second, according to a new policy 10% of every new council housing area was to be reserved for private hous- ing. The resulting proximity to people with higher incomes was in- tended to give an example to the social housing tenants on the one hand, while on the other the higher average income of the private own- ers was meant to help sustain a greater range of services in the area. Third, a highly contentious system of differential rents spread through the country, whereby council tenants would pay different amounts of rent depending on their income and possessions (Brady 2016). Finally, complaints about high bus fares and inadequate services in the sub- urbs caused a renewed interest in the building of flats in the inner city, where most of the jobs were concentrated (Brady 2016; Rowley 2019). Ireland’s economy at the time was in a state of stagnation and crisis (Brady 2016), the country being still mostly rural and unindus- trialised (Bartley and Waddington 2001), a consumer of resources and not a producer, and at the same time an exporter of labour as emigra- tion continued in high numbers (Brady 2016). In 1959, however, de Valera was replaced as Taoiseach by Seán Lemass, and this marked a turn for the Irish economy. Lemass and T.K. Whitaker, Secretary of the Department of Finance introduced economic planning, shifted the protectionist policies to free trade, and encouraged foreign invest- ment in the country, thereby initiating a reorientation from the rural, agrarian bias to industrialisation and urbanisation (Hanna 2013: 9). 41 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 41 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 41 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 As part of this transformation of Irish economy, urban planning became an increasingly important project (Hanna 2013) and was to play a role in “smoothing the way for the emergence of the new geogra- phies, or spatial patterns” that this new economic order would require (Barley and Waddington 2001: 9). The role of urban planning, claims McGuirk (1994: 288), was to support the imperatives of capitalism and reorganise the environment spatially so as to fit the reorganisation of economy. In the Irish context, urban planning is the responsibil- ity of local authorities, which are however subservient to central gov- ernment’s inclinations (ibid.). Even today Ireland is still characterised as a highly centralised state with a weak local government (Callanan 2018), with local authorities exclusively in charge of local planning and development (Larragy and Bartley 2007). Attempts to rationalise the urban space and to deal with the increasing city population were insti- tutionalised in Ireland in 1963 through the Local Government (Plan- ning and Development) Act, which came into force in 1964. The Act required all local planning authorities to devise a development plan within three years, and to later on renew it every five years. It marked an era of increased commercialisation of land and of warming relations between developers and politicians (Rowley 2019: 226). A reflection of this new era of rationalisation of space in the context of Dublin is the Myles Wright strategy for urban development (Bartley and Waddington 2001: 11), which went on to be one of the most influential documents in shaping the city. This plan was based on the ideal of an affluent society with mass car ownership, and where the urban landscape thus needs to be remodelled so as to accommo- date the resulting traffic (Hanna 2013: 40). The plan thus proposed the building of new housing estates to the west of the city – the later suburbs of Tallaght, Clondalkin, Lucan and Blanchardstown (Rowley 2019: 226) – and a decentralisation of the population, commerce and industry, transferring parts of them from the inner city to the new sub- urbs (Hanna 2013: 41). The push for the thinning out of the inner city and emptying it of its residents thus continued into Ireland’s new era, while at the same time large construction activities began in the inner city, with the building of new office spaces to meet the demands of the new economic expansion. Whereas in the 1950s the obsolete build- ings in the inner city were primarily left neglected, the accelerated development pressures of the 1960s caused an increased and whole- sale renewal of urban sites through their demolishing (Negussie 2003: 19). Multiple Georgian houses were demolished at the time to make space for new developments, and the modernist architecture that re- placed them embraced a “post-nationalist ethos” (Kincaid 2006: 131) 42 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 42 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 and functioned as a legitimising tool of the new government. On the one hand it presented a critique of the failure since independence to create an industrial economy and a thriving bourgeoise, while on the other hand it also dismissed the colonial legacy of the city evident in its Georgian architecture. The building of the Ballymun suburb was thus intended to help clear the Georgian buildings of their inhabitants in the centre and leave the space open for urban renewal (Kincaid 2006). BALLYMUN’S BEGINNINGS Dublin’s population continued to grow in the 1950s and 1960s, and Ire- land was slowly becoming more urbanised – by 1971, 52% of the popu- lation already lived in urban areas. The stagnation in the social house building of 1950s could no longer continue by 1960, as there was once again an increased need to house the working-class population (Brady 2016). This became increasingly clear in March 1963, when the results of a survey of the housing stock in charge of Dublin Corporation re- vealed that some 60,000 occupied houses were unfit for human habita- tion, and about a half of them were unsuitable for repair. The shortage of the available housing stock, along with housing collapses, brought about one of the worst housing crises Dublin had ever experienced (Somer- ville-Woodward 2002b). On 2 June 1963, 20 Bolton Street collapsed and an elderly couple was killed. This was followed less than two weeks later by the collapse of two tenement buildings, 3 and 4 Fenian Street, killing two girls, one eight- and one nine-year-old (Brady 2016). Part of the reason for the collapses was the weather conditions that summer. However, a part of it was also the weakening of the structural supports of the old buildings as a consequence of the new developments in the area. and the replacement of cobblestone roads with concrete roads that produced a greater transference of traffic vibrations (Hanna 2013: 115). These events caused the Corporation to adopt emergency meas- ures, and to suspend their existing housing priorities. Precedence was given instead to rehousing the tenants who were living in the worst conditions, whose removal from the rundown tenements was started in full force (Somerville-Woodward 2002a), with 900 families and 326 single people being given notices of eviction (Power 2000). With the lack of available housing, however, these people were offered only temporary accommodation or were forced to sleep on the streets. Neil Blaney, the Minister for Local Government responsible for the pub- lic housing within the state, coming under increasing pressure by the 43 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 43 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 43 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 press (Somerville-Woodward 2002b), and the Taoiseach promised more building would be done in Dublin. By the Minister’s request (Power 2000: 200), in 1964 the Corporation produced a report on its progress and prospects with regard to building new homes, and it showed that approximately 5,000 new dwellings were expected to be built in the next four years, but that over 11,000 individuals were on the housing waiting list (Somerville-Woodward 2002b). The existing building programme would thus be unable to provide the housing for the urgent cases on the waiting list (Power 2000: 200). It was there- fore recognised that an additional 1,000 dwellings per year for the next three years would be needed to supplement the existing building pro- gramme in order to cope with the situation (Hanna 2013: 38). Minister Blaney suggested as a possible solution to the problem of housing in Dublin the use of industrial approaches, and arranged a research visit of officials from his department and the Corporation to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Paris. The best system-building tech- nique, it was decided, was the French Balency and Schuhl method, characterised by its “precast wall units and in-situ floors coming out of a purpose-built factory on-site” (Rowley 2019: 229). The benefits of pre-fabricated building methods were to be found in their time and labour effectiveness, as the superstructure works could be completed in half the time needed with traditional methods, and a less-skilled, cheaper work-force was required (Brady 2016). In May 1964, the De- partment of Local Government thus recommended to the Corpora- tion a large housing scheme using pre-fabricated methods, and it was promised that it would be a supplementary housing programme to the Corporation’s already existing one (Somerville-Woodward, 2002b). As such, it was implied that the costs of the project would be mostly met by the Department of Local Government and the works would be undertaken by an outside agency (Brady 2016). The suggested site of the new development scheme, influenced by Corbusian theory5 (Hanna 2013: 38), was to be on land belong- ing to the Albert Agricultural College, which the University College Dublin was looking to sell as it was no longer suitable for agricultural purposes (Power 2000: 201-2). Due to the size of the available land, it was decided that the scheme would comprise a mixture of cottages and high-rise flats, so that at least 3,000 new dwellings could be built on it (Brady, 2016) [Figure 7]. It was decided that the independent agency 5 Jane Jacobs (1961: 436), highly critical of the Corbusian architecture, stated: “his tow- ers in the park were a celebration, in art, of the potency of statistics and the triumph of the mathematical average”. 44 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 44 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 44 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 in charge of overseeing and managing the work process would be the recently formed National Building Agency, and the architects chosen were Arthur Swift and Partners, working with a consortium called Cu- bitt Haden Sisk (Power 2000: 207; Rowley 2019: 230). Within this process of planning, it was Minister Blaney of the Department of Local Government who was the driving force, and not the Corporation itself. Whereas he needed the Corporation to request and give him permission to undertake the project and act on the city’s territory, it was Blaney who initiated it and pushed forward the process (Power 2000; Brady 2016). This, as Brady (2016: 192) states, points to “the degree of centralised control which has always been a feature of ur- ban governance in Ireland”. The relationship between the Department of Local Government and the Corporation in the process of building Ballymun was occasionally a problematic one, as “the Minister felt he had superior information to that of the Corporation” and thus did not take their advice as to what type of housing was most needed for exist- ing tenants. At the same time, and despite the Corporation’s warnings, he prioritised the building of 3,000 dwellings over facilities, a commu- nity centre and landscaping. The Corporation was also not given a firm indication of where the financing for the project would come from and what costs they themselves would need to bear for the project (Brady 2016). Despite all this, the Corporation gave its tentative backing to the project, and it was officially started on 2 February 1965, when the contract was signed between Minister Blaney and Cubitt Haden Sisk consortium (Power 2000: 209) [Figure 8] [Figure 9]. “The confusion and lack of coordination surrounding the planning, development and construction of Ballymun” (Somerville- Woodward 2002b: 45) was reflected in issues that quickly arose in the building of the new “satellite town”, as it was being referred to. First, there were major delays in the building schedule of dwellings, to such a degree that bordered on public scandal (Brady 2016). Second, despite promises to the contrary, landscaping cutbacks were made due to budgetary constraints (Power 2000: 209). Third, prioritising the building of dwellings meant that by the time first tenants moved in, in the second half of 1966, there was still no town centre with shop- ping and entertainment facilities. And by mid- 1969, an entire com- munity was already living in Ballymun without any of the amenities they would need to be able to satisfactorily conduct their daily lives there. When at the beginning of 1969 the National Building Agen- cy’s contract for Ballymun ceased, the Corporation was given 3,021 dwellings and took over what was a half-finished scheme at the time. Even throughout the 1970s, shopping facilities, playgrounds, health 45 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 45 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 45 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 facilities, social and recreational facilities were lacking in the area (Somerville-Woodward 2002b). The building of Ballymun took about four years, from 1965 to 1969, and upon its completion it comprised “seven fifteen-storey point blocks, which became the leitmotif of the estate [Figure 10], nineteen eight-storey deck-access spine blocks, and ten four-storey walk-up blocks” (Rowley 2019: 230). Besides these, about 450 houses were also built in the area, and by March 1970, the estate was made up of 3,265 homes, most of them in the form of flats [Figure 11] [Figure 12]. Being built around the time of the 50th commemoration of the Easter Rising, the seven highest towers were named after the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic, i.e. Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Seán Mac Diarmada, Éamonn Ceannt, Thomas Clarke, James Connolly, and Joseph Plunkett (Montague 2008). It was a “tri- umphal vision of a modern and patriotic Ireland” (Hanna 2013: 38) and being primarily a social housing estate was in many ways a break with the established form of housing provision. The Corporation had up to that point built mostly cottages in the suburbs to house the city’s poor, with higher-density low walk-up flats being limited only to the inner-city areas. Ballymun was different in that blocks were built in the suburbs, not in the inner city as was done before. Another break with the established typology of social housing of the time was that many of the blocks were high-rises, which was a radical departure from the low- rise ideal of the Corporation. Higher blocks, that is the ones with eight or 15 storeys, were fitted with lifts, which was another feature that was not used before (Rowley 2019). As was standard with the Balency method for high-rise building, a boiler house was built in the area to heat the flats through a central system heating, which the Corporation had not done before either (Brady 2016). Moreover, and as already mentioned, it was also a first serious attempt by Dublin Corporation to use the pre-fabricated system-building techniques, Ballymun being a “‘mothership’ project and testing ground” for the Balency method of such building in Ireland (Rowley 2019: 229). As such, the Corpora- tion had no previous experience on how to manage such a large and complex housing estate (Somerville-Woodward 2002b). The issue of the management of local authority housing had been left to lag behind the primary concern of the central government, which was the production of new housing. The local authorities tend- ed to focus their efforts on the allocation of new dwellings and on col- lecting the rent from tenants for a period of time before they exercised their right to buy the property. As such, the management of the exist- ing local authority housing stock was always only a limited concern, even to the local authority (Norris and O’Connell 2002: 245). 46 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 46 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 46 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 CONCLUSION As Merrifield writes, place “internalizes conflictual and contradictory social forces”, the “social conflict is thereby ‘inscribed in place’” (1993: 521). In the first chapter, I hoped to show how history is inscribed within the concretisation – the materiality – of Ballymun. Ballymun, being, as discussed in the introduction, simultaneously a state and a process, concrete and immaterial, can thus be viewed as that which “crystallizes out of a field of flows”. Ballymun as a place “internalizes everything going on around it within that field of flows, in past, pre- sent, and even future” (Harvey 2009: 137). Internalised in Ballymun are thus historical relationships between Ireland and England and between the state and the local authority, the power of the Catholic Church, the urban-rural relations, the class and labour relations. The process of building Ballymun has been a highly symbolic project. Past relations, flows and power dialectics are inscribed in every inch of the materiality and imagery of the site. Built on the area which used to serve as agricultural farmland of Albert Agricultural College (named after Britain’s Prince Albert), its distinctive seven towers were named after Irish revolutionaries. The way the landscape was changed during its construction reflects the growing power of cities and of ur- banism, and the waning power of traditional agricultural Ireland. The place as a suburban satellite town mirrors the morality of the Catholic Church and middle-classes, as well as their anti-urban attitudes. The wide main street with a circular roundabout under which tunnels were made for pedestrians represents, perhaps, the growing role of car traffic compared to people on foot. The Corbusian theory that inspired the Ballymun construction plan represented liberalism’s growing stress on individualism (Jacobs 1961: 22). Finally, the industrial building pro- cess was a statement of the modernisation of the country. Ballymun was thus a solution to a housing crisis and a utopian image of soci- etal progress. It was also a project of state-building: as Rowley states, “rather than emphasise the failures of Irish freedom – slums – the state sought to celebrate the achievements of independence” (2022: 325). Ballymun has thus not only been a product of various contexts and processes, but by its very nature also contained the power and po- tential to influence and transform those very contexts and processes. The failure of the Ballymun as a “housing estate” did, for example, have a crucial impact on Ireland’s building policies. Traditional building methods were again favoured, rather than prefabricated ones, and so was building housing lower to the ground rather than higher in the sky (Brady 2016). 47 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 47 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 47 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 29. 11. 2024 11:09:33 APPENDIX Figure 7: A diagrammatic plan model of a part of the four-storey walk-up blocks of flats at Ballymun. A complete four room flat is shown to the right of the staircase access bay (Cubitts Haden Sisk: Ballymun housing project, 1966). Figure 8: Close up of concreting plant and moulds for vertical casting. Concrete is injected from the bottom of the mould (Cubitts Haden Sisk: Ballymun housing project, 1966). 48 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 48 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 48 29. 11. 2024 11:09:34 29. 11. 2024 11:09:34 Figure 9: Viewing an architectural model at the completion of the first house of the £10m. Ballymun project, from left: Mr. Martin Quirke, Project Director, of Cubitt, Haden and Sisk, Councillor Denis Larkin, Mr. Neil Blaney, Minister for Local Government, Alderman Eugene Timmons, Lord Mayor of Dublin, and the architect, Mr. Arthur Swift of London. (Build, Journal of the Industry, year unknown, approx. 1965). Figure 10: Model of proposed residential tower block at Ballymun, National Building Agency LTD with Cubitts Haden Sisk. Model acquired by the Irish Architectural Archive in 2016. Colum O’Riordan (2016). House and Home. Dublin: The Irish Architectural Archive. Courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive 49 Historical overview A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 49 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 49 29. 11. 2024 11:09:34 29. 11. 2024 11:09:34 Figure 11: Site plan of Ballymun. Red colour indicates the position of seven tower blocks, dark green colour indicates the position of lines of spine blocks, dark blue refers to the position of walk-up blocks, yellow refers to Lowton-Cubitt houses and flats, and light blue refers to other buildings (schools, churches, shopping centre, boiler house). Source unknown, year unknown. Courtesy of the Ballymun Community Archive, Ballymun Library. Figure 12: Happy Birthday, Ballymun?” Photo shows Ballymun’s idiosyncratic roundabout and blocks of flats in the distance. Evening Press, July 4, 1988. 50 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 50 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 50 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 Formation of Community As I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, the project of build- ing Ballymun was a highly symbolic one, with symbolism entrenched in the materiality of the very place. Yet beside their symbolic aspects, places also have corporeal and social dimensions – they incorporate the bodily presence of people living and moving in them and their social practices. As Kohn argues, “by providing a shared background, spatial forms serve the function of integrating individuals into a shared con- ception of reality” and they encourage or inhibit proximity and junc- tions of people (2003: 4). The significance of the relationship between a community and locality in Ireland is clearly expressed in Wilson’s and Hastings’s statement that “locality and place are socially meaning- ful for people in various spots in Ireland, where they are constitutive of wider notions of community and culture” (2006: 116). It is these social aspects of Ballymun that this chapter will be concerned with. To 51 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 51 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 51 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 research Ballymun from the perspective of its social dimensions, I will draw upon the concepts of (urban) community and boundary. While the boundaries of the locality of Ballymun as such are easily determined, the same does not hold true for the boundaries of the urban community. The boundaries of the latter are much less clear- ly defined, as are its meanings. Despite the non-congruent boundaries of the area and community, the two notions were, in my interlocu- tors’ accounts, continuously used interchangeably. Such interrelation of place and community was also observed by Brent in his study of Southmead in England: Each [community and place] is an attribute of the other /…/. Each is imagined as much as actual, with the imaginings closely interlinked. The relationship between them can best be described metaphorically: space is a stage brought to life by performance; community is one of the shows performed. (2009: 222-3) To follow Brent’s argument, community is the “performance” that “brings space to life” and thus invests it with meaning, making a place out of it. Hence place encompasses community, and community encompasses place. MAIN CONCEPTS Community The concept of community has a multiplicity of meanings (see Clarke 2014), which may refer to a variety of issues of collective social life, such as morality, territory, action, identity, and control (Brent 2009: 203). Somerville (2016: 4) understands community as “a state of be- ing or set of practices in which people are connected or linked in some way”, accompanied by the existence of “common attachments”, such as attachments to a place, “and the common construction, maintenance and recognition of those attachments”. “Traditional” anthropologi- cal and sociological approaches to the study of community construed them as social organisms and focused on commonalities between members and social interactions as their essence. Researchers studied communities in villages, tribes, and islands (Rappaport 2002: 173- 4), or as isolated groups within the urban environment, composed of immobile members (Wonneberger 2011: 128). The “symbolic” approach, on the other hand, defined community by focusing on its 52 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 52 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 52 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 boundaries. Communities thus conceived were therefore understood as symbolic structures, rather than social practices (Delanty 2009: xi), as groups that formed in opposition to other groups (Rappaport 2002: 174). This concept of a community simultaneously implied similar- ity within it and its difference from others (Cohen 1985: 12). More recent studies have tended to focus on non-spatial communities (see Wonneberger 2011: 129-32), the essence of which is “the solidarity and social control that resides in overlapping virtual networks tran- scending time and place” (Bradshaw 2008: 8). Delanty suggests a compromise between all these approaches and definitions, arguing that “‘community’ does in fact designate both, an idea about belong- ing and a particular social phenomenon, such as expressions of longing for community, the search for meaning and solidarity, recognition and collective identities” (2009: xii). To invoke the notion of community, Delanty argues (ibid.), is to recognise that it is simultaneously both real and an ideal. It occupies, as Clarke further reiterates, an “unstable space between description and aspiration” (2014: 46) and is thus in a state of becoming, rather than in a state of being, as it activates a set of practices which in return constitute the community (Somerville 2016: 4, 6). As such, community is both an experience and an interpretation. Many authors warn against unquestionably accepting the positive connotations of the term community6 and romanticising the idea of the unity it implies (see e.g. Joseph 2002; Young 1990: 226-56). They also warn against reifying the groups under study and viewing them as “in- ternally homogeneous, externally bounded […], even unitary collective actors with common purposes” (Brubaker 2002: 164) and with common understanding of symbols (Keesing 2012). In other words, they warn against viewing the social world of communities as constituted by ho- mogenous and distinctive “billiard balls” (Wolf 2010: 6). Furthermore, Creed (2006: 10) argues that rather than fetishising the community, “ex- amining [its] making (and unmaking)” is crucial; rather than presuming its positive value, “diverse and often unintended consequences generated” need to be explored; and rather than objectifying the community, we must acknowledge the “different regimes of knowledge” by which com- munities come to be constituted and which they constitute (ibid.: 11). Despite the dangers of presupposing unity where one does not necessarily exist, and of obliterating differences amongst voices, I found it unavoidable to rely on the concept of community in my work. There are several reasons that guided my decision to take the 6 Potter and Reicher show that the term community has overwhelmingly positive conno- tations in its discursive usage (1987: 37). 53 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 53 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 53 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 concept of community as my focal point in this chapter. First, for Bal- lymuners, community is of utmost importance and is a concept that is inextricably tied to the place they inhabit. Indeed, this is the con- cept that Ballymun is most strongly associated with by its inhabitants themselves when they are focusing on its “positives”. It cropped up in the conversations with residents in a multiplicity of contexts and on various occasions. Even one of the least liked places in Ballymun – the Metzo Lounge bar – has the following in its online description: “We are delighted to be able to help out with the community and give the local folks somewhere to meet up and socialise /…/” (From the Metzo Lounge 2022; emphasis A.B.). Second, being committed in this text to focusing on those aspects that are generally perceived as positive about Ballymun, the concept of community is one that cannot be overlooked. Third, “community” is an emic term that is widely used in various con- texts, not only in Ballymun but also in Dublin, and Ireland in general (Wonneberger 2011: 133): governmental policies emphasise that they are aimed at facilitating “community cohesion”, universities announce that they are providing “community development programmes”, and discussions on the presence or absence of community are part of the everyday discourse of citizens. As stated by Wilson and Hastings, “‘[c] ommunity’ as an organizing principle continues to be a salient factor of social, economic and political life in Ireland today” (2006: 116). Even from a discursive perspective the use of the discourse of community is significant, as it constructs our lived social reality and has its own consequences (Wetherell and Potter 1988: 169-72).7 Commu- nity thus does not exist purely on a discursive level, but is also something that is experienced, lived with, and cherished (Rappaport 2002: 176), and which consequently makes it an indispensable analytical concept. In this book, I will thus use community as the main concept through which I will approach the topic of place and placemaking in Ballymun. In do- ing this, I will to some extent rely on a symbolic approach to studying community, but will refrain from making the mistakes, warned against by Creed and other authors (see above): I will look at the community of Ballymun in a non-essentialist manner and will study it as a continu- ously changing and changeable entity. In this chapter I will discuss the shapes that the concept of community takes in the context of Ballymun, demonstrate how the community has developed, wherein lies its unity and its heterogeneity, and how its boundaries are permeable or fixed. I 7 Brent (2009: 234-35) argues that the most important of such consequence is the gravi- tational force of community, and its effect on relationships of people construed as being “inside” or “outside” of community. 54 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 54 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 54 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 will also discuss the meanings that community holds for Ballymuners. Before discussing the questions relating to community further, a theo- retical discussion on the concept of boundaries is first due. In this, I am following the argument made by Gupta and Ferguson: that “instead of assuming the autonomy of the primeval community, we need to examine how it was formed as a community out of the interconnected space that always already existed” (1992: 8). Cohen argues (1985: 12; see also Bar- th 1969) that as a community becomes defined by its symbolic bounda- ries, an examination of the boundaries of a community, indicating where it begins and ends, is required to understand its nature. Boundaries Research on boundaries (and the related concept of borders) has been a rather common topic in anthropology (Lamont and Molnár 2002: 167). Since the spatial turn theorists declared the theoretical obsoles- cence of boundaries and pointed to places as fluxes and flows rather that bounded entities, using the concept of boundaries in relation to spatial concepts such as place or community may seem somewhat out- dated (Malpas 2012: 227-32, 238). Such a view was, however, chal- lenged by Malpas, who argued that: [t]he neglect of boundedness is especially problematic when allied with the insistence on relationality, since the two are intimately con- nected. All relations presuppose boundaries, while the boundary is properly that on which the possibility of relation is dependent. The boundary is that which […] establishes a certain oriented locatedness. (2012: 238) A boundary can refer to a cognitive template separating cog- nitive categories (symbolic boundary), to an abstract delineation of social groups (social boundary) or to physical boundary dividing ter- ritories (barrier) (Barth 2000: 17). Boundaries arise out of the percep- tion of distinctions and differences (Epstein 1992: 232; Abbot 1995), and they simultaneously include and define some groups or things and exclude others (Lamont, Pendergrass and Pachucki 2015: 850). Their origins may be sought on the cognitive, communicative (as product of social interaction), or political (as imposed by socio-political forces) levels (Lamont and Fournier 1992: 1-2). “Symbolic boundaries” are “conceptual distinctions made by social actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space”, and serve as “tools by which individuals and groups strug- gle over and come to agree upon definitions of reality” (Lamont and 55 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 55 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 55 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 Molnár 2002: 168). The lines they draw eventuate social forms (Barth 2000: 30) and are an indispensable part of creation of social reality, as “only with them do meaningful social entities (families, social classes, nations) emerge out of the flux of human existence” (Zerubavel 1993: 2). They also determine the appropriate behaviour and attitudes for different groups of people (Edelmann 2018: 120). Symbolic bounda- ries exist on the level of the intersubjective and can pattern interac- tions in important ways (ibid.). If there is a general agreement about the legitimacy of their existence, they may at times begin to constrain social interaction in certain ways and engender discernible patterns of exclusion (e.g. based on social class). Once boundaries manifest them- selves in groupings of people, they lose their symbolic character and are termed “social boundaries” (Lamont and Molnár 2002: 168-9). An important factor of the boundary-entity relation is that “boundaries come first, then entities” (Abbott 1995: 860). Bounda- ries enclose an entity, but the entity is not pre-existent – it is instead an entity precisely because the boundaries make it one. Stretching this argument further, Jones asserts than the process of bounding needs to be the subject of social analysis, as “without boundaries nothing could ever be anything”. Bounding, he states, is a process, as “boundaries are never finished or fixed, even if they appear to be, and must be re-fixed and reiterated to reify that perception”, meaning that there is an “ongo- ing necessity for re-fixing, rewriting and renegotiating the boundaries” (Jones 2009: 180). Boundaries are thus open, fluid, and permeable (Jones 2009: 175, 184). They are never impassable. Barth asserts that important so- cial relationships take place across boundaries and that boundaries per- sist despite mobility and contact through them. He proceeds by argu- ing that discrete social categories (shaped through processes of inclu- sion and exclusion) are maintained despite the changing participation and memberships within them (Barth 1969: 9-10). Furthermore, Bail affirms (2008: 39) that there exists a multitude of symbolic bounda- ries, and their relative salience and configuration is shifting. They are strategically negotiated and renegotiated, policed or made permeable, so as to suit the interests of certain people or groups. MEANINGS OF COMMUNITY IN BALLYMUN Despite the fact that community frequently cropped up in the con- versations with Ballymuners, my interlocutors did not usually explain 56 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 56 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 56 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 what they meant by the term, and it was just used in whatever way seemed appropriate. While there was not one single meaning I could infer, it was generally understood which of the term’s many meanings each use was meant to convey in a particular rendering. Sometimes it was used interchangeably with place and territory. At other times it served as a medium of expressing affection for the place. Yet on other occasions it was used to describe institutionalised community groups working within the area, managing local initiatives and conducting courses. Sometimes it referred to ties of solidarity between neighbours within a small area around one’s home, and at other times to ties of solidarity meshing throughout the Ballymun area. Membership in community was, in my talks with the residents, sometimes ascribed to those people within Ballymun who were involved in social activi- ties and initiatives; at other times it was taken to mean the everyday bonds of social solidarity that tie people; and still at other times it en- compassed everybody who lives in the area of Ballymun. Community membership was at times also attributed to those who do not live in the area but have created social bonds there, or are involved in local initiatives. Still at other times community membership was not attrib- uted to some of those living in the area, as they were viewed as too passive or destructive to the place. It thus felt somewhat strange to ask my interlocutors for an ex- planation of such a common term, or to inquire about what it meant for them to be “part of the community”. To my question, put at the beginning of my field research, about what it meant to be a member of the community, Dylan responded: “It’s when people start recog- nising your face on the street”. Although I did not entirely under- stand this when I heard it, by the time I was finishing my fieldwork research I had gained more clarity on the issue. Having been engaged in some of the community groups and having taken part in many community events and gatherings, I became increasingly acquaint- ed with the meshwork of sociality in Ballymun. Walking down the streets, I would inevitably bump into someone I knew or was familiar with, greeting them with “howya” or stopping for a chat, and thus to a certain extent, I too– according to Dylan’s criterion – became a community member. I did not, however, feel that partaking in social practices made me a full-fledged member of the community. I was in no way at the “centre” of community. I did feel, however, that I was somewhere on its margins, and my growing feelings of attachment to Ballymun tied me to the people and the place equally. While not having a shared experience of living in the place made me an out- sider, being a member of some community groups and having formed 57 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 57 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 57 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 social ties with some residents in the area contributed to my feeling of being an (almost) insider. What did become clear from conversa- tions with my interlocutors, however, was that community as a social entity needed to be thought of in its relation to place. OUTSIDE BOUNDARIES OF PLACE AND COMMUNITY Ballymun as a (satellite) town or a housing estate is a relatively eas- ily discernible area with clear-cut boundaries, and numerous local area development plans show a map of the place, distinguished by the use of colour from its black-and-white neighbouring areas [Figure 13]. Moreover, every few years census information shows a similarly shaped Ballymun map, overlapping with the shapes of maps in the older mas- terplans for the housing estate and its transformation. While the out- ward boundaries of Ballymun estate separating it from its neighbour- ing towns are thus clearly established in numerous maps and urban plans, it is not just spatial limits that make Ballymun an entity, distinct from other neighbourhood areas. Rather, it is a particular connota- tion that the name Ballymun evokes among the citizens of Dublin, the stigma attached to it, which reaffirms, asserts and reifies the social boundaries that divide Ballymun from other areas in the city – not (only) from within, but rather from the outside. The stigma attached to Ballymun is the result of a long process in which many factors intertwined and contributed to the negative reputation the area continues to have even nowadays. Already when the plan to build the Ballymun housing estate was first introduced, the residents of the neighbouring suburb Glasnevin (south of Ballymun Avenue) actively opposed its construction due to the bad reputation of social housing estates. They only agreed with the construction once they were guaranteed that fenced parkland would separate both areas, with gates closed at night (Brady 2016). Nevertheless, the plans to construct Ballymun in fact started off with great hope and promise. The first tenants of the estate were fami- lies who represented “model” Corporation tenants [Figure 14], chosen on the basis of interviews. They had to have low rent arrears, (usually) at least two or more children, and a father (or provider) who was em- ployed full time. A survey from 1974 shows that 47.8% of the Bally- mun population at the time were children under the age of 10 (Kerri- gan 1982). The town centre and its accompanying amenities were set to be built ahead of the residents’ arrival in 1966 (Somerville-Woodward 58 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 58 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 58 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 2002b: 40-5), and besides shopping facilities the centre of the hous- ing estate – as shown in the original plans – was supposed to include “a swimming pool, dance hall, bowling alley, restaurant, creche, clinic and garda station” (McDonagh 1997). Contrary to the Corporation’s promises, however, the end re- sult was much shabbier than promised and materialised only years later (Rowley 2019: 233). Even several years after the arrival of the first tenants, the centre and its accompanying amenities were not yet built, which caused daily hardships and inconveniences to those who lived there (Power 2000: 264; Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 49-51). Landscaping was also behind schedule, as the building of parks, gar- dens and playgrounds was delayed (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 45). Moreover, soon after the blocks had been built problems started to arise due to their poor structural properties. Fractures began to appear and the steel parts of the buildings soon rusted (McDonagh 1997). Central heating and the lifts (Rowley 2019: 231) for those ten- ants who lived in the flats proved particularly problematic. The 73 lifts on the estate (Rowley 2022: 324) regularly broke down (Power 2000: 210), and in 1978 alone a total of 2,425 complaints were submitted by the tenants to the Corporation about them [Figure 15]. While tenants in houses had their own central heating systems and thus were able to regulate their own heating, those living in the flats had no control over it (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 48), as the heating there was controlled by the Corporation (Boyle 2005: 184). Coupled with the lack of management and maintenance of the estate by the Corpora- tion (Power 2000: 241; O’Connell 2007: 41), the system was unreli- able from the very start. This situation is described in Dermot Bolger’s drama The Ballymun Trilogy: … I felt isolated and tired. After seven years I was tired of waiting for Ballymun to be finished. You saw it in the other mothers too, a dif- ferent tiredness than our mas had known. [Jane enters] The tiredness of climbing stairs when the lifts were broken. The tiredness of waiting for shops to be built, then being unable to afford anything in them with Christy so long out of work. The tiredness of waiting for buses that rarely came. The tiredness of dealing with a Corporation who forbid Christy to hammer a nail into their precious walls, yet never sent anyone to fix anything broken. (Bolger 2010: 33) The Corporation tended to blame the tenants and vandalism for the malfunctioning equipment and physical decline of the estate. The tenants, on the other hand, considered them to be the result of regular wear and tear (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 47). Relations between the Corporation and the tenants thus quickly deteriorated (ibid.: 43). 59 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 59 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 59 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 The lack of amenities, recreational facilities for children, poor landscap- ing, lack of maintenance and technological weaknesses of the blocks attracted wide media coverage throughout the 1970s and 1980s (ibid.: 49). Yet instead of increasing pressure on the Corporation to manage the estate better, it created a suffocating reputation for the residents and the place itself, increasing the stigma associated with it. The conditions in Ballymun became even worse as a recession, the consequence of the 1973 Oil Crisis, hit Ireland, and the 1970s and 1980s saw another “dismal period economically” (Ó Gráda and O’Rourke 2022: 354), which led to tight controls on government spending (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 51). In this worsening con- text those tenants who could afford to left the estate, and the image of Ballymun continued to decline. Once many of the better-off tenants had left and the number of vacancies rose, the strict policy of “model tenants only” was abandoned and new, “less desirable” tenants were moved into the flats and houses on the estate: single-parent families, single men, young dropouts, and so on (Power 1993a: 21). While at other locations the Corporation was following a policy of selling off its housing stock and thus achieving a mix of social housing tenants and homeowners, this was not the case in Ballymun. The Corporation’s de- cision not to sell off flats in the blocks meant that those tenants who aspired to homeownership refused to be sent to Ballymun, which thus became a “welfare enclave”, with a large resident population dependent on state support (Power 2000: 243). Consequently, as residents worked on getting the Corporation to move them to social housing in other suburbs, Ballymun became an increasingly transient estate (Kerrigan 1982). The negative percep- tions that became more and more attached to the estate were exem- plified in 1974, when the longer established residents of Glasnevin’s Ballymun Drive and Ballymun Park – which had existed before the newer Ballymun housing estate – requested a name change, and were indeed granted it, to Glasnevin Drive and Glasnevin Park, to prevent their homes from being associated with Ballymun. In 1977, Ballymun Avenue followed the same path, becoming Glasnevin Avenue (Brady 2016: 170-7). All these name changes clearly established new bounda- ries of the place, thus limiting “Ballymun” specifically to the location of the newly built housing estate. They also demonstrate the firmly en- trenched stigma that by then was attached to Ballymun. This stigma, which was associated with both the estate and its tenants, is something that the residents have always had to cope with. Many people claimed that they needed to change their addresses on job applications, as they believed that a Ballymun address would 60 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 60 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 60 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 immediately prevent them from being considered for employment. A conversation with Caoimhe and Aoife clearly expresses such fears: Caoimhe: And if you said you were from Ballymun, you didn’t get a job. Remember that, Aoife? Aoife: Oh yeah. Sure, even places like… now, different kind of say, they say where you’re from and you say Ballymun, once they hear Ballymun they wouldn’t call you. Ballymun has a name now. Caoimhe: Always had a name. We moved to Kille- ster, and even when I moved back here [to Ballymun], I still used my ma’s address from Killester, to get a job or… The stigma thus created the boundaries between Ballymun and the neighbouring areas that are sometimes reasserted not only by the outside communities, but also by the local residents themselves: Where I live, like in Poppintree [neighbourhood of Ballymun] […], the minute we go through them gates [towards Glasnevin Avenue], we would call that [area] Poshland. (Aoife) It also solicited a variety of personal and community-level re- sponses – from mocking it, feeling upset about it, to trying to improve the reputation of the place. When the effects of the stigma from the outside were too tangible, Siobhan explains, a reaction was necessary: [T]here’s an entrance, if I walk out to my house, and I can walk out through what we call the gaps and go to Aldi in Santry Lane, and then… they wanted to put a wall across that. So we had to go at 5 and 6 in the morning to stop the builders from putting that wall. And a lot of kids would have used that exit for […] a lot of kids would have went down to Whitehall, to Larkin, to the buses stop there and bring them down. Which meant the kids would have to walk much further. Stigma, an “attribute that is deeply discrediting” (Goffman 1963: 3), thus creates social – and sometimes even physical – bounda- ries between groups. The ascription of stigma by one group to another is not done arbitrarily, but rather reflects the power dynamics that per- meate their relation: “One group can effectively stigmatise another”, Elias claims, “only as long as it is well established in positions of power from which the stigmatised group is excluded” (1994: xx). The crea- tion and maintenance of boundaries between Ballymun and neigh- bouring areas through the processes described above is thus done in a context of unequal class and related power dynamics between the vari- ous Dublin areas. The fact that Ballymun is an exclusively social hous- ing estate naturally means that it is mainly people from the lower class who live there. Ballymun consequently holds lower social prestige and power than neighbouring areas. The stigmatisation of council hous- ing estates is not uncommon, though. It can be observed elsewhere in 61 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 61 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 61 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 Europe and the US (Wacquant 2007: 67), and many countries “are af- fected by this phenomenon of territorial stigmatization linked to the emergence of zones reserved for the urban outcasts” (ibid.: 68). While stigmatisation thus works towards creating boundaries between communities, it can, on the other hand, also contribute to their internal cohesion. The common experience of being stigmatised may in the members of the stigmatised group stimulate a tendency towards “defending their community from outsiders” (Hayden 2000: 230). There is, however, a variety of other factors that have engendered a certain unity in the community in Ballymun. UNITY OF THE BALLYMUN COMMUNITY Being a relatively new suburban town, there is no deeply historically rooted identification of the community with the place. Many of the tenants in Ballymun come from various areas of Dublin, and many were even born and raised outside the city and moved there from vari- ous parts of Ireland or Northern Ireland. In the booklet of stories from his childhood in Ballymun, O’Malley describes the heterogeneity of Ballymun: “ After the family arrived in Ballymun it did not take very long for us to settle in. The rest of the families on the estate were from every county in Ireland. Every accent was considered normal /…/ in this new melting pot that was called Ballymun” (2013: 70). The creation of strong community ties, the existence of which most local narratives, newspapers and academic texts affirm, could thus be a surprising fact. Especially so considering Jacobs’ argument about the Corbusian type of social housing (of which Ballymun is an example) supposedly being unconducive to community building (Jacobs 1961: 22). Yet being a social housing estate, the centre of which was developed late and badly, meant that “the unique thing about Ballymun in the 1970s was that everybody was in the same situation” (O’Malley 2013: 131): everyone lacked services, parks and playgrounds, good transport links, shops and so on. The inhabitants thus shared a common experience of place. As my interlocutor as- serted, financial struggles were another commonality that united the residents: We were poor growing up, and everyone was the same, back in the day, ‘cause we were all in the same boat, you know, ma’s and da’s not working, not working, but there’s no money. (Niamh) 62 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 62 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 62 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 In addition to financial problems and the resulting economic vulnerability that contributed to the shared feeling of struggle and the consequent fight for the improvement of the place and its living con- ditions, the extremely high number of children in the area, especially those living in single-parent households,8 was yet an additional factor in generating ties of solidarity among people. The many families in the area with young children also meant that people were in similar life stages and social situations, and that may have helped create bonds be- tween them. Many of my interlocutors recalled this fondly: the older residents remember taking care of other people’s children, and the younger ones being fed and helped by other members of community. Children and their well-being was something that most of the people in the community cared deeply about, and were prepared to fight for. As my interlocutor Siobhan explained while showing me old photos [Figure 16] of children she helped take care of: There was a little home beside that [church], so we opened up a youth centre in that little home. Just getting together and trying to organise things for, you know, kids. /…/ Thomas, on the other hand, remembered being the recipient of care from the residents of the estate: We always… kids used to come in off the street to people in Ballymun. “C’mon, I’ll feed you.” Thus despite, and to a certain extent precisely because of, the lack of common facilities and growing stigma attached to Ballymun, and its consequent outside perception as a “sink estate” or a “transient camp” (Kerrigan 1982), the community’s ties became stronger. Shared problems with regard to the living conditions and general well-being necessitated the creation of ties based on mutual help and solidar- ity, both on the level of individual neighbourhoods and the area as a whole. Moreover, the 1970s saw many newly developed community groups, formed with the aim of improving living conditions, and the decade could “almost be considered a ‘training-ground’ for communi- ty activists who lobbied and protested again and again for amenities” (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 50). “Everything was a fight”, my inter- locutor Siobhan told me, “trying to get TDs [members of parliament] 8 By 1996, single-parent households made up 51.7% of households in the area; approx- imately one third of the population of Ballymun in the same year was under 14 years old, and over 50% of children/young people had left school before the age of 15 (Foxe 1998: 15). 63 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 63 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 63 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 on our side, to agree that those services were needed. […] But it was constant protests and fighting and arguing to get things”. As discussed at the beginning of the chapter, the term commu- nity implies a distinction with those outside of its boundaries, while at the same time it also implies a certain unity, or rather, similarity among those within it – that is, after all, what makes a group into a community. In the case of Ballymun, the community was formed and sustained, as I explained above, 1) out of shared stigma; 2) the similar social situation of the inhabitants (young families, low-income social housing tenants); 3) out of a common struggle arising from the lack of affordances of the environment, and the hardships people faced in daily life. Consequently, the members of the community had a shared interest to improve the place which they inhabited. The community within Ballymun was thus formed around the issues of place and its usage, and once it was formed it became an important feature of the place itself. DIFFERENTIATION AND INTERNAL BOUNDARIES While there was a sense of unity and common interests shared by the residents, the degree to which they identified with the community or were accepted as its members differed greatly. At various points in its history, people living in the area were to different degrees included or excluded from the community, and the unity of the community thus fluctuated over time. This is especially evident when looking at the events that took place throughout the 1980s, and the effects they had on the social fabric of the community. In the early 1980s the living conditions in Ballymun seemed to be improving. The Corporation set up a local office, and it attempted to support and facilitate the local groups which were emerging. As a consequence, the turnover rate in the area dropped slightly (Power 2000: 243). Soon, however, the conditions on the estate deteriorated even further. The continued economic recession took its toll as Bally- mun continued its fall into a “downward spiral of economic, social and physical decline” (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 51). Unemployment in the country at large rose from an average of about 5% during the 1980s to a peak of 17% in 1987 (Norris 2016: 158), with unemploy- ment in Ballymun at the time being at approximately 65% (McVerry 1986: 443; Nolan and Coghlan 2002: 279). Furthermore, the begin- ning of a heroin epidemic in Dublin in the early 1980s was felt most 64 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 64 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 64 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 strongly in its most vulnerable communities (Marsh 2020: 10-11), and it devastated Ballymun (Montague 2021). Indeed, even today Ballymun continues to be associated with drug use – a recent RTÉ documentary on the drug trade in Dublin, for instance, was filmed in Ballymun (RTÉ Investigates 2021). A report also showed that the percentage of opiate users in Ballymun in 2014 was over ten times the average of Ireland (Hay et al. 2017: 9), and in recent years there has been a boom in the market for crack cocaine (see Montague 2021: 26). Rachel Keogh, a former addict, describes the situation in the 1980s in her autobiography: Drug addicts were beginning to drop like flies in Ballymun. The he- roin was taking its toll and lots of people were overdosing and dying. (2009: n.p.) The worst hit to the conditions of the estate came, however, in the mid-1980s, when a misguided Corporation policy left “low de- mand estates” in disarray (O’Connell 2007: 49-55). In line with the policies supporting homeownership in Ireland (see Norris 2016), in October 1984 a grant of £5,000, known as a “surrender grant”, was made available to Corporation tenants who wanted to become home- owners (Threshold 1987), a scheme that lasted until March 1987 (Nor- ris 2016: 181). The rationale behind it was to free the council homes for use by other prospective tenants on the local authority’s housing waiting list, with a further goal of stimulating the private housing mar- ket, which was stagnant at the time (O’Connell 2007: 48). Yet the un- even spatial take-up of the surrender grant, as outlined in the Thresh- old Report of 1987, had catastrophic effects on some communities. Specifically, in the Dublin area 75% of those who applied for the grant came from three areas – Darndale, Ballymun and Tallaght – all work- ing class “low demand” areas, and this was primarily due to the push factors, as the residents hoped to escape the stigma of their existing addresses (Threshold 1987: 1-2, 12). The consequences of the grant were devastating to the community because it was primarily taken up by those in employment (ibid: 13), and many of those who left were strong community figures and role models (ibid.: 29). This thus weakened the existing community ties and divided the residents: “Boundaries have become hardened, with established tenants closing ranks amongst themselves. Barriers have also arisen be- tween those in the community with no option but to stay and those in a position to leave” (Threshold 1987: 30). With the exodus of many of those who were employed from the area, the overall level of income in the community fell and many services were no longer financially 65 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 65 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 65 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 viable, causing a further decline in employment (ibid.: 31-32). Flats that remained vacant for too long contributed to an increase in vandal- ism (ibid.: 32-34) and squatting (ibid.: 49). In order to fill the empty flats in these undesirable areas, the Corporation let them out to the unemployed, homeless people, single parents (ibid.: 49), and those discharged from institutions. In the 1980s Ballymun accounted for just 10% of the Corporation’s housing stock, but housed 45% of the Corporation’s single parents, 29% of homeless applicants and 59% of single male applicants (Montague 2021: 7). As even those with mod- est means left the area if they could, this caused it to spiral further, the end result of the surrender grant policy being the ghettoisation of Bal- lymun and areas similar to it (Montague 2021: 7; Threshold 1987: 50). This is how Oisin described the situation: When I came here in 1986, at which time I was living on the stre- et partially and depression and that, but right then the government or the local authority introduced a scheme where they gave people £5,000, which is a lot of money, for a deposit for a house. So what happened […] you were left with people like me, psychiatric patients, because there was loads of empty flats. When I came out first, they gave me a choice of two or three. “Have a look at them” you know. But the one thing /…/ they always gave you the ground floor, ‘cause nobody wanted the ground floor. I was on the ground floor… Beca- use you were broken into, and you got noise going over at night. I remember I got the Balcurris Road, and again, I was broken into, and eventually I had to, I went back and reapplied to get me a third floor. Oh, it was crazy back then. The surrender grant thus worked towards fracturing the social fabric of the community. It divided people by setting those with the means and desire to leave Ballymun against those who had no choice but to stay, according to the report. The other factor that contributed to internal differentiation within the community was heroin addic- tion. The variable state of inclusion-exclusion relates in particular to those who were considered destructive members of the community, such as drug dealers, drug addicts, and those who had exhibited anti- social behaviour. These “problematic” members of the community are thus sometimes construed as members of the community inasmuch as they were considered victims of the government’s and Corporation’s policies, and as they are linked by family ties to less contentious mem- bers of community. Yet they are at the same time perceived as “bad apples” who have the potential to cause the community to rot, and are thus destructive and a danger to its existence. While drug problems have helped to promote and cement the stigma attached to Ballymun from the outside – against which the 66 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 66 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 66 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 residents have fought and with which they have dealt in various ways – along with reaffirming the boundaries between Ballymun and neigh- bouring communities, they have also contributed to the internal divi- sions within the community, within which drug addicts became “the others within”. In particular, when individuals were not only consuming but also dealing drugs – as many addicts tend to do (see Marsh 2020) – they were seen as especially endangering for the community and thus strongly rejected by some of its members. Although many com- munity members did not support its activities, a controversial group called Concerned Parents Against Drugs, known for forcing the drug dealing tenants out of their flats, calling for their ostracisation (ibid.: 31) and even for using threats and violence against them, was formed in Ballymun in 1984 and gained the backing of some resi- dents, after it had been established in the north inner city of Dublin (Lyder 2005: 13). On the other hand, several initiatives were established to help those fighting addiction, and often there was much solidarity shown to the addicts and endeavours to retain them as members of the commu- nity. As my interlocutors who themselves had experienced struggling with addiction asserted: Drugs, crime, everything, all that shit. /…/ So, I had to go in treat- ment because of drugs and alcohol at the time. So, I went and got support in this community. I got support from YAP [Youth Action Programme], got support from there. (Luke) Nobody was left in Ballymun on their own. Even drugs. When you’re sick in Ballymun on drugs, they were like “You’re sick? Come with me. I’ll make sure you’re looked after.” (Thomas) CONCLUSION Community has been shaping and reshaping itself since the arrival of first tenants in Ballymun. It has been defining itself by its boundaries – symbolic, social or physical. The Ballymun community has been formed through its boundaries on the outside, with other neigh- bouring areas, created in particular through the stigma attached to it due to the high rate of crime and drug addiction. On the other hand, it has also been internally divided. While the boundaries cre- ated by stigma engendered Ballymun as an entity and – to a certain 67 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 67 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 67 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 extent – contributed to its unity, the Ballymun community has in no way been a homogenic entity. Rather, it is composed of a set of op- posing voices and interests, differentiated internally, depending on various factors and various contexts. Some of the residents have at times been included in the community, and others have not. Some have been willing to include others, and others have been less willing to do so. This does not negate, however, the fact that there is such a thing as a community, cohesive in its shared struggle and usage of place in Ballymun – it simply rejects the notion of community as a homogenous entity, made up of members with congruent voices, positions and wishes. While permeable and shifting, the boundaries – external and internal – were crucial in the formation and maintenance of Ballymun as a community. Their strength has been fluctuating, as specific con- texts made particular boundaries at times more salient than others. The changing social, economic, and political situations required flex- ible positioning of community members along and across boundaries. While the boundaries united them in working together to solve com- munity problems and in the fight for their rights, the locals engaged in joint social activities have at times created new contexts which ex- ceeded the conceptual boundaries of the neighbourhood (cf. Appa- durai 2005: 185, 198). APPENDIX Figure 13: Ballymun Area as designated by the Local Area Plan (Dublin City Council, 2017). 68 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 68 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 68 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 29. 11. 2024 11:09:35 Figure 14: A plaque – part of the Better Ballymun Trinity Comprehensive History Trail – appe-aring alongside the main Ballymun road. The text reminds of the arrival of the first tenants to Ballymun. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 14/6/2022. 69 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 69 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 69 29. 11. 2024 11:09:36 29. 11. 2024 11:09:36 Figure 15: Caricature of the perpetually out-of-order lifts in Ballymun flats. Build, July/August 1994. 70 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 70 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 70 29. 11. 2024 11:09:36 29. 11. 2024 11:09:36 Figure 16: Photos my interlocutor was showing me while talking about organising activities for children in Ballymun. Blocks are visible in the background. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 19/7/2022. APPENDIX - SOCIO-ECONOMIC PROFILE OF BALLYMUN9 Table 1: Population of Ballymun from 1971 to 2016. Year 1971 1979 1986 1991 1996 2002 2011 2016 Population 13,000 18,000 18,598 17,045 16,566 15,160 16,236 17,575 of Ballymun-15,190 The statistical data for Ballymun puts the area at odds with the rest of the city and country in terms of unemployment, single-parent households and single men, in the ratio of young population, and in the ratio of deprivation. In 2006, the POBAL index measuring the af- fluence or deprivation of areas described two districts of Ballymun as “very disadvantaged” and two as “disadvantaged”. In 2011, the same index designated three districts of Ballymun as “disadvantaged” and one as “marginally below average”. 9 The sources used: Ballymun Local Drugs Task Force (2000), Ballymun Partnership (2002), Breeze (2003), Doolan (2000), Foxe (1998), LAP – Part 2 (2017), Loughran and McCann (2006), Montague (2021), Power (1993b, 1997) and RTÉ Archives (1971). In- formation from the Central Statistics Office (personal communication, 2023) is also used here. Note that the information in these sources does not always entirely match. 71 Formation of community A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 71 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 71 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 Table 2: Unemployment in Ballymun (compared with national rate of unemployment) from 1982 – 2016. Year 1982 1987 1991 1996 2002 2011 2016 Unemployment 30-45% 65% 33% 38% 9% 31% 27% in Ballymun Unemployment N/A. 17% N/A. 8.7-18% 2.7% N/A. 13% in Ireland Table 3: New lettings to two-parent families, single-parent families and single men in Ballymun – changing profile through the 1980s. Year 1980 1982 1984 1986 New lettings to 78% 64% N/A. 22% two-parent families New lettings to 18% 31% 48% 35% single-parent families New lettings to 2% 2% 7% 33% single men Here are a few further data illustrating the socio-economic pro- file of Ballymun through the years. In 1980, 68% of all council lettings in Ballymun were to people dependent on state benefits. In the 1985, the percentage of all single parents housed by Dublin Corporation al- located homes in Ballymun was 45%. In 1991, 40.7% of all households in Ballymun were single-parent households, and in 1996 that had risen to 51.7%. A total of 71% of Ballymun households were dependent on social welfare as their only source of income. In 2002, 62.3% of households in Ballymun had an income below 50% of national average income. In 1991, 76% of households in the area were renting their ac- commodation from the local authority, whereas in Ireland at the time 80% of homes were owner-occupied. In 2006, 61% of households in Ballymun rented their home from the local authority, while in 2011 this had fallen to 50%, compared to the Dublin average of 11.5%. 72 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 72 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 72 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 Community and Local Authorities The Ballymun urban community is in no sense a static entity. Instead, it is in a constant state of becoming as its boundaries shift and become more or less permeable, as I hope to have shown in the previous chap- ter. Ballymun, as also noted above, was a product of collaboration be- tween the national government and local authority – and of their mis- communications and oversights. Thus community in Ballymun, being a social housing estate, has been, and continues to be, densely perme- ated with the structures of authority and government. It is an area in which even today, despite the rising number of private apartments and new residents, there is a high number of social housing residents who are tenants of the local authority. The dependence of many of the local residents on the state’s assistance and on the local authority’s services means that the relations with these bodies are an important fact of life for the residents. The changing relationship with authorities, their 73 Community and local authorities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 73 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 73 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 changing policies and presence or absence, are all strongly experienced by the residents. Indeed, they are felt emotionally, and complaints about the local authority’s and government’s policies are the topic of emotionally engaged everyday conversations. This chapter is thus concerned with community and govern- ance. Governance refers to the art of steering societies (Vymětal 2007: 8) and to “modes of governing in which a multitude of public and private actors from different policy levels govern society through net- works and soft policy instruments” (Hysing 2009: 647). It is different from government, in that government refers to “hierarchical govern- ing by nationally organized political institutions” (ibid.). Governance is about power and relationships (Vymětal 2007: 8) between people and entities, and this is what this chapter is about. It seeks to explore the way the idea of community has transformed with the neoliberal shift in Ireland, and the way governance is oriented towards the space of community. Also important in this chapter is as a consideration of the role of the local authority – Dublin City Council – as the most directly present and tangible governmental entity in the area. Ireland is a highly centralised country (John 2001: 78), with its local government system organised in a three-tiered structure. There are eight regional authorities, two regional assemblies and 34 local authorities; of these, 29 are county councils and five are city councils (Collins and Quinlivan 2010: 362). The system of local government in Ireland is weak, however, and subject to strict central control, finan- cially dependent and with a narrow functional range; local authori- ties, whose members are locally elected, are in the Irish context not a separate governmental system, but rather agents of the central govern- ment (Chubb 1992; in Forde 2005: 137). The local authorities are the main providers of local government services; their operational areas primarily include issues of housing and building; road transportation and safety; water supply and sewerage; developments and incentives and controls; environmental protection; recreation and amenities; and agriculture, education, health and welfare (Collins and Quinlivan 2010: 363). CHANGES IN GOVERNANCE Due to a crisis in finances in the 1970s and 1980s, Dublin Corpora- tion did not have the means to do much more than “administer some basic services from a distance” in the case of Ballymun (Boyle 2005: 74 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 74 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 74 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 184). A significant change took place in the 1980s, however. A trans- formation in the mode of governance affected the very structure of the community, and the sense of its strength. Along with this changed po- litical ethos of the 1980s, the relationship between the community and local authority also changed significantly. The bleak conditions of the 1980s triggered a strong commu- nity response. This was demonstrated in a number of initiatives stem- ming from that period (Power 2000: 248-56), many of which are still active today. When the Bank of Ireland closed its branch in Ballymun in 1984 as the estate was too poor to be profitable (Power 2000: 254), the residents responded by forming a Ballymun Community Coali- tion. The organisation, established in 1987, formed a community run and controlled credit union. In addition, in the same year the resi- dents created a job centre – the first in the country to be community run – “to provide a locally controlled job placement and employment creation service” (Hayes and Greaves 1993: 2), as well as a Housing Task Force (Boyle 2005: 185), whose task was to link all the parties concerned with the housing estate in a single forum and plan for its improvement (Power 1993a: 22). By the end of the 1980s over 90 local community organisations had been established, of which 32 were offi- cially recognised tenants’ associations (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 54; Power 1997: 250). In 1985 we set up a club /…/ we had one room, there was no running water /…/ it was like a garage. /… Youth work is the most impor- tant community builder there is in any community. Because it brings parents and children and neighbours together, it brings everybody together. (Stephen) Simultaneously, a shift was also seen in the Corporation’s ap- proach to the management of the area. The centralised management that was used before was being replaced by localised Corporation of- fices, and partial inclusion of the residents in the decision-making pro- cesses was also introduced. Local tenant groups, for example, gained power to screen potential new tenants that were to be allocated dwell- ings in Ballymun, and had a direct impact on decisions such lettings (Power 2000: 248-9). The relationship between the Corporation and tenants started to improve at the time (Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 57), and cooperation between local initiatives and local authorities became more common than before. An example of a community-led initiative, cooperating with the Corporation for the better integration of new tenants, was, as Oisin explained, 75 Community and local authorities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 75 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 75 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 a group called LINX, so anyone that moved in, the Corporation gave them their name and address, so you got a letter inviting you. That was a social service over in the towers, it’s still up operating now. It was a purely social home, they’d have a pool table and they’d have a lunch during the day. Alina: And that was for the new people who moved in the area? Oisin: That’s right, to introduce them. It was to combat isolation. /…/ It was right in the centre, the Thomas Clarke tower. /…/ That was a good introduction for me because you made friends here. The new cooperative relationship between the Corporation and residents is perhaps best exemplified in the case of the Housing Task Force, set up in 1987. It brought together “public representatives, the statuary authorities and representatives of the community” (Hayes and Grieves 1993: 2-3). A Dublin Corporation architect, following the new trend in architecture whereby the community is actively in- volved in the creation of its environment, started working alongside community groups and became a member of the Task Force (ibid.: 5). Building relationships between the representatives of various groups within the Task Force was its “major achievement”, and enabled “in- creased understanding of each other’s perspective” (ibid.: 14). When European funding10 for the Task Force ended, it was the Corporation that continued to provide further support (Power 2000: 252). CHANGES IN COMMUNITY This change in the Corporation’s approach towards Ballymun is reflec- tive of the wider shift in Irish politics that took place in the mid-1980s. Between 1988 and 2000, the Irish economy was booming after years of decline (Ó Riain 2014: 50-9). Ireland embraced American-style eco- nomic policies of a cheap and flexible labour force and government policies aimed at increasing competitiveness (Bartley and Treadwell Shine 2003: 145-6), opened itself to external investments. This period of prosperity, known as the Celtic Tiger (see e.g. Breathnach 1998; Ó Riain 2014), was not experienced equally by all citizens. Despite the average household income in the years 1987 to 1994 rising by 30%, there were also growing income disparities. There was heightened po- larisation between skilled and well-paid workers and unskilled workers 10 Ireland entered the European Economic Community in 1973 (MacLaran and Kelly 2014b: 20), and had been receiving funding from the EEC during this period (Breath- nach 1998: 314). 76 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 76 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 76 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 who were poorly paid and often in part-time or temporary work ar- rangements. Additionally, new economic sectors made the positions of many unskilled workers obsolete and the individuals involved un- employable (Breathnach 1998: 312-3). As such, certain areas in the city where socially rented accommodation was prevalent, such as Bal- lymun, were left largely untouched by the Celtic Tiger prosperity expe- rienced elsewhere (Clarity 1998; Norris and Murray 2004: 85). With an acknowledgment of the hardening social divisions being a consequence of economic restructuring, a new discourse of “social exclusion” entered the political arena in the EU (Welshman 2007: 183), and was also adopted by Ireland (see Moran 2006; Bar- tley and Treadwell Shine 2003: 146). The awareness of socially ex- cluded segments of the population triggered attempts to reintegrate the poor into the labour market, which soon came to the forefront of official social policies. These stressed that while the socially excluded had rights, they also had duties (Allen 2000: 37). As a consequence of the social exclusion discourse, the policy of the Irish state towards poverty became spatialised and focused on specific communities and their development (Saris and Bartley 2002: 14-5; Meade 2011). In these new policies, the community thus “emerges as a third space be- tween the excluded individual and the state, and it is at this commu- nity level that most interventionist, employability and even policing programmes are located” (Moran 2006: 188). However, what actu- ally happened was that the risks of market capitalism were transferred from the state to the community, and left for the community to ad- dress (ibid.). This was in no way a complete break with how the social sphere was treated in Ireland beforehand, which is why neoliberalism was so readily embraced there. Having long been subjugated to the needs of capital, even before the neoliberal shift welfare in Ireland was seen as a private matter, best resolved within the family or community, with non-state actors being its primary providers (Meade 2011: 891, 893). In addressing the issue of social exclusion, terms such as “active citi- zenship” and “community development” thus became part of the lan- guage of the state (Meade 2011: 898; Saris et al. 2002: 175). The view that every community has strengths that can be built upon (Saris et al. 2002: 175) was reflected in a changed type of governance policy, which stressed the role of partnerships between actors at the local level. As Giddens puts it: “State and civil society should act in partnership, each to facilitate, but also to act as a control upon, the other. […]. [I]t is particularly in poorer communities that the fostering of local initiative and involvement can generate the highest return” (1998: n.p.). 77 Community and local authorities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 77 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 77 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 Such a corporatist partnership model of governance (Geoghe- gan and Powell 2006: 848) at the national level promoted the idea of capital, labour and the state as social partners (MacLaran and Kelly 2014b: 26). The national model whereby the state facilitates agree- ments and pacts between employers and unions (Geoghegan and Powell 2006: 848) was further extended to the local level (Ó Riain 2006: 312), which resulted in the established infrastructure of area- based partnerships (Meade 2011: 896). As part of this new age of partnership governance, in the 1980s the state thus began supporting community groups (Geoghegan and Powell 2006: 849). In stressing the way such groups contribute to reducing poverty, the idea was that “individually, citizens would work their way out of poverty and into inclusion: collectively, they would become partners in government” (Meade 2011: 895). This, however, resulted in what Meade, through a Foucauldian lens, views as a productive technique to “conduct the conduct” of socially excluded constituencies (2011: 905). RELATIONSHIP WITH LOCAL AUTHORITIES The Dublin Corporation/City Council, colloquially known as “the Corpo”, the main landlord, is considered the true adversary of the Bal- lymun community by Ballymuners. It is at the heart of “class warfare” (Cully 2019: 20) – or rather, it used to be. Despite the fact that the lives of many residents depend on the assistance provided the local au- thority, Dublin City Council is deeply disliked in the area. While its presence is necessary and needed in the functioning of everyday life in Ballymun, its actions and policies are also often viewed with hostility. The absence of official assistance and the authority’s neglect of the flats and houses rented by the residents are the cause of much discontent. As a local Councillor told me herself : I think the relationship between the Council and residents is very fractured, but both need each other to actually make the community work properly. Dislike and distrust towards the City Council was frequently shared by my interlocutors and expressed in their accounts of life in the area. One of them was particularly outspoken about her aversion towards the City Council and articulated her distress at its neglect of her home: 78 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 78 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 78 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 The City Council here is crap. /…/ They’re nothing. You can phone them up and you say “Right, I need this, I need that, I need that” – “Yeah, I’ll get back to you”. Two years later you’re still phoning up. What about, oh, yeah, “I’m looking into it”. And then you just go mad, “Listen, I’ve had enough. Now if you don’t do it, I’m going to go to the paper and tell them to come and have a look. I’ll photograph it and put it in the newspaper, so that people can see the living conditi- ons of what people are living in today in these courts.” (Marie) The relationship of the residents with the local authorities has in fact been tense since the very beginning of their settlement in Bal- lymun, with the Corporation / Dublin City Council typically being blamed for much of the daily hardships the residents had to endure, as implied in the published memoir of a former resident, looking back at a childhood spent in Ballymun in the 1970s and 1980s: From the outset, the decent people of The Mun [Ballymun] had been kicked in the teeth. First by the Corporation who failed to follow through on their promises, and allowed the town to deteriorate in ways they could have rectified with just a little sensible thought […]. (Connolly 2006: 165) This shared dislike of the Dublin City Council and govern- ment, expressed in everyday conversations in Ballymun, is cohesive in the sense that people share a collective experience of distress and disap- pointment in relation to their work in the area, thus creating a feeling of insidedness and a sense of community. Moreover, such talk also has a mobilising potential in its constructing the authorities as adversar- ies. The following conversation with Connor, a resident of Ballymun, demonstrates the readiness of the locals to actively engage in action against the City Council: Connor: See where we’re sitting here now? I don’t want them to build any apartments here. Alina: Are they planning to? Connor: I don’t know. But you couldn’t trust Dublin City Council, they’d say yeah, go ahead and do it. Where I would come here and protest the council, because it’s… this is nearly the only bit of gree- nery that we have. The sense of shared place and belonging that is felt as a conse- quence of these everyday practices is continually forming the Ballymun community. Indeed, as I argued before, here too it is evident that the community is in a constant state of emerging: it is never already a third space between individuals and government, but rather needs to be con- tinuously co-opted as such. That is, turning “active citizenship from a citizen’s demand into a governmental strategy”, thereby potentially 79 Community and local authorities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 79 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 79 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 stripping it of its radicalism (Newman and Tonkens 2011: 16). As it is not a fixed entity, but in a continuous process of becoming, it may also always take on a different role. Despite the global shift towards “government through community”, the community members have not been passivised by it, nor co-opted themselves into the agenda of those in power. Instead, I argue, the community in Ballymun may manifest itself both as a strategy as well as a tactic, to use de Certeau’s (1988) concepts. De Certeau distinguishes between tactics and strategies “as a means for explaining the types of political behaviours people are likely to employ and to encounter in their manoeuvrings through the politi- cally charged landscapes of their daily lives” (Tangherlini 2000: 47-8). A tactic is, according to de Certeau, a practice that is “determined by the absence of power”, whereas a “strategy is organized by the postula- tion of power” (1988: 38). When a local community thus functions as a space of government, it takes the form of a spatial strategy; when, on the contrary, a community emerges through the space of everyday talks, especially when these are imbued with complaints against the government or local authority, it takes the form of a spatial tactic, re- sisting the strategies of those in power. Community in Ballymun thus exists simultaneously in a dual form. On the one hand, it is that which a community of active citizens should be – permeated with ties of soli- darity and mutual help, which take the place of official welfare chan- nels that are lacking. On the other hand, the community also exists through a state of shared struggle and affectivity, oftentimes bonding through brief everyday interactions, that position many of the social tenants in the area in an opposition with the government structures. A CHANGED COMMUNITY The effects of this political shift were widely felt on a local level, with the Ballymun community being no exception to this. The institu- tionalisation of community groups and the professionalisation of the work in them is usually viewed by Ballymuners as having harmed the community’s strength and weakened its voice. The anxiety triggered by the consequences of the new policies is clearly expressed in the 2006 report of the National Advisory Committee on Drugs: “The community in Ballymun is well used to organising itself. However, there is a sense that a level of local bureaucracy has taken over the community voices, and that concerns are not being heard” (Loughran and McCann 2006: 8). 80 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 80 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 80 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 As Stephen, a founder of a youth club which was established the 1980s, told me, his qualifications as a youth worker were consequently questioned by representatives of the authority: I remember being invited down to meet some of the staff there, and this fella said to me: “Who are you, what education have you got? How can you be a youth leader? What training have you got?” So, I said: “Good luck to you!” While among the factors identified as contributing to the weak- ening of the community is the arrival of new residents to the area who are not social housing tenants, as well as the regeneration taking place at the turn of the millennium, it is, however, often construed as a con- sequence of the changed mode of “governance” as well: I’d say we have much less community development now. Because so many things are professionalised, or para-professionalised. So, whe- re there were volunteers, there are now professionals, many of them don’t live in Ballymun. (Matt) The community used to be an entity which was in opposition to the national and local authorities, and it was precisely this position of the community through which people identified with the place and related to it. No roll-back of the authority actually took place in Bal- lymun with the neoliberalisation of Ireland. On the contrary, through the use of community as a “governmental strategy” (see Meade 2011; Newman and Tonkens 2011), it has become further ingrained in the area. Bulley and Sokhi-Bulley similarly maintain that this shift is “thus smuggling in more government, greater social control, under a guise of empowerment, freedom and less government” (2012: 466). As Rolfe further argues, “communities [thus] become activation targets for gov- ernments needing local partners to tackle issues not thought amenable to top-down intervention” (2017: 579). Whereas in the past the com- munity in Ballymun used to take shape as a spontaneous configura- tion of angry residents, meeting together to express their discontent and plan action, it has since the 1980s, and in particular the 1990s, started taking shape as a set of institutionalised groups, employing pro- fessional “community development workers” and taking on the nature of a “minibureaucracy” (Boyle 2005: 192). Much of the local activism which used to be against the local authority thus transformed to be- come activism working hand in hand with the local authority. However, I argue that as community functions on various lev- els and in different contexts, its meanings likewise vary. On the one hand, it takes the shape of a bureaucratic network of institutionalised 81 Community and local authorities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 81 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 81 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 groups, representing an interface for the meeting of state authorities and individuals. On the other hand, it manifests itself in daily interac- tions of people, in their everyday bonds of sociality and, for example, in their casual daily conversations, imbued with criticism of the local authority. CONCLUSION The Corporation/City Council that used to function as a detached and external adversarial Other, has since the 1980s entered the area and become an everyday presence in Ballymun. Since the mid-1980s, the mode of governance underwent a change, with the state increas- ingly functioning as a facilitator within partnership structures. The community became co-opted by the government which started “gov- erning through community”. The Corporation simultaneously became a localised entity, more directly involved with the residents. The local authority structures in Ballymun are generally dis- liked, however, and distress at their actions – or lack of action – is often expressed in conversation. The Corporation is thus usually seen as an adversary, while at other times it is seen as a collaborator of the community. As such, members of community occasionally position themselves against Dublin City Council, and at other times seek to work with it. Community in Ballymun, as I have argued, continually emerges in the everyday practices of those who live there, thus func- tioning not only as a strategy of governing but also as a tactic opposing those strategies. Community, Rose similarly stresses, is: the object and target for the exercise of political power, while rema- ining, somehow, external to politics and counterweight to it. […] It consists of multiple objectifications formed at the unstable and un- comfortable intersections between politics and that which should and must remain beyond its reach. (2000: 1401) Despite the prevalent sense of the community in Ballymun los- ing its strength today, partly as a consequence of its bureaucratisation, brought about by the neoliberal shift, community nonetheless contin- ues to be strongly felt, and continues to have a major role in people’s lives. Community is, as I have hoped to demonstrate in this and the previous chapter, one of the key elements in the construction of Bal- lymun as a place. Community is what gives Ballymun a meaning and it presents a medium through which people relate to the place. As Gupta 82 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 82 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 82 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 and Ferguson (1992: 8) claim, it is through the cultural construction of community (as well as through the involvement of the place in a sys- tem of hierarchically organised spaces) that a space achieves a distinc- tive identity as a place. It transforms the space which was created by the forces of modernisation and state planning into a meaningful place for its residents. The presence of the community and its significance are felt even by those residents who claim not to be full members of it. Community is seen as that which makes Ballymun a positive place, a place capable of defending and improving itself. And it is the commu- nity which makes it a liveable and even loveable place for its residents. 83 Community and local authorities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 83 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 83 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 84 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 84 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 Sensing Urban Generation The lodging of community activism within an increasingly profession- alised bureaucratic system, as shown in the previous chapter, is only one of the changes that were being implemented towards the end of the millennium. These developments form part of the wider “Third Way” policies, prominent in the areas of welfare provision and urban planning in Western Europe. The Third Way is a political and econom- ic programme that aims to steer a middle course between the Fordist- Keynesian – that is, state interventionist – and neo-liberal, free mar- ket, positions (Boyle 2005). The Third Way programme encompasses five key ideas: “transcending the distinction between left and right; advancing equality of opportunity; employing mutual responsibil- ity; strengthening communities; and embracing globalisation” (Leigh 2003: 10). The term “social exclusion” which has come to dominate the political discourse since the 1980s and 1990s (Peace 2001: 18), 85 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 85 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 85 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 as discussed above, represents a key goal in the Third Way discourse. By substituting “social injustice” with “social exclusion” as the main problematic, the goal of such policies is no longer to achieve “equity” (Stevenson 2004: 126) but rather “inclusion”, invariably understood as participation in the economy, or inclusion of citizens in the labour market. The idea of an interventionist state with a redistributive agen- da has thus become obsolete, with its place taken by the ideal of a small government, mutual obligations (Stevenson 2004: 126) and partner- ships between the government and civil society, constituted of activ- ised, moral and responsible citizens (see Clarke, 2005). The post-war years were in many Western countries character- ised by a Keynesian-Fordist state (Kitchin et al. 2012: 1305), which embodied a pact between the interests of capital (wealth accumula- tion) and labour (wealth redistribution) (Powell 2017: 226). Keynes, concerned with post-war recovery, propagated three goals: “to sustain full employment; to achieve greater distributional justice through pro- gressive taxation; and to provide state funded social services for hous- ing, health and education” (ibid.: 15), Ireland did not immediately benefit from Keynesian welfare reforms (ibid.: 5), and lagged behind other states in adopting a strong welfare approach. As Norris argues (2016), the development of the Irish welfare state was uncommon, as rather than being the consequence of the power of urban industrial classes, it was largely driven by the agricultural ones. Thus welfarism was constituted for a long time mainly through the provision of hous- ing, and an expansion of social security benefits in Ireland only hap- pened in the 1960s and 1970s (Norris 2016: 196). Consequently, writes Dukelow, during the 1970s, “a Keynesian repertoire of policy instruments was only beginning to be used in conjunction with wel- fare development and the Irish welfare state was in a belated period of progress” (2011: 412). Yet when the oil shocks of 1970s and 1980s caused a global economic crisis, Keynesianism was largely abandoned worldwide and economies were restructured. Keynes’ approach was grounded in the post-war context of a booming economy, when oil was treated as inexhaustible and economic growth as unrestrained by the availability of energy (Mitchell 2011: 141). The oil crisis therefore provided a trigger for a political challenge to Keynesian approaches, providing a new way of constructing economy, namely through supply and demand. Neoliberalism thus made its way on the global arena as the dominant political and economic project (ibid.: 177). The undoing of the Keynesian state was part of a project “char- acterized by a dismantling and reconfiguration of state institutions, a reorganization of urban space, and a proliferation of discursive 86 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 86 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 86 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 practices geared to (re)-activate civil society” (Fairbanks II and Loyd 2011: 5). Consequently, the 1970s are also seen a turning point in the histories of Keynesian welfare states, which from that time on turned into increasingly “post-Keynesian”, that is, neoliberal (Starke, Kaasch and van Hooren 2013: 53). The restructuring of the economy from a Fordist-Keynesian regime of a centralised welfare state, “oriented to the spatial equalisation of living standards and employment opportu- nities within its borders”, to a decentralised neoliberal one “wherein regional economies pursued their own economic interests through direct participation in the global economy” was accompanied by a re- structuring of state spatialities (Breathnach 2010: 1181). This restructuring of spatiality occurred both on the national level and within cities. On the national level, a hierarchical core-pe- riphery system of relations between cities and regions in Ireland was substituted by a polycentric one, whereby towns and cities became in- tegrated directly into the global economy – and not into the national one, as had hitherto been the case (ibid.: 1184; 1191). Within the cities, this new approach to urban planning redeveloped urban areas, “facilitating the property-development sector” and “promoting ‘gentri- fication’” through regeneration policies (MacLaran and Kelly 2014a: viii). As cities and regions competed to attract mobile investment, whole areas were being subjected to makeovers to improve their im- age (MacLaran and Kelly 2014b: 14). From the mid-1980s, Irish urban planning became increasingly infused with an ethos of entrepreneurial- ism, as private interests were prioritised in planning, and development was subsidised through tax incentives (ibid.: 29). In 1986, the first set of official urban renewal policies was developed to deal with the prob- lems of urban decline. They were concerned primarily with the physical development of areas. A decade later, however, new policies were set into motion, concerned with the holistic regeneration of areas, and thus oriented towards the transformation of physical, economic and social aspects of the environments and communities (Brudell and Attuyer 2014: 206-7), in line with the Third Way political programme. Based on the principles of the Third Way, government invest- ments in communities and civil society, through funding and urban re- generation programmes, were not undertaken without some demands being made. Citizens, in the Third Way ideology, are understood to have both rights and duties (Clarke 2005: 447), and so in return for state intervention, communities need to be(come) comprised of active citizens (Boyle and Rogerson 2006: 202). Within this political and cultural programme, citizens need to be transformed from “passive recipients of state assistance into active self-sustaining individuals” 87 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 87 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 87 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 (Clarke 2005: 448), as they need to be liberated from the state. It is from this community-based ethics that citizens – construed as mem- bers of communities – are to derive their aspirations and direction (Rose 2000: 1398). In this chapter, I will look at the changing ideas of welfare in Ire- land and the ways these have informed the regeneration process. More- over, I will show how a transformed political subjectivity emerged in the welfare recipients as they were “responsibilised” into “active citi- zens”, and how their sensory perceptions accompanied these social transformations. More specifically, by looking at heating practices and the perception of heat in the residents’ homes, I will demonstrate the sensorially felt social changes that were introduced by neo-liberalism and the Third Way. REGENERATION OF BALLYMUN The strength of the Ballymun community had a central role in securing funding and initiative for the regeneration of the area (Carnegie and Norris 2015: 501). The initial decision with regard to the regeneration and its early stages took place in the context of the buoyant economy of the Celtic Tiger years. Uneven development, discussed above, as well as low unemployment and skills shortages in Dublin, “led to an incentive to re-integrate the reserve army of labour in places such as Ballymun” (Muir 2004: 961-2). The fundamental objectives motivat- ing the regeneration were to “lift the residents out of welfare-depend- ency, to reposition the suburb within the market economy, reattach the locals to the mainstream and accordingly to create so-called ‘sus- tainable communities’” (Boyle and Rogerson 2006: 206). While the initial step in the mid-1990s (Prichard 2000: 64) was a refurbishment of the tower blocks (Kintrea and Muir 2009: 83), this plan was soon discarded. Instead, it was decided that demolishing and then rebuild- ing the dwellings was more viable (Carnegie and Norris 2015: 500) for both “financial reasons and […] sustainability11” (Committee of Public Accounts debate 200812). 11 There is no explanation in the speech as to what “sustainability” refers to. It might refer to: a) the energy wastefulness of the buildings (heat etc.), b) deficient construction and expensive repairs, and c) societal revitalisation and improving the image of Ballymun (creating so-called sustainable communities). 12 Geraldine Tallon. Committee of Public Accounts debate – Thursday, 1 May 2008. Spe- cial Report No. 61: Ballymun Regeneration. 88 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 88 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 88 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 The funding for the regeneration was secured through public- private partnerships13 (Carnegie and Norris 2015: 500). In 1997 the Dublin Corporation gained the government’s support for a wholesale renewal of the area. In the same year, it formed a company called Bal- lymun Regeneration Limited (henceforth BRL), which was to be in charge of development and implementation of the regeneration pro- gramme and of promoting inward investment (Purcell 2007: 18). In 1998, after a five month long local consultation process (Prichard 2000: 66), BRL formed the initial regeneration masterplan (Kintrea and Muir 2009: 83-4) [Figure 17], that is, a “high level strategic in- tegrated plan providing the planning framework for the entire devel- opment” (Purcell 2007: 15). The masterplan’s strategy of regeneration was outlined under five main programme categories: housing; em- ployment; education and training; neighbourhood identity; and town centre (BRL 1998: 1). The goal of the regeneration was to achieve the physical, economic and social integration of Ballymun into the wider urban area (Kintrea and Muir 2009: 84). In terms of housing, the previous high-rise buildings [Figure 18] were demolished [Figure 19] and in their place over 5,600 homes in low-rise buildings (houses and blocks) were built at a higher density in the area (BRL 2006: 12). Of those, over 2,000 homes were built for the social housing tenants, who were rehoused from the blocks to their new homes; the rest of the dwellings were provided as private, co-operative and voluntary housing (BRL 2006: 12) to achieve a better mix or residents. At the end of the century, that is at the beginning of regeneration process, 80% of housing in Ballymun was public housing and 20% was owner occupied (BRL 2008), in contrast to the national figure, where only 9.7% percent of housing was social (McGrath 2015). Among the key aspirations of the regeneration project was changing these figures and increasing tenure and social mix, aiming for 57% of private housing in the area (Purcell 2007: 11). Other changes that the physical regeneration of Ballymun brought about include the development of a new civic centre on the Ballymun Road, as well as new community facilities, such as art centres 13 Funding was secured from a variety of sources. Funding from the Remedial Works Scheme, which funds the refurbishment of dwellings rented from local authorities, was secured to demolish the blocks and rebuild the dwellings aimed at social housing ten- ants. Tax incentives subsidised the building of commercial facilities and private apart- ments around the main road. The socio-economic aspects of regeneration were funded by a separate government agency with the exchequer funds (Carnegie and Norris 2015: 500). Some of the projects within the regeneration programme were also funded by European Union (Kintrea and Muir 2009: 90). The initial estimation of cost was €442 million, but by 2012 this had risen to €1 billion (ibid.: 85). 89 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 89 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 89 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 and sports and leisure centres (Purcell 2007: 4). Each of the five neigh- bourhoods in Ballymun received its own neighbourhood centre as well, their purpose being to create a “village buzz” (Kapila and Finnan 2019). Additionally, new parks and infrastructure were built, and Bal- lymun Road itself was transformed (Purcell 2007: 4). New employment opportunities were created in the area (Kin- trea and Muir 2009: 93), and training and education were provided by local organisations with the aim to upskill participants (BRL 2006: 72-760). Despite some improvements, the project was generally not considered a complete success. The development of a promised Busi- ness and Technology Centre never happened, and the metro line which was supposed to connect Ballymun with the centre of Dublin was never constructed either (Purcell 2007: 26). Most importantly, the existing shopping centre was demolished to make space for a new one, which as yet remains unbuilt. This is because the 2008 economic crash affected the private-public partnership upon which regeneration was dependent, and as private investors abandoned the project the plans for the shopping centre were halted (van Lanen 2017). Altogether, the regeneration programme took much longer than forecast – intended initially to be finished in less than a decade (Kintrea and Muir 2009: 85), the regeneration actually took 17 years and ended only in 201514 (LAP 2017: 1). SENSORY MEMORY OF HEAT The regeneration of Ballymun, which has aimed to transform not only the physical environment but also the subjectivities of the residents, is often viewed by those very same residents in a rather negative light. There are several reasons for this: first, the goal of the Third Way ap- proach with regard to regeneration, namely community participation, is generally perceived as not having been achieved.15 Second, people complain that many of the promises made within the regeneration 14 Identifying the end date of regeneration is a complex matter and information on it var- ies. In 2013, BRL as wound down, but the last blocks were still being demolished in 2015. I consider here 2015 as the end of the regeneration project, or 17 years from its beginning, which is the date that is stated in the official Local Area Plan in 2017. Ac- cording to the residents, however, the regeneration never actually finished, as they feel that its promises were never fulfilled. 15 The documentary The 4th Act (2018), by film-maker Turlough O’Kelly, showcases the top-down power processes and influences which were underlying the discourse of “community participation”. 90 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 90 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 90 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 plans were broken, as the building of many of the promised facilities was not carried out. Consequently, feelings of disappointment are common among the residents, as is dislike of the local authority, Dub- lin City Council, the owner of BRL, for not delivering on their under- takings to the residents. Third, people feel that the regeneration project has actually harmed the community in a variety of ways. As they were moved from flats in high-rise blocks to their new homes in low-rise blocks and houses in Ballymun, they got new neighbours, which led to a disruption of social relations based on proximity. Most of the resi- dents remained in the area, but they were often rehoused in different neighbourhoods in Ballymun to those they used to live in. In addition, new people moved to Ballymun to buy or rent the private dwellings, which were now available on the market. The newly arrived residents of private apartments from outside the area have at times come to be viewed as a threat to the existing community, as they often distance themselves from the older residents. Moreover, a policy aimed at in- creasing tenure diversity (introduced in 2008) banned those living in Ballymun from claiming any rent supplement.16 Consequently, young people in the area were forced to look for homes away from their fami- lies and support networks in Ballymun and to move to nearby areas (Neylon 2021; McGrath 2015). Fourth, people feel that drug dealing has become more obvious than before. No longer contained within the flats in the blocks and invisible to most, it now takes place in public spaces, such as streets and residential courts, thus presenting a danger to the residents – particularly so to the children who are approached by dealers. The feelings of people towards the regeneration are most clear- ly expressed in their narratives – reflected in them, most commonly, are disappointment with the local authorities and nostalgia for the old towers and flats. The wholesale regeneration of the area is not only a matter of narratives, however. It is, as is no doubt self-evident, also a matter of senses. The transformation of the physical environment of the area has transformed the related sensory experiences and de- manded shifting practices of sociality. The changing urban landscape is experienced through all the senses and the whole body (Montser- rat Degen 2008: 9). While the whole materiality of the area changed, so too were the sensory perceptions reorganised and a new sense of 16 Rent supplement is a support payment to people living in private rented accommoda- tion who cannot afford the private sector prices on their own. Rent supplement, howev- er, is increasingly being substituted by a similar renewed scheme known as the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), which is not banned in Ballymun. 91 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 91 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 91 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 place created. To sense something is to have the capacity to remem- ber, Seremetakis (1993) argues, as one remembers through sensing. Sensing and sensory memory are in this way related. “Sensory mem- ory”, she claims, “is a form of storage, [that is,] the embodiment and conservation of experiences, persons and matter in vessels of alterity” (Seremetakis 1993: 4). Here I will focus on a particular sensory experience – namely the transformation of the experience of heat within the intimate space of the home. In paying attention to the heating practices and senso- rial experiences of heat in public housing estates, I take inspiration from Catherine Fennell’s research (2011) conducted in Chicago. As in her work, in Ballymun heating and experiences of heat also turned out to be an important subject for residents. The exploration of heat- ing infrastructure, organisation and experience in the area provides an interesting lens through which to gain an understanding of how the shift from a Keynesian-Fordist welfare state to a neoliberal one, and the corresponding shift from government provision to individual re- sponsibility, is sensed and intimately felt by the residents. Narratives about heat kept cropping up in conversations with my interlocutors in Ballymun. When asked about their memories of the times before regeneration, they would most commonly bring up their experiences of heat. Central heating was an idiosyncrasy of the estate. The district heating system operated through a central boiler house, where the heat, generated by liquid fuel (Doherty 1967: 111), that is, oil and gas boilers (Halligan 2011: 11), was supplied to over 2,800 households in 36 flat complexes and 450 houses (Ballymun Re- generation News 2010: 2). The flats themselves had poor thermal in- sulation (Halligan 2011: 15), and the heating was delivered through built-in coils in the concrete floor slabs of the dwellings (Rowley 2022: 324). Heating was supply oriented, which meant that there was a very high use of heat in the flats (Gaillot et al. 2008: 10). This is because while the residents of the houses were able to have control over the degree of heating, those in the flats were unable to regulate it them- selves. The heat in the towers could only be regulated by the residents through opening of the windows (Waters 2011). Contrary to the aca- demic literature, which talks of the failures of the system – the high costs, inability of the residents to regulate it, potentially a contributing factor in certain types of bronchial and stress-related illness, etc. (e.g. Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 48-9 – the residents recall the heat that was being provided to them with a sense nostalgia: 92 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 92 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 92 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 The heating, you always got good heating on, so you put your clothes on the floor and they were dry the next morning. It was more cheaper like... (Patrick) It was the best place I ever got to move in. There was underfloor hea- ting, so you could walk around with no socks on and you’d be swea- ting. You could take your top off and the drips would be coming out of your forehead. (Connor) But your own flat, private flats… and this flat, big space, and the heat would hit you in the face. /…/ and the rent was very nominal. (Oisin) The extreme heat provided to the flats was invariably remem- bered positively, and even longed for. In most of the narratives, the enjoyment of the high levels of heat that was provided to the dwellings is related to the fact that it was also very cheap for the tenants, since in Ballymun it was included in the cost of rent (O’Neill 1992: 46). The memory of that inexpensive heat was thus often contrasted with the present situation. When Thomas, a friend and interlocutor, arranged for us to visit his neighbour and friend Marie, heat and the lack thereof was raised in the conversation more than once. Marie is seventy-two and had moved to Ballymun from her previous home in East Wall (an in- ner city area on the northside of Dublin) in the 1990s. She first lived on the fifth floor of one of the seven towers, until it was demolished, and she was then relocated to a duplex house in Coultry Drive. Af- ter she experienced health issues, however, the house was no longer suitable for her due to its many stairs. Consequently, she was relo- cated to a much smaller house in Poppintree, on the other side of the main Ballymun Road, although she is not satisfied with it, because of the lack of space and dampness. When we arrived at her house we were greeted at the door and then sat down in the living room and started to chat. It was the end of May. Marie was wrapped in a warm home robe, whereas Thomas and I remained in the light jackets we had been wearing outside. It was mostly Marie who talked, though Thomas did occasionally join in. Heat came up in conversation, and both interlocutors remembered it as a good characteristic of life in flats where they used to live. Marie: Now the flats were beautiful, we had constant hot water, we had constant heat [Thomas: Mhm], now we have nothing [Thomas: Hehe]. Later in our visit, Marie left to go to the bathroom. When she was absent, Thomas asked me if I felt the cold in the room. I had a 93 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 93 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 93 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 jacket on, so I did not feel cold and was actually surprised by the ques- tion. But he commented there was “a dense cold in here”, that he felt it and that Marie often “gives out [complains] about it”. Heat has been usually conceptualised as a specific mode of touch (haptic senses). Le Breton states that “conditions of heat or cold in the surrounding environment rebound off the skin” and that “air en- velops the skin like an invisible piece of clothing, which may be warm or cold depending on the circumstances” (Le Breton 2017: 116). Skin is the interface between the body and environment. The sensory recep- tors on the skin receive stimuli of heat and cold (Rodaway 2002: 42-3), and it combines with the muscles of the body and its mobility to “to permit us to explore the tactile world” (ibid.: 44). Senses are both internal and external phenomena, however. As Stuart argues, “feelings of heat or cold or warmth are partly internal and partly dependent on contact with external forms” (2005: 60). Al- len-Collinson and Owton further maintain that the sense of heat may at the same time take both the form of touch and of a distinct sensory perception. They claim that what commences as tactile experience, the touch on skin of an exter- nal heat source (sunshine, the heated air of the gym) may then con- tribute to the generation of feelings of inner-core heat, so that it is no longer possible to distinguish ‘external’ and ‘internal’ heat. Indeed, there are problems with conceptualizing heat experience as ‘external’ or ‘internal’ at all, for in lived experience such distinctions are not quite so neat. (Allen-Collinson and Owton 2015: 262) Heat thus has a trans-boundary capacity: it is perceived “both within the human body and at its boundaries where it touches/merges with the external world” (Allen-Collinson and Owton 2015: 253). Sensations of heat and cold, Gray (2013) argues, are sensations of pro- cesses of transference of heat rather than representations of states of things – their heatness and coldness. Thus for Gray experiences of heat and cold constitute “the opposite processes of thermal energy being transmitted to and from the body, respectively” (2013: S131). Van- nini and Taggart see thermoception as an interface and treat it as a type of affect, in the sense of “the body’s capacity to be moved and be affected, and the body’s capacity to move and affect other people and other things” (2014: 66). Conceptualised as such, thermoception is not a passive sense, but a skill and a set of practices (ibid.). 94 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 94 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 94 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 DIFFERENT HEATING, DIFFERENT HEAT The house in which Marie now lives, unlike her previous home in the tower block that was demolished, is sensed as “a cold place”. Heat in her new home is no longer abundant, as it was in the flats, nor is it as inexpensive. The payment of rent and heating bills in the flats used to be consistent and based on a differential rent system. The system which was applied in Ballymun meant that the rent paid by each ten- ant was directly related to the income and other circumstances of their household. According to a parliamentary debate in 1970 a man earning £18 a week and supporting a wife and four children may have been paying only about £3 a week in rent and rates for a five-roomed house in Ballymun (plus a charge for central heating and hot water), although it cost the Corporation more than £6 a week to provide and maintain the house—over and above the rates ele- ment17. Their costs for similar accommodation in a flat in the sche- me would be much higher. In cases of hardship, the Corporation may remit the rent altogether. (Dáil Éireann debate 1970)18 In practice this thus meant that tenants in Ballymun paid less than their full share of the upkeep costs that the Corporation bore (see also Brady 2016). With the relocation to the new homes, the heating system changed. Tenants were now able to control the heat, but they were also charged for it, depending on their usage. A part of a BRL document on the topic of heating and the change in heating system in Ballymun is important, as it shows the way heating came to be seen as the respon- sibility of the residents: In the old flats, heating was included with the rent charge. In the new homes, people are responsible for their own heating bills. (2006: 33) The new heating system, which introduced the consumerist model of participation in the marketplace (Newman and Tonkens 2011: 12), embodies the idea of a responsible and self-sustaining citi- zens who manage their own life and well-being (Clarke 2005: 448) and are an autonomous agent, no longer “dependent subjects waiting on the state’s whims” (ibid.: 450). As consumers, such citizens have 17 A differential rent system was in use by Dublin City Council, according to which social tenants were charged a different rent depending on their personal and economic situa- tion. Consequently, some tenants were paying more and some less for the same kind of home. 18 Robert Molloy. Dáil Éireann debate – Thursday, 21 May 1970 Vol. 246 No. 12 95 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 95 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 95 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 choices, but these must be exercised responsibly. They are not only re- sponsible, however; rather, they go through a process of “responsibili- sation” (ibid.: 451). This was enacted in partly through the work of local organisa- tions. The Community and Family Training Agency (CAFTA) in Bal- lymun, for example, which was started in 1987 and funded during the regeneration as a “community development project” (Combat Poverty Agency 2008: 3) states in its work description the following: [CAFTA] is contributing to the growth of sustainable communiti- es in Ballymun. All of its courses are broadly concerned with family, personal and community development. […] Many of its courses are designed to help people transfer from high-rise flats, with centrally provided services, to local houses, and to deal with budgeting and other issues associated with the transition. CAFTA’s housing transi- tion course informs people about […] how to plan for a new mode of living where, for example, heating is the resident’s decision and there are bin charges rather than waste chutes. As is evident from the case of CAFTA, it is through the em- ployment of pre-existing local community groups that the tenants are responsibilised to become increasingly self-reliant (Jones, Aryal and Collins 2013: 444). The new system of heating, where heat becomes a part of resi- dents’ decisions and responsibilities, implies a shift in political sub- jectivity from that of sensory comfort to that of risk (Fennell 2011: 52) and anxiety. “The sensory care” of social housing tenants before the regeneration “exceeded basic survival needs by incorporating the more affective, indulgent and subjective qualities of comfort” (Fennell 2011: 48). This has changed dramatically since the regeneration. As people remember the past, they remember it through heat being abundant and cheap: We miss the money we had in our pockets back then, ‘cause we con- stantly had central heating and water and the… now we need to pay for rubbish this, pay for hot water and pay for heating. It’s a culture shock ha ha ha. (Niamh) And all of a sudden, the same amount of money they give us, and now we run a house… and there’s people in home freezing cold, starving, you know, no television cause they haven’t got electricity, and bills, bills, and rubbish fucking flying all around our back… (Thomas) The abundance and low cost (or even no cost) of heating, which characterised life in the old flats, were not the only things contribut- ing to feelings of comfort before the regeneration. The heat is often 96 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 96 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 96 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 remembered in relation to certain household practices – such as walk- ing barefoot at home and drying clothes on the heated floor – as well as the separate issue of getting rid of waste easily and for free through the waste chutes. Living in the flats is thus remembered as convenient and comfortable: I liked the flats, I did. As [Thomas] says, we had no problem with the heating, we had no problem with a lot of things, and hot water at the turn of the tap, the black bag was full of rubbish, just go out to the door, pull down the chute, throw the bag down, that was it… but now, they charge us… if we want to get rid of our black bags, I leave it outside the door and a fella collects it, and we pay one euro extra on my rent, so does everybody else on this court. (Marie) Marie: Now the flats were beautiful, we had constant hot water, we had constant heat, now we have nothing. Thomas: And the rubbish was easy to dispose, cause we had this […], there was this chute, you could just throw it there. […] It was simple, and then it just got com- plicated. (Thomas) This nostalgic remembrance of the “easy” way of doing things is contrasted to the way they are done today, where things are no longer so easily given by or taken care of by the state, but instead form part of the choices and responsibilities of residents. They are expensive and contribute to people’s financial anxieties, and are also individualised. With the shift in the welfare state to one oriented towards consumerist users of services, the provision of such services became de-collectiv- ised (Newman and Tonkens 2011: 13). In the old system of heating, while not always reliable – people were sometimes left feeling cold as there were occasional malfunctions and the heating was turned off in warmer parts of the year – the sensory sensations, usually of comfort and occasionally the lack of it, were shared among everyone who lived in the area. In the new context, on the other hand, sensory pleasure or deprivation varies across households. No longer a common, shared experience, it depends on the individual (or the family unit in a house- hold) and their ability to be “moral citizens”, that is, consumers. The deprivation of comfort experienced by some thus becomes a sign of their own inadequacy and lack of responsibility. The amalgamation of memories of flats, heat, reasonable prices and a bounded community is thus often reflected in the narratives of my interlocutors. The heat-that-was in the flats is associated with the community-that-was – both now viewed as weakened and at risk. You have to understand, in the flats, we had the community, we had reasonable prices, we had reasonable rent prices, we didn’t have much bins [bills], we didn’t have much gas [bills]… (Thomas) 97 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 97 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 97 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 Patrick: Ah, I miss my flat terrible. Dylan: There was constant hea- ting and everything. Patrick: The community was more closer. Dylan: Yeah it was, he’s right. Patrick: The community was more closer, like. The changing sensory experience – from sensory comfort to sensory risk, from collective sensorial experience to an individualised one – is thus common to those residents of Ballymun who lived there before and after the regeneration. As they nostalgically remember the past and the place that used to be, they at the same make meaningful the present. The sensory pleasure of the heat in the flats is juxtaposed with the risk-bearing attributes of comfort and budgeting in the new dwellings. The sensory experiences of the past place and narratives thereof thus provide a framework against which to compare the less- than-satisfactory present and in reference to which tenants construe its meaning. The intimate sensorial experience of the global and wide-rang- ing set of changes that have occurred makes the residents of Ballymun particularly aware of their own vulnerability in their positioning with- in the global economy. The area has been hit badly by economic crises in the past, and it was overlooked by the economic boom from which other areas prospered. “When Dublin sneezes, Ballymun catches a cold” (McCann 1991: 3; Somerville-Woodward 2002b: 51) is a local saying, and the idea is expressed frequently in conversations with resi- dents. As consumers, responsible for obtaining their own comfort and pleasure, the residents bear the risks of an economy in crisis. When the war in Ukraine started and gas prices and cost of living rose, financial anxiety was expressed in many conversations. Sitting at a café in Bal- lymun early in March, I overheard a heated conversation between a couple of women. While their children were playing around the café, they were lamenting to one another about the (then beginning) Rus- sian attack on Ukraine, and the consequently rising prices of gas and heating in their homes. Coincidentally, the conversation took place at a café in the Re- discovery Centre, a National Centre for the Circular Economy in Ire- land, which used to be, up until 2011, the boiler house responsible for providing district heating and hot water to the residents. This build- ing is itself a stark embodiment of the changing place of Ballymun, accompanying the attempts at transforming the subjectivities of its residents. During the regeneration, the boiler house was occasionally the focus of artistic initiatives, but it was planned to be demolished after the flats came down. However, a local recycling group began a campaign to save it, and European funds were awarded to repurpose 98 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 98 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 98 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 the structure into an exhibition centre for sustainability, a textbook building (O’Toole 2016) “in which best practice reuse and green con- struction methods would be encoded into the texture of the building and its surroundings” (WISER n.d.). The building [Figure 20] now hosts a café, an eco-store [Figure 21], workshop spaces for repurpos- ing fashion, bicycles and paints, and gardens and is an exemplar of sustainability. It caters to activated, environmentally aware consumers – the ideal residents of Ballymun. CONCLUSION The oil crisis of the 1970s and the global neoliberalisation that it brought was thus not only experienced economically but was also sensed bodily by the residents of Ballymun. In this chapter, I focused on explicating the ways this shift was reflected in heat and the chang- ing sensorial perception of it. Through the lens of heating and sense of heat, I have also shown how a collectively shared experience of heat in the Keynesian ordering of the welfare state was exchanged for an individualised sense of it, construed as one’s personal choice. Through the exchange of heat with their environment within their homes, the social housing tenants in Ballymun thus intimately experienced the transformation of the Keynesian welfare state to a neoliberal free-mar- ket one. The same transformation corresponds to the coinciding shift from government to governance, most tangible in the bureaucratisa- tion of community and urban regeneration projects. The key resources of governing are the “self-regulating capacities of subjects, shaped and normalised through expertise” (Miller and Rose 2008: 22). Citizen- ship with this shift was no longer understood “in terms of solidarity, contentment, welfare and a sense of security established through the bonds of organizational and social life” (ibid.: 48), but rather, as al- ready mentioned, in terms of activity, self-regulation and choice. This transformation is primarily guided by local community groups, what Miller and Rose term the “government through community” (ibid.: 90). While the community did indeed become the space of governing citizens – members of various communities – it was not always nec- essarily so. The old sense of community is remembered nostalgically by the residents (alongside the heat, which was shared communally), as that which used to be and is no longer present as such. With the shift in governmentality towards governing at a distance, citizens are educated so as to be able to govern themselves and “political power 99 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 99 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 99 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 29. 11. 2024 11:09:37 has come to depend upon a web of technologies for fabricating and maintaining self-government” (ibid.: 52). However, the more periph- eral role of the government, as enacted by this shift, does not imply that there is consequently less governance (Clarke 2005: 3). And, as Saris et al. argue, any roll-back of the state is far from the reality in the deprived neighbourhoods of Dublin, where residents regularly experience the state in both its guises, such as police and welfare officers, and in its new forms of Partnerships and Task Forces. Indeed, few of their fellow citizens have anywhere near as much state contact, and few have so many aspects of their lives managed and nor- malised by state and para-state structures, while having around their life-world so many social fissures. (2002: 188) APPENDIX Figure 17: One of the pages of BRL Masterplan for the Ballymun regeneration. The photo shows a plan of New Ballymun, with violet colour referring to new housing, orange to office space and red to shopping facilities. Main points of the Masterplan are summarised on the left bottom side. (BRL Masterplan 1998: 1). Courtesy of Ballymun Community Archive, Ballymun Library. 100 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 100 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 100 29. 11. 2024 11:09:38 29. 11. 2024 11:09:38 Figure 18: Aerial view of Ballymun, 1979 (Photo: Pat Langan, The Irish Times). Available from: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/ballymun-at-50-from-high-hopes-to-sink- -estate-1.2731512 Figure 19: Demolition of McDermott Tower, 2005 (Photo: Alan Betson, The Irish Times). Available from: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/ballymun-at-50-from- -high-hopes-to-sink-estate-1.2731512 101 Sensing urban generation A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 101 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 101 29. 11. 2024 11:09:38 29. 11. 2024 11:09:38 Figure 20: Old boiler house building from afar. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 5/7/2022. Figure 21: Eco-store that is part of the Rediscovery Centre in the old boiler house. Photo: Alina Bezlaj, 5/7/2022. 102 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 102 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 102 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 Two Places, Two Moralities In the previous chapter, I demonstrated how a shift in the welfare state was intimately and significantly experienced by the long-term resi- dents in the area. I also pointed to the moralising vision of the local authorities, who attempted, via regeneration of the area, to transform the residents into better citizens. Indeed, morality is a topic that has cropped up often in the historical accounts of Ballymun and its con- struction. Suburban life, high-rise buildings, social housing, living density, home-ownership, possession of a garden… all these facets of living find their place in various normative frameworks, informed by the Church, the state and local authorities, the middle classes or other influences. In this chapter, I will build upon the previous one on the moral tones of regeneration and pay particular attention to the question of morality in Ballymun. I will attempt to demonstrate that there are two 103 Two places, two moralities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 103 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 103 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 different core frameworks of morality which co-exist at different levels in the area and which occasionally come into conflict positions, as they presuppose a different kind of personhood. On the one hand, the local authorities have attempted to impose one type of normative frame- work in the suburb, which is occasionally adopted by the residents, but more often contested. On the other hand, the residents – particularly so long-term residents – draw upon an alternative moral framework that guides their behaviour and informs their constructions of mo- rality. This alternative moral framework is primarily concerned with relationality. Community – and the place of community – are both value-laden terms for the residents and consistently rank high in their normative frameworks. As such, here I will take into account their moral engagement with the people and the world around them. The two moralities that coexist in Ballymun, I will further ar- gue, both correspond to their own place – each is thus related to its own vision of Ballymun. In will base this argument on the claim by Preston that “practices take place in physical contexts, and it is not only the practices, but also the physical contexts, that are morally thick” (2009: 178). MORAL UNDERTONES OF THE “NEW BALLYMUN” As I have already demonstrated, one of the underlying purposes of the regeneration in Ballymun was also to transform the subjectivity of the residents. The “immoral” conduct of subjects who were far removed from the neoliberal ideal and were living in a degrading environment was countered by the government structures reshaping and rebuilding that environment. The moral undertones of the processes that reshape neighbourhoods are not unique to Ballymun. Indeed, as Ruppert states in his study of a Toronto neighbourhood, “problematizations of space are euphemisms for problematizations of the conduct of groups”, so that “rather than on the overt moralization of conduct, practices focus on space, thereby concealing their foundations in moralization” (2006: 228). Cully, furthermore, makes a strong claim that all urban renewal is informed by an “idea of the poor as ‘undeserving’ and ‘im- moral’” (Cully 2019: 20). The goal to “moralize the conduct” (cf. Ruppert 2006) of Bal- lymun’s residents was one that stemmed from the ideology of the Third Way programme, which presupposed a kind of person-citizen who is self-sustainable and independent (see Chapter 5). This goal is reflected 104 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 104 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 104 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 in specific urban policies which, informed by this political programme, aim to animate and regenerate public spaces so as to achieve inclusion of the excluded population in the public sphere (Stevenson 2004: 128). The process of regeneration, which implemented these wider changes in the political orientation of Ireland and its welfare state into Ballymun, is often criticised not just by the locals, who are living in the context of its consequences, but also by academics writing about it. The latter have described such Third Way urban programmes of envi- sioning and creating “good” communities (Boyle and Rogerson 2006: 201, 203) as a “thinly veiled moral crusade” (ibid.) and claim that they are ideologically grounded in “moral elements of control”, basing their vocabulary on “moral scolding” (Crawford 2001: 74) which insists on individual and communal responsibility (Crawford 2001). “Morally commendable communities” within such a viewpoint, as Boyle and Rogerson explain, “are defined as those who can reattach themselves to the ‘mainstream’ and stand on their own two feet within the terms set by neoliberal market economics” (2006: 201). In fact, while the regeneration was supposed to be driven by the engagement and participation of local residents, it has been in- stead largely taken over by professionals and their vision of the place. Indeed, the documentary The 4th Act (2018) illustrates the way the community was at all times said to be consulted and involved in the process, yet in practice ignored and pushed aside. A BRL employee in a recording which is part of the documentary film tells the residents, quite succinctly, that: “what is important is, that you the community have a process whereby you feel involved to the extent that you have confidence in the partnership approach that is delivering for you what the community’s needs are”. The approach taken by BRL had been, ac- cording to Cully (2019), indicative of the “controlling, carceral and classist” treatment of the Ballymun community. Indeed, the regenera- tion had been to a large extent conducted as envisioned by BRL and the Dublin Corporation – that is, in morally laden terms and without a high inclusion of community voices. Having established that the regeneration was indeed a morally informed project, it is now left to us to explicate further the ways in which urban restructuring in Ballymun specifically reflected this. In what sense did morality infuse the appropriation of space and the at- tempts at creating a different space? A part of the answer was provided in Chapter 5, which illustrated how a transformation in the system of heat supply to households in the area aimed to also change the residents of those households. Related to this is the transformation of buildings in area and a return to the cottage style of building, which had become 105 Two places, two moralities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 105 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 105 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 established since the 1930s as a morally preferred building typology, especially so in the suburban context (see Rowley 2019: 68). Fur- thermore, the culture, civic and neighbourhood centres which were built in the area, the purpose of which was to animate the community (Kapila and Finnan 2019), are also part of the agenda of engendering active citizenship and participation in the public sphere (Stevenson 2004: 128), and thus of creating appropriate individuals-citizens ac- cording to the Third Way programme. A particularly tangible moral note is present in the tenure mix policies, which were implemented during the process of regeneration with the construction of new mid- dle-class homes. The underlying rationale of diverse tenure policies is that low-income individuals will benefit from social interactions with people who have a higher socio-economic status, as middle-class role models may help instil “proper values” in the locals (cf. Crump 2002: 583), and it is through these role models that locals will learn about and adopt middle-class behavioural norms, such as a two-parent fam- ily lifestyle and commitment to education, employment and home- ownership (cf. Crump 2002; Carnegie, Norris and Byrne 2018). Such a rationale is clearly visible in the many discussions and writings on the tenure diversity in Ballymun. Gerladine Tallon, Secretary General at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Govern- ment, stated in a Committee of Public Accounts debate in 2008 that “that Ballymun is now evolving into a mixed tenure community, mov- ing from a cycle of dependency to a sustainable community in its own right.”19 Moreover, a BRL document stated that “in order to attract the private sector into Ballymun, the area must, somewhat, pertain to values of […] the professional classes”, and that the aim of artistic in- terventions in the area was “the education of a social group in line with ruling-class thinking” (as cited in The 4th Act). REPRODUCING MORAL VISIONS ON THE GROUND The moral concerns of the authorities that underlay the process of regeneration were most often implicitly present, and only occasion- ally found an explicit articulation in official texts and narratives. They were, nonetheless, to a certain degree and by some residents accepted, adopted and reproduced through discourse. 19 Special Report No. 61: Ballymun Regeneration. Committee of Public Accounts debate – Thursday, 1 May 2008 106 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 106 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 106 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 One of my interlocutors, for example, complained of the lack of employment opportunities in Ballymun, but also stressed her annoy- ance with the laziness of the younger generation in the area: But I worked, I used to travel to town and take two buses. But now people are lazy shits. (Niamh) Some people further locate the cause for a share of Ballymun’s problems in a certain group of residents, with their own negative characteristics. Another interlocutor told me that the place is being harmed by: people who, for whatever reason, are not good at being sociable, be- ing clean, not using drugs, not letting their houses go in decay… that is still problem. (Matt) Some of the moralising narratives that are undertaken by resi- dents themselves focus on the children and how they are raised. They don’t know how to have a kid. So that’s the problem, how do you solve that then? Then you have to educate the parents, but they’re already after having a kid, so it’s too late for them, and then you’re trying to educate the kid that their situation is not ideal and that they can have more, but they have to understand that the life their parents and their family are running it, that they can’t rely on that. They have to go better. (Ryan) For these reasons, the pursuit of a greater tenure mix was seen as a positive and beneficial policy. Many of my interlocutors felt that social mixing in the area among people with different socio-economic statuses – and specifically the better integration of middle-class people in the area – would indeed lead to more positive developments. Only occasionally, however, did some interlocutors also explicitly articulate such policies as being beneficial due to their direct effects on trans- forming the people themselves: You should make sure you have a mix of different type of people, not the same type of people, not all rich, not all poor. It has to be rich and poor so that one rubs off the other. I know they say one bad apple spoils the whole things. If you have a bad family, make sure you have five good families around, so that child has a chance not to become like their parents and to see how other kids are treated. (Caoimhe) Indeed, this was not an isolated statement. Narratives express- ing the need to change people and improve them, while not very com- mon, were nonetheless still heard. My interlocutor Ryan, for example, reiterated the need for people to change as follows: 107 Two places, two moralities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 107 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 107 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 The area looks better, they’ve built new things, it looks nicer. You see, but none of that is gonna change people’s attitudes. People have to change from within… The vision of morality and change of people expressed in these narratives thus reiterated, to a certain degree and in its own way, the official visions of local authority and BRL. These visions perceive the place and the community as weak when compared to the visions of ideal neoliberal areas and communities, and care for place – which all of the narrators profess – is thus oriented towards calls for a moral change of Ballymun’s people. However, such narratives that go in line with this vision that is imposed from the above are relatively rare. More commonly heard are various forms of contestation of such visions and a construction of an alternative image of Ballymun and its morality. Consequently, a differ- ent form of care for place is engendered. THE MORALITY OF “OLD BALLYMUN”: CONTESTING OFFICIAL VISIONS The New Ballymun, as conceptualised and built, thus imposes upon the residents a specific normative framework about what it means to be a moral person and what it means to be a good community. The morality present in this is inscribed in the place of post-regenerational “New Ballymun” – this moral vision has appropriated the place in both the public (see above) and private spheres (see Chapter 5) and shaped it to its own requirements. Occasionally, this version of morality also shapes the residents’ attitudes and normative codes. The New Ballymun, conceptualised and built to reflect, concre- tise and enforce the morality of neoliberalised Ireland, is not, how- ever, a place in which the long-term residents live exclusively, as it only constitutes one layer of their Ballymun. Their place is one of affective and sensory memories of the past, co-existing and overlapping with the New Ballymun. The “Old Ballymun”, which overlaps with the ma- teriality of the New Ballymun in residents’ experiences, is not a place that ever existed, but is rather a place of memory and imagination, one that is continuously drawn upon in place-making activities after the ruptures in place continuity caused by regeneration. Old Ballymun is a place which exists purely as an assemblage of memories and affects – it collapses various coexisting timelines and diverse places into one (cf. Hamilakis 2017) and overlaps the presence and absences of spatial 108 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 108 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 108 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 features of different manifestations of Ballymun. As a place, it gains its existence through affective memory and narratives of the past. This idealised place, simultaneously real and intangible, repre- sents for the residents an alternative framework for moral engagement than the one imposed by Dublin City Council through the regener- ated neighbourhood. Acts of remembering, which call into exist- ence this idealised place with strong community bonds, may “take on performative meaning within a charged field of contested moral and political claims” (Antze and Lambek, 1996: vii). Preston claims “the places from which we speak often give expression to our moral com- mitments”. Long-term residents of Ballymun, who every day encoun- ter, live in and draw from the Old Ballymun, thus speak from a place of their own, one that is inaccessible fully to anyone but themselves. Nostalgic remembrance, which continuously brings into being a multi-temporal place of its own, is therefore a common practice and a mode of moral engagement with the present. Nostalgia is both a “public sentiment” in Ballymun, as well as an “intimate and personal emotion” (cf. D’Orsi 20022) of the residents. The anger, sadness, yearning and disappointment that I often witnessed when my interlocutors spoke of the past is indicative of concurrently public and intimate existence of nostalgia as an affective attunement in the neighbourhood. Conceptu- alising it as an affective intensity that blurs the boundaries between the self, others, and the world, these nostalgic affects may best be construed as “ethically imbued and viscerally laden moods” (Throop: 2014: 65). Such nostalgic moods underlie the narratives of the past and reveal certain “moral concerns” (ibid.). While affective outbursts may bring them to the fore and intensify them, such moral concerns may also take shapes as less intensive moral moods, which inhabit “a dispersed tempo- ral and conscious expanse that lies somewhere between unrecognized sedimented habits and more ephemeral and accessible thoughts and feelings” (ibid.: 71). Ballymun residents’ nostalgic being-in-place thus implies a specific attunement to the world, and engenders and main- tains a distinct personhood, informed by these “sedimented habits”, from the one that the City Council is trying to impose. CARE FOR PEOPLE, CARE FOR PLACE Both the frameworks of morality which coexist in the area occasional- ly overlap, contest and compete with one another, offer visions of their own ideal personhood. Long-term residents create their conceptions 109 Two places, two moralities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 109 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 109 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 of personhood by contrasting the disappointing present with the ide- alised past. Narratives by the long-term residents about New Ballymun paint a picture image of broken ties and disengagement from care. People become very isolated, they close the door, they’re not involved in what’s happening around anymore. (Matt) Such a mode of living as described in the above quote, however, goes against the normative framework which is embedded in the ide- alised place of the past. That place, the Old Ballymun, acts as a source from which residents may draw when needed, as it may “help [them] navigate […] through both the physical landscape and social relations” (Degnen 2013: 558) of Ballymun. At the core of the Old Ballymun are images of strong community bonds and solidarity, of sharing and taking care of each other. Everybody knew each other, you could walk into each other’s flats. There was a lot of people helping each other, there was always some- one out there to look out for the kids… And there still is, to some extent. There still is that little bit of ‘I’ll watch over your house’. The solidarity and care that many narratives recall and locate in the Old Ballymun is reflective of a different moral engagement than the one presupposed by the government structures. In Old Ballymun, the relational ethics of care were prioritised over individualised visions of inclusion in the economy. Images of atomistic, self-governed individu- als, participating in contractual ethics, as imposed by the Third Way ideologues in Ballymun, are contested in these imaginations of Old Ballymun with visions and memories of the self as constituted through networks of relations and interdependence, networks created and maintained by care (cf. Sevenhuijsen 2002). The memory-place of Old Ballymun may thus further serve as a “means to articulate, legitimate, and […] constitute […] selfhood and relationships to others” (Antze and Lambek, 1996: viii). An articulation of selfhood and relationships is thus achieved through the work of nostalgic remembrance, which brings to the foreground a different place with its belonging alternative moral codes. Care, which comes into focus though nostalgic affects, is a habituated practice which guides behaviour and constitutes moral frameworks of residents. It is important to conceptualise it, argues Sevenhuijsen, both as “a concrete activity, in the sense of caring about and for daily needs, and as a moral orientation – as an ethics or a set of values that can guide human agency” (2000: 6). It forms a relationship, argues Bajič (2023), which constructs on the one side an entity that 110 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 110 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 110 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 needs caring for due to its vulnerabilities, and on the other those that may provide the care. In the case of Ballymun, place itself and its com- munity are considered as vulnerable and at threat, and care is crucial at resuscitating them and restoring the vibrancy of the past. In Ballymun, care is thus formative to relations between long-term residents of the area and is at the core of moral codes guiding behaviour in the area. My interlocutor Marie, for example, in a conversation with Thomas and myself, provides an illustration of one such instance of care which underlies relations among Ballymun’s long-term residents. Like one man that is in this court [the neighbouring area], you know him, Dan, he’s a very nice man, [...], and he has bowel cancer, God love him, but he loves coffee. When I go shopping, I always get him a jar of coffee, and Thomas always gets him a jar of coffee. […] Because he said to me, and I found it very hard, “I’m saving for my funeral”. Oh my god, “Dan”, I said, “please don’t say that to me”. […] So me and Thomas always make sure he has a cup of soup, pasta, spaghetti sauce, teabags, coffee, sugar, things like that. Me and Thomas always make sure, and I always say to Thomas: “Make sure you get the black bag [trash] for him”, and Thomas always does. This is a far from isolated narrative of solidarity and care among neighbours or friends in the area. Indeed, there is a whole set of nar- ratives about care for children and young people in the area, or about memories of that care (cf. chapter 3.4.). Where I live down there now I have lovely neighbours, I’m blessed where I live down there /…/ on the main road but it’s a little square, it’s only a tiny little square, but we call that our heaven. Cause there’s little children who play there, and I don’t mind watching, playing with kids … it is nice little community kind of. (Niamh) Many are also about (memories of ) relations among neighbours and neighbourly help in times of need. They are very good people around here. They are very helpful, if they know you’re sick or that, they’ll knock on your door… neighbours, or some friends – do you want me to get any shopping for you, do you need me to go to the pharmacy for you, do you need me to do anything around the house if you’re not able to do it? (Marie). Another one of my interlocutors, Luke, further talks both about the past and present relations with his neighbours. When describing the past relations, he nostalgically remembers the unlocked doors, bor- rowing sugar from others and a tight community. 111 Two places, two moralities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 111 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 111 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 I remember, everyone, the majority of people used to live the key in the door, and you wouldn’t do that now, but in the flats, people used to leave the key in the door. And my mother’s best friend lived over us, and if she needed a bit of sugar, drop of milk, she’s just come down, and open the door, walk in, we could be all sitting there and watching the telly, and she just passed by “I’m just getting a bit of sugar!” In describing his present situation, on the other hand, Luke talks of his efforts to establish contact with his current neighbours and setting up ways of getting in touch. I try to talk with my neighbours now, just two neighbours, on my left an Indian, from India, and then I think there’s a Polish family, and then there’s an Irish family. But I talk to them all, I do exchange my number with them, if there’s ever any problems, whether there is a problem where I live or if they have a problem… yeah, I try to engage with them, rather than not talk with them. I live there. (Luke) By remembering the strength of relations in the past, taking place in the flats of Old Ballymun, Luke draws on a vision of past, which informs his normative framework of what relations should be like. This in turn may lead his attempts at “trying to engage” with his neighbours and creating new networks of care in case of problems. The ethics of care become habituated and embodied, and are revitalised through the work of nostalgia (cf. D’Orsi 2022). CONCLUSION The ethics of care, as I have hoped to illustrate, permeate networks of relations in Ballymun. As relations are spatially bound, and practices of care “take place” in spaces of Ballymun, there is a strong intertwine- ment of place and people – indeed, they are mutually constitutive (Sack 1999: 26), and places themselves become “morally thick” (cf. Preston 2009). Thus, I have argued, the residents of Ballymun nos- talgically engender a vision of a place – the Old Ballymun – which provides a source of a framework for morality which contests offi- cial normative visions. Affectivity which underlies such nostalgic re- membrance further engenders a specific mode of engagement with the world. “Nostalgia […] arise[s] as the emotional habitus” through which long-term residents of Ballymun “develop their life narratives, […] preserve their form of sociality and trigger a process of self-for- mation” (D’Orsi 2022: 860). 112 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 112 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 112 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 The personhood that is formed through nostalgia and the ethics of care is a relational personhood (cf. Sevenhujsen 2000) which forms through relational networks. I will further explicate the relationality of personhood in Ballymun in the next chapter, where I will demon- strate the ways in which the self, the community and the place have all become interconnected in the case of long-term Ballymun residents. The next chapter is thus oriented towards the fusion of boundaries be- tween residents and their place. 113 Two places, two moralities A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 113 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 113 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 114 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 114 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 Self, Community and Place Fused Boundaries Between 20 In the previous two chapters, I discussed how the environmental trans- formation was accompanied by attempts to change personhood. In this chapter, I will continue to explore the relationship between peo- ple and place. I will do so, however, using different concepts and ap- proaches. I will primarily focus on the issue of affectivity in relation to public places and discuss how past and present co-exist in the affective experiences of the residents of Ballymun.20 Affects, which will be in the theoretical focus of this chapter, can be generally conceived as the intensities that pass from bodies to bodies and arise in the midst of in-betweenness. They are commonly understood as encompassing “the various capacities of bodies to affect 20 This chapter is a revised and shortened version of an article titled “ Affective dynamics of belonging in a regenerated Dublin suburb” in Emotion, Space and Society (in print). 115 Fused boundaries between self, community and place A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 115 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 115 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 and be affected”; the concept thus refers to forces and intensities that are visceral (Frykman and Povrzanović Frykman 2016: 12). Affects are the “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than con- scious knowing” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1). The focus on affects and affectivity in this chapter means that I will be relying much less on the information expressed in the narratives themselves, than I will on the information gathered through my own sensory work in the field. Tones of voice, bodily gestures, rhythm of speech, facial expressions and movement or stillness all relay, on a pre-cognitive level, informa- tion about the affective worlds of my interlocutors. In this chapter, my main research material will therefore be what Wikan (1992) termed resonance. Resonance, Wikan argues, demands “an effort at feeling- thought; a willingness to engage with another world, life, or idea; an ability to use one’s experience […] to try to grasp, or convey, meanings that reside neither in words, ‘facts,’ nor text but are evoked in the meet- ing of one experiencing subject with another” (1992: 463). ATTACHMENT TO BALLYMUN When I first met and started chatting with my interlocutors, I was sur- prised by the extreme strength of the positive emotions they expressed in relation to their town – that is, to Ballymun. All my interlocutors who were long-term residents of the area seemed strongly attached to the place. The more I talked to people, however, and the more I felt their appreciation and love for Ballymun, the more I felt those affects rubbing off on me. From being enthralled by people’s love for Bally- mun, I have come to love it myself. One of my most meaningful connections in Ballymun hap- pened as a result of this shared emotion. I was attending a community event taking place at Setanta GAA club in Ballymun– a “meet-your- neighbours”-type event – when I started to talk to a person who was sitting next to me. Always looking for new interlocutors, I was quick to mention that I was there doing field research. The conversation thus moved on to Ballymun, and I could not help myself but express my newfound enthusiasm and love for the place. I was asked about the reasons, and I tried to describe it – the colour of Ballymun felt differ- ent than that of the rest of Dublin, less brown and more like home. The buildings, at least those along the main road, were still taller than is usual in Dublin, and I experienced a sense of familiarity with the high buildings, more so than with low-rise ones. I talked of the people 116 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 116 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 116 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 I met, their love for the community and place, how unfamiliar that was to me, and how riveting it was to listen to them. My enthusiasm about Ballymun touched my interlocutor, Dylan, who was to become a friend and had since often gone out of his way to help me in my research. Some time later I was sitting at a café with Oisin, the interlocutor I met at the community garden where we both volunteered. Soon after sitting down and starting to talk, Oisin told me that he had already heard about me doing research on Ballymun, and that I was writing about the positives, not about the drugs, crime, and other social problems. Dylan already mentioned it, he said. Oisin was not good friends with Dylan – he was not even sure if he got his name right – but nevertheless, he heard about me and my work. The fact that I felt love for the place and was not focusing just on the “negative” aspects of Ballymun sufficed for him to be not just willing but even happy to talk to me. Despite my initial surprise at hearing people talk about their love for Ballymun (which one could seldom hear in Ljubljana, my home- town, for instance), this is not as uncommon as I thought it was. Love for a place, Scanell and Gifford state, is “a prevalent part of human his- tory and culture” (2014a: 24). Such affective bonds of people with place are most often conceptualised under the term “place attachment”, which Hidalgo and Hernandez define as “a positive affective bond between an individual and a specific place, the main characteristic of which is the tendency of the individual to maintain closeness to such a place” (2001: 274). Place attachment, Low and Altman argue, is a phenomenon that encompasses affectivity, cognition (thought, knowledge and belief ), and practice (action and behaviour) (1992: 4-5). Bonds to place are affective as they contain elements of emotions, positive or negative ones. At the same time, they are also cognitive – they encompass beliefs, memories, knowledge etc., that make places meaningful. These cognitive-emotion- al bonds gain their behavioural component in the sense that they inform the actions of people in relation to the places to which they tie them (Scannell and Gifford 2014b: 274-5). The experience of place attach- ment is also important for people’s well-being, especially in reinforcing their sense of belonging to a place and its community (Scannell and Gifford 2014b: 288). The attachment of the residents to Ballymun was partly directly expressed in my interlocutors’ statements, but even more so in the enthusiastic way they talked about the place: I love Ballymun, Ballymun is me heart. (Saoirse) It’s a great place like. I grew up in it. (Liam) So when I come back to Ballymun it’s coming to a home. After thirty years yeah, rooted in the place. (Oisin) 117 Fused boundaries between self, community and place A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 117 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 117 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 This sentiment is also reflected in the statements of my inter- locutors who had at a certain time moved out of Ballymun in order to find a better life, but came back and learned to appreciate the positive aspects of the life there: I had problems in Ballymun, so I left and went to Tallaght, but I didn’t like it. Yeah, I came back. Then I went to England, and then I came back. Anywhere I went, I came back. Why did I come back? It’s home. Yeah, Ballymun is home. Just because I probably grew up here like. (Luke) Other still claimed that they would never even think of leaving Ballymun, and appreciated the life there: I love Ballymun, I’d live here for the rest of me life, I love it. (Caoimhe) But I would never plan to move, I like it. I would like to stay local, cause all of my [clients] are local, I like the area. (Ryan) Attachment is usually not based solely on the physical aspects of the focal place, but also incorporates its meanings and social relations. “Places”, argue Low and Altman, “are, therefore, repositories and con- texts within which interpersonal, community, and cultural relation- ships occur, and it is to those social relationships, not just to place qua place, to which people are attached” (1992: 7). This aspect becomes evident in Niamh’s emphasis on the relationships among people in Ballymun being the main reason for her to move back and stay here: … I moved out of Ballymun, I did move out of Ballymun when I was 18. I’m gonna do me own thing, get me own place… I moved to town, I moved to Cork… back into town, Lucan, lived all over the place. But I could never settle anywhere else, I would always feel lonely. Even though there’s loadsa people around you in town, you’d walk down the street, you wouldn’t bump into one person you know. Ballymun, if you’re down, you walk out, you’ll see somebody that you know. You’d always say how’s everything, how’s you ma, how’s your sister, how’s that, you’ll always see somebody. Indeed, place attachment is often regarded as equivalent to a sense of community. Furthermore, experiencing a place may occur on both the individual and communal levels (Relph 1976: 36). At- tachment on the individual level means that the place is meaningful to someone for personal reasons (for example, due to the personal memories tied to it). On the other hand, attachment on the collec- tive level implies the meaningfulness of a place determined by a group, rather than by individuals (Scannell and Gifford 2014b: 274). Groups 118 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 118 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 118 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 frequently develop attachments to place “through shared symbolic meaning among members of the group” (Smith 2018: 5). While mean- ings may thus be shared across groups, groups are never completely ho- mogenous, and members may participate to a greater or lesser degree in the meaning-sharing activities. ATTACHMENT AND TEMPORALITIES Indeed, there seems to be an important difference in the attachment to Ballymun between long-term residents of the area and those who have newly arrived. In my fieldwork I mostly focused on those who had lived in the area since before the regeneration. The few talks I had with newer residents, on the other hand, made me aware of signifi- cant differences between their experiences and those of the long-term residents. The post-regeneration residents expressed no such strong positive attachments to Ballymun as I had observed among the former group. If they saw positives in Ballymun, it was in the facilities it pro- vided and its location being not far from downtown. Moreover, they were also very aware of the negative image of Ballymun, and expressed a degree of fear with regard to going to certain places that were seen as dangerous. Contrary to the newer residents, the long-term residents in Ballymun that I interviewed invariably spoke positively of the place and talked of it with fondness and even devotion. While they were aware of its potential dangers, they did not have any “no-go zones”. As some interlocutors explained, it was the fact they always knew some- one anywhere in Ballymun that made them feel safe going wherever they wanted. What became obvious in the conversations with the long-term residents, however, was that they expressed much less attachment to the New Ballymun, that is, to its contemporary manifestation, than to Old Ballymun – indeed, the former was a much more ambiguously experienced place. The residents sometimes found New Ballymun to not be aesthetically pleasing: But it’s completely different now Ballymun, I call it Legoland. Beca- use it’s all the houses are different shapes, different colours, it’s like Legoland. And they hid all the old houses with all the new houses, so when people are driving through, they think “oh, it’s nice”, but when they go in through, they’re like “oh”. (Luke) 119 Fused boundaries between self, community and place A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 119 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 119 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 At other times, they feared that the new Ballymun was losing its distinctiveness from other suburbs: It’s starting to look like Tallaght [working-class suburb in the south- -west of Dublin], I think, with all the big buildings. (Caoimhe) The towers and big roundabout on the main road with under- ground tunnels for pedestrians are the images of that mark the dis- tinctiveness of Old Ballymun, and it is precisely this amalgamation of images that forms the notion of place that the long-term residents expressed attachment to. Memories of the towers, roundabout, flats, heat, community and a shopping centre engendered most of the posi- tive affectivity of the residents towards the place. The significance of these images, and the nostalgically created ties among them, is clearly expressed in the following statement by one of my interlocutors who relates them to community and identity: It was just more community, Ballymun roundabout and all. It was an identity. You know the way you went, you could go the country, go up to mountains or whatever, and you’d look and, you’d point out Ballymun cause you’d see the flats and you’d see the towers. (Patrick) Place attachment implies a certain temporality: it ties a per- son to the place and involves a continuity of the relationship be- tween them. The continuity of the relationship of person with a place (that is, to the object of attachment) means that the present is related to the past and to the future (Lewicka 2014: 51). “Awareness of the past”, Tuan maintains, “is an important element in the love of place” (1974: 99), and it is memory that is the glue that ties people to the place, as emotional bonds are grounded in memory (Lewicka 2014: 51). It is therefore not surprising that the experience of place attachment among the residents differs widely depending on their time spent in Ballymun, and that the long-term residents relate to it differently than that the newer ones. SELF, COMMUNITY AND PLACE Long-term dwelling in the area may also mean that the self and place become more closely intertwined. As Jones and Evans write, “body and landscape become entangled with the individual’s memory of on- going physical engagements with place” (2012: 2321). When Bally- mun as a place was talked about, it was often discussed interchangeably 120 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 120 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 120 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 with the people who inhabit it or with the community as a whole: “I’d know majority of Ballymun. Well, majority of people who are involved in stuff ”, Luke affirmed. “It’s a good place, yeah, it’s a good community”, Maeve said, making no clear distinction between the two. Even more indicative was Liam’s comment during a conversation he had with me and Dylan. When Dylan was telling us about the new luxurious stu- dent apartments that were built in the area and what all facilities they contained, Liam commented: “No, it’s not for Ballymun” – referring to the inaccessibility of the building to the general residents. This assumed identity of people (community) and place in everyday talk is understandable. Place is de facto that space which has been invested with meaning, and affects, by people; among those most routinely investing the meanings and affects into it are the very people who inhabit its space. As such, place is “constituted through a gathering of elements that are themselves mutually defined only through the way in which they are gathered together within the place they also constitute” (Malpas 2006: 29). Mutually containing and constituting one another, place and people are thus separable only insofar as mind and body, or the observer and the observed, are separable – Cartesian dualisms which anthropology, with the spatial turn being no exception (Merrifield 1993: 518), usually attempts to surpass. While people do objectify place and separate the self from its surroundings (Greif and Cruz 1999: n.p.), there is nevertheless a visible coalescence between place and people, as was illustrated in a variety of ways during my discussions with the residents – as Liam commented: “You can take a boy out of Ballymun, but you can never take Ballymun out of a boy.” Liam’s statement, indeed, implied the notion of the embodi- ment of place. As the boundaries of the self and body are porous, this porosity enables affects to unfold in the in-betweenness of bodies (Slaby and Röttger-Rössler 2018: 2), not necessarily only human ones (Pile 2010: 9). Affects relate the human and non-human, animate and inanimate, and slide over the distinctions between them (Wetherell 2012: 3). Brennan, furthermore, argues that “there is no secure dis- tinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’” (2004: 6). As Helander-Renvall also emphasises, “[p]laces really gather experiences, and they engage human and non-human persons in various activities. By doing so, they [places] become themselves social beings and actors” (2010: 49). Affectivity, I would argue, thus emplaces the selves in Bally- mun, and at the same time animates the place, infusing it with hu- man qualities. My interlocutors invariably referred to Ballymun as a 121 Fused boundaries between self, community and place A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 121 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 121 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 being, alive and organic: “The place struggles”, “it’s lost its soul”, “its heart has fattened, “it had to fight”. The struggles of the Ballymun community were thus in no way conceived of as separated from Bal- lymun as a place. THE TEARING OUT OF BALLYMUN’S HEART The argument that I have made, namely that it is a long-term, rather than short one, spatialised relationality that is crucial in animating the place of Ballymun, is particularly explicit in the case of the shop- ping centre, as I will now demonstrate. The site of the former shop- ping centre [Figure 22] was at the time of my fieldwork an empty field with low-cut grass that was occasionally littered with the remnants of fast-food packaging and pizza boxes. It is positioned in the centre of the Ballymun town, just on the side of the main Ballymun Road. The building that used to stand there was demolished and the site cleared in 2020, costing an estimated €6 million (Farrell 2017). The shopping centre was built and started filling up with shops in the 1970s (Tuohy 2004: 152). It was the biggest indoor mall in Ireland at the time, and when it first opened there were lines of cars with people coming from all over Dublin to shop there (Hayes and Greaves 1993: 1; Tuohy 2004: 152), but it soon experienced a similar decline to the rest of Ballymun. In the early 1990s, newspaper stories were already reporting on its derelict state and the need for re- juvenation (see Yeates 1991; McDonald 1991). By 2014, it had expe- rienced a complete decline. Tesco, the major tenant in the complex, shut down its Ballymun branch stating that “[t]he decision to close the store was taken due to a number of factors – primarily, the store is located in a shopping centre that has been in decline for a number of years” (Hennessy 2014). By 2018, the last remaining shops in the centre closed (Kelly 2020), and the building was boarded up ahead of its planned demolition. In 2020, the abandoned shopping centre was, as van Lanen writes, an “almost existential ruin, dramatically telling the story of boom and bust, of spectacular unkept promises, through the presence of its ruined neighbourhood. At the heart of Ballymun, the shopping centre reminds of past lives and forlorn fu- ture vibrancies” (2020: n.p.). In the discussions, however, the old shopping centre in Bally- mun turned out to be a highly affective memory-place, and perhaps the most affectively potent place in the area. 122 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 122 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 122 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 Aoife: I loved that shopping centre. Caoimhe: So did I, the little cof- fee shop… That used to be a shopping centre where that carnival is [makes hand gestures towards a field in front of us]. A place called Tesco’s and everything. And the bookmakers, everything. And me favourite pub was just over there, at the end of the shopping centre. It’s called the Penthouse Pub. It was brilliant, great fighting [laughter]. (Connor) While it was decided that the abandoned shopping centre needed to be demolished – a decision prompted by a local councillor who saw the building as a reminder of the regeneration gone wrong (Kelly 2018) – the news was received in mixed ways by the residents. The account of an online blog by Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh, a for- mer inhabitant of Ballymun, expresses one such view about this devel- opment: “Knowing that it’s completely gone now – not just that the lights are off, not just that the doors are closed, but that even the shell of the building no longer exists – leaves me with a very strange feeling, almost a feeling of amputation” (O Ceallaigh 2021). This feeling of amputation clearly expresses the relation between place and residents, whereby a place becomes so much a part of them that its demolition feels like having a part of the body cut off. Sitting at a small round table in a building that was being used by one of the community organisa- tions in the area, I had a brief discussion with Hannah, an employee at one of the organisations. She was in a hurry to get to a meeting but was happy to remain chatting with me, waiting for a colleague to arrive. Knowing I was eager to talk to people about Ballymun, she started telling me about the Old Ballymun and the shopping centre that used to operate there but had recently been demolished. Trying to get across the significance of the shopping centre when words seemed unable to convey it, she motioned to the round table at which I was sitting and told me to see it as Ballymun. Then she pointed to the centre of the table and said that that is where the shopping centre used to be located. She reiterated a word I had heard countless times before – it was the heart of Ballymun. “When the shopping centre was demolished”, she told me, grabbing with her hand the imaginary centre of the table and pulling it aside, “the heart of Ballymun was taken out”. Hannah was not alone in seeing the shopping centre as the heart of Ballymun [Figure 23], and its demolition as taking out something vital, an action that was sometimes even talked of as an amputation. See, we’ve no heart, our heart was taken out. [They] took it out. No wonder we’re all angry. (Caoimhe) 123 Fused boundaries between self, community and place A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 123 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 123 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 We also need a shopping centre up the road. They took the shopping centre, and they took the heart out of Ballymun. (Niamh) This speaks of the affective power the shopping centre used to hold and still effectively holds, bonding the older residents and the place together. That is because shopping centres are often more than simply places to shop. They have social functions and can serve as meeting points for people (Christiaanse and Haartsen 2017: 328). The Ballymun shopping centre was certainly the focal point of socialisation in the area. As Mark, one of my interlocutors, stated, “it was the one place everybody would go. All roads seem to lead to it, even its cross- shaped layout had that effect”. The physical layout of the area directed people towards the shopping centre: So if you were coming from here, and going to shopping centre […] you’d have to go down by this tunnel, the underground tunnels, there was a big roundy roundabout, ever seen the picture? Right, so there was a big roundy roundabout, and if you were coming this way, you’d have to go down the tunnel, and then up the steps and then to the shops. So everybody, wherever you come from, you’d go that way. (Luke) Many others remember the affordances of the shopping centre which facilitated social bonds. Yeah, it was good, you had the snooker hall, then you had, there was a pub, the Towers, then you went in, you had Miss Mary’s, job centre, all the proper shops, funboxes… (Luke) When there was any kind of a charitable event or a community event, it tended to happen there. It contained the two pubs, the hairdressers, the Corporation offices, a snooker hall, lots of “community” things like that. There were also public telephones in the middle “concour- se” […] so that added to the social feeling. (Mark) At the shopping centre they’d have seats, sit arounds, where you could go sit down, have a smoke and have a chit chat. (Niamh) Aoife: The shopping centre. And then the Towers and the Penthouse [both pubs were parts of the shopping centre], that was a big part of Ballymun. The Towers and the Penthouse, they were two pubs. So we had two pubs literally. Caoimhe: The Penthouse is great, we played pool there all the time. And there was pool hall, and there was upsta- irs in the shopping centre that had all the clinics and all that. It did have everything. The affordances of the shopping centre meant, as seen on the statements presented above, that there were plenty opportunities for socialising there. 124 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 124 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 124 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 […] women would shop together and stop to talk for what seemed like forever to children. Children and teenagers would just “hang around”, as they do everywhere. The pubs and the betting shop were obviously a place for socialising, that would be where my father did the vast majority of his socialising in Ballymun. (Mark) Even the shopping centre’s car park was used as the venue for gatherings and events. A story from the local Ballymun Concrete News describes one such event in the following words: Who said there is no talent in Ballymun needs their head examined after Sunday’s episode of Ballymun bands kind of music: ‘Rock The Blocks’ in the car park of the shopping centre […]. Not even the over- cast and cool blustery wind deterred the audience, they were foot ta- pping to the beat and swaying to the bends in the music. (Kelly 1998) Such a habitually sensed and experienced place that was “ma- noeuvred through and around” daily by the residents becomes, in the words of Degnen, “’sedimented’ in a “habituated body”, contributing in such a way to place attachment (2016: 1647). People, Connerton further argues, “produce a symbolic nexus out of the interaction be- tween bodily actions and terrestrial places” (2009: 17). My interlocu- tors who experienced important events that occurred over time at this place thus became “more and more a part of the place to the point where it has become an extension of self ” (Rowles 1983: 303). As the shopping centre became embodied and people emplaced in it through everyday practices of sociality, it took on the role of the heart of community, animating all of the Ballymun through its “beat- ing”. When the shopping centre was taken out of Ballymun, the sense of place changed. The socialisation that took place at the centre was crucial in the process of its personification. While Bird-David argues that “we do not personify other entities and then socialize with them, but personify them as, when, and because we socialize with them” (1999: S78), I would argue that in the case of Ballymun, the statement would be slightly different: “we do not personify other entities and then socialise with them, but personify them as, when, and because we socialise in them” (emphasis mine). No longer seen as one being with a common centre animating it, Ballymun – the place and its community – is now perceived as having “lost its heart”: The heart of Ballymun has fattened. The heart of Ballymun – tudu, tudu [imitating the sound of the heartbeat] – the community. When you have fat on your heart, your heart gets heavier to beat. (Thomas) 125 Fused boundaries between self, community and place A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 125 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 125 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 But the heart was taken out. When you separate everybody away from each other you’re all fighting for yourself and then you start fighting each other. Whereas if the community has a shopping centre, they’re all going to the shopping centre and they’re all mingling. (Caoimhe) The empty field where the shopping centre used to stand nowa- days continues to be an affective reminder of the former shopping cen- tre, engendering the circulation of a complex intertwinement of affects in Ballymun. Above all, longing is often felt and articulated in relation to the empty place – longing for the world that used to be, for the relations that were being created and strengthened there, that are no more. Anger and hurt are also commonly felt in relation to it, inter- twined with the feeling of disappointment over the broken promises of regeneration: They took the shopping centre away. We had a very, very tight com- munity. And when... like those flats, the shopping centre. They took all that away […] like they promised us so much and we got nothing! They didn’t put a new shopping centre in, they didn’t give us… […] so people were hurt, Alina, you know. (Saoirse) Moreover, the lack of a shopping centre points to the “inade- quacy” of Ballymuners themselves, being incapable of becoming the kind of political subjects the authorities are trying to create – with enough spending power to attract investment to the area and be con- sumers. The empty site thus also speaks loudly of the economic crisis, and of the ongoing vulnerability of Ballymun in the throes of the neo- liberal market economy. CONCLUSION Place in Ballymun is thus tangibly alive, perceived as a living body. While it used to be animated by its most affectively potent core, that is, the shopping centre, which was the nexus of flows of people and their bonds, with the financial crisis in 2008 and the inability of Bally- muners to attract capital to the area, rejuvenation or rebuilding of the centre after its demolition never took place. As such, its absence now stands as a constant reminder of the past and is entangled in webs of affectivity circulating in the area. The kind of strong affective relationships between a place and its residents that I have observed in the area were, I argue, built through the years of place-practices and everyday life habits. Being a 126 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 126 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 126 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 historically built relationship, it is experienced primarily by those liv- ing in the area for a longer time. That is partly because of the activist history of the residents in the area, whereby the political repertoire entangled the state of place and the lives of people. Changes in place thus effectively meant changes in the lives of Ballymun residents. On the other hand, as the regeneration showed, a changing ideal of Self demanded new kinds of place to facilitate the new kinds of Selves. Moreover, what I argue is that the strong bonds of socialisation and solidarity that are taking place in the area are spatially bound. Conse- quently, the self is often constituted relationally, both in relation to the people of Ballymun and to Ballymun as a place – both are, in any case, not completely delineated from each other. It is these factors, I claim, that have engendered the affective relations between many of the long- term residents in Ballymun and the place itself, and it is such affective relations that blur the boundaries between the selves, the community and the place. The fact that place is animated and ascribed personhood, con- ceived of as almost a living being, and affectively experienced, at the same time engenders specific relationships between people and place. One of the key behavioural outcomes of place attachment is steward- ship, whereby people aim to protect their place, preserve its meanings and provide its upkeep and maintenance (Scannell and Gifford 2014b: 285). Such an attachment roots one in place and involves a “sense of deep care and concern for that place” (Relph 1976: 37). A number of initiatives that now exist in Ballymun are concerned with beautifying the place and taking care of the environment. For example, one of the functions of the Muck and Magic Community Garden, an organisa- tion in which I volunteered, was to make the place more aesthetically pleasant. Moreover, every Wednesday afternoon, a group of volunteers – members of Tidy Towns Ballymun – pick up trash and clean the en- vironment. Every year, the Better Ballymun festival takes place during which children and adults, schools and community groups organise activities to improve, brighten up, enliven and clean the environment. There is a deep sense of care for place in Ballymun, a sense of reciproc- ity between people and place – as expressed in one of my interlocutor’s statements: I help the elders, I paint their windows, wash their windows. Oh, yeah. I’m paying my contributes to Ballymun. I’ve been paying my contributes back to Ballymun for a long time. (Thomas) 127 Fused boundaries between self, community and place A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 127 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 127 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 29. 11. 2024 11:09:39 APPENDIX Figure 22: Photo of the former Ballymun shopping centre, 1993 (Photo: Eric Luke, The Irish Times). Figure 23: “Seeking a pacemaker for Ballymun’s ailing heart.” Article on the Ballymun’s sho-pping centre. The Irish Times, Wednesday, April 3, 1991. Author: Padraig Yeates. 128 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 128 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 128 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 Conclusion The Ballymun neighbourhood of Dublin has, in the relatively short period of its existence, undergone major transformations. Built in the 1960s as a high-rise housing estate, its material features were complete- ly transformed when in the context of a revitalisation and regenera- tion process it was demolished and constructed anew at the turn of the millennium. These material changes, however, have gone hand in hand with the changes in the social fabric of the place. They, in addition, also affected the sense of place of its inhabitants. It is this history, and the ways it continues to inform the lives and experiences of people today, that this book is ultimately about. Writing about it, I have tried to take into consideration both the perspective of top-down pressures on the inhabitants and their area, as well as their own, grass-roots actions and agency in making the place of Ballymun. The first chapter describes the context by explaining the forc- es of history and politics and their entanglements, and their role in 129 Conclusion A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 129 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 129 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 bringing about Ballymun. In the following chapters, I focused on the ways a meaningful place is being made in Ballymun through the eve- ryday practices of the inhabitants and their sense of place. I looked at the ways the Ballymun community is being formed and at its chang- ing boundaries, as a sense of community is one of the key elements in the way people relate to their area. I then looked at how that very community has changed with the neoliberalisation of Ireland since the 1990s, when community became a “technique of government”. Being in a state of perpetual becoming, the community can, I argue, also become a tactic the residents use to oppose the strategies of the government. I also paid attention to expressions of the “actually exist- ing neoliberalism” (see Brenner and Theodor 2002) in the Ballymun locality. I looked at the ways the place changed in the process of re- generation at the turn of millennium, and at how one particularity of that change – heating practices and heat on the estate – has been intimately and collectively sensed. I demonstrated that the changing perceptions of heat also informed the changing political subjectiv- ity in the area. Furthermore, this was indicative of a specific type of framework of morality which was imposed upon the area. While all the chapters are to some degree concerned with the bonds between people and the place, these came to the forefront in the last chapter. This addressed the affective relations between the residents and Bal- lymun, which are particularly clear in their relation towards the shop- ping centre that used to stand at the centre of Ballymun, but no longer does. Within this framework, I explained the ways place is animated and ascribed personhood, as well as how the selves of the residents are emplaced. In all these chapters, concerned with different topics and ap- proached through different theoretical concepts, I was ultimately con- cerned with how Ballymun is lived, made meaningful and loved. I also attempted to place Ballymun within the national and global processes that have shaped it. Thus, despite my focus on a small locality, and my – perhaps in anthropology old-fashioned – treatment of that locality as relatively bounded, I have construed it within its relationship with other places as well as with the neoliberal capitalist and globalising forces that affected them all. I found it crucial to look at Ballymun as it is unfolding in time, with all the changes that it has undergone and the ways these were experienced and discussed at the time of my fieldwork in the area. A key phenomenon then, running throughout the whole book, is memory. Memory is inscribed into the very landscape itself – it “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects”, writes 130 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 130 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 130 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 Nora (1989: 9). Memory permeates the talk of places in Ballymun where the neighbourhoods have been transformed in their totality, un- recognisable in comparison with their previous image. Walking with interlocutors around the area, I would continuously be shown places where buildings once stood or where things once happened, so that by the end of my time in the area I myself had something of an image of where the Old Ballymun used to stand in comparison to the new one. “A conscious focus on the past”, Lewicka argues, “may be a successful means of restoring disrupted place continuity” (2014: 51). In Bally- mun, where the material environment has metamorphosed under the urban renewal programme, the sense of place of its residents has been severely ruptured. As such, memory is that which, in Ballymun, con- nects the present conditions – material, social, and individual – with those of the past, thus establishing a sense of connection through the rift of time. Indeed, it is a specific type of memory – nostalgic memory – that is particularly prominent in Ballymun: the “longing for what is lacking in a changed present” and “yearning for what is now not attainable, simply because of the irreversibility of time” (Pickering and Keightley 2006: 920). Nostalgic narratives in Ballymun coalesce memories of the towers, the heat, the shopping centre, and the com- munity into an affective assemblage, informing the present in which these are lacking or are weakened. At the core of this assemblage lies the image of a strong community, bounded by bonds of solidarity and good neighbourly relations. Common narratives of the past nos- talgically remember the old times when people left their doors un- locked and borrowed sugar from their neighbours by just entering their flats and taking it – as opposed to today, when many do not even know their neighbours. Nostalgia, however, as Berliner and Angé (2015: 1-5) argue, is tied to the ideas of crisis and loss and to problems of cultural conti- nuity. The crisis and lack of continuity that are implied in nostalgia expressed in the Ballymunners’ narratives, are partly due to the fact that during the regeneration process people were moved from their blocks to new houses in various locations across Ballymun. Moreover, the moving in of new inhabitants, often of a different class (i.e. mid- dle class) and from different areas, was perceived as threatening to the continuity of the community. While most of my interlocutors saw the growing presence of middle class residents in the area as a positive de- velopment, and stressed the importance of social mixing, the reality is that tenants with different types of tenures rarely mix much in Bally- mun (Norris, Byrne and Carnegie 2018: 260). As Siobhan said: 131 Conclusion A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 131 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 131 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 The only thing, I have to say, that annoyed me about the private apart- ments. […] And I remember saying, unless we try to integrate the people into community, later then […] they will find problems. And even trying to give them information, they had a gate up, couldn’t get in even to their letterboxes to put information in. So, it’s like they locked themselves up. So that’s what I find. They’re not integrating. The lack of integration of the new residents creates the feeling that this is no longer a spatially bound local community with common interests. One of the conversations I had with Thomas clearly expresses this: People don’t like it [the regeneration]. If you bring back the elders and you ask the elders how it turned out, they’d say “no, bring back Ballymun”. We’ve lost our culture, we’ve lost our way. Ballymun is be- ing diluted, diluted in numbers. […] Well there’s actually more [peo- ple], but less Ballymuners. There is a clear feeling of the loss of community evident in these statements. Such feelings, as I argued, go hand in hand with nostal- gic memories of the past. There is, Robertson further argues, a “global institutionalisation of the nostalgic attitude” as a consequence of the currently ongoing phase of “accelerated, nostalgia-producing globali- sation” (1992: 158). Yet nostalgia may also imply protest. In his dis- cussion on the rise of memoirs in Ireland, Kincaid observes that “inas- much as they remember a city of an earlier time, particularly in a nos- talgic way, they may lodge a protest about the current wave of ‘creative destruction’ taking place in the capital” (2005: 18). Such a nostalgic affect, as is visible in the discourse of residents of Ballymun, suggests, according to Wanner, “that the past can become the future again, that meaningful connections and encounters between peoples and places can be resurrected in the here and now” (2016: 216). Nostalgia is not just wishful longing, however, as it may also have the power to affirm the bonds between people and strengthen their sense of belonging, as well as provide possibilities for imagining and making future practices. The expressing and sharing of longing for the past places in Ballymun that continue to live in the people’s memories is an active and animated practice, contributing to bonding some residents together – those that share such recollections. “Knowledge and experience” of profoundly transformed places, Degnen argues, “still ‘seen’ […] as they used to be, serve as a point of mutual connection. They connect [people] not to just any place, but to this place, […] to these streets and to each oth- er” (2016: 1661). It is also a practice that has the potential to exclude those who do not share the same experiences of the past. And while 132 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 132 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 132 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 29. 11. 2024 11:09:41 expressing and sharing nostalgia may be interpreted as laying claim to the place, its past and present, and to its community, it may also serve to discredit claims of others of the same place – those who have not experienced both the hardships and benefits of Old Ballymun. These may be the new residents in the area, but more so, perhaps, the local authorities, whose claims to place may always be made illegitimate due to the fact they do not share the social memories present among those “truly” belonging in Ballymun and are not privy to the inside knowl- edge of it. This nostalgia that I continuously encountered in the field has not left me unaffected, either. Participating in conversations in which memories of the Old Ballymun were shared, I myself started feeling affection for the place, even though I came to the area much too late to be able to share experiences of its past. Nonetheless, memorial boards marking old buildings and events are spread around the area, and pho- tos and stories of that which used to be enabled me to feel nostalgia for the past, and to a certain degree share such experiences with the residents. I feel now as if I am as familiar with the Old Ballymun as I am with the New. Throughout my stay in Dublin, Ballymun had become the place I felt most comfortable in, and most at home. It had become a place where I knew people and recognised them on the street, and where I managed to carve out a space for myself. It is a place that I felt I be- longed to. 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Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 154 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 154 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 154 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 LIST OF INTERLOCUTORS 21 AINE: Female, approx. 45 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 6/7/2022. AOIFE: Female, 25 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 2/3/2022. BARBARA: Female, approx. 40 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Polish. In-person interview, 23/5/2022. CALLUM: Male, 18 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 13/6/2022. CAOIMHE: Female, 56 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 2/3/2022. CEM: Male, 33 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Turkish. Informal discussion, 27/5/2022. CIAN: Male, 23 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 13/6/2022. CLODAGH: Female, 59 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 19/7/2022. CONNOR: Male, approx. 70 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 11/5/2022. DANIEL: Male, approx. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 7/3/2022. DARRAGH: Male, 31 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 13/6/2022. DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL AREA OFFICE REPRESENTATIVE 1: Female. Irish. Virtual video interview, 16/6/2022. DUBLIN CITY COUNCIL AREA OFFICE REPRESENTATIVE 2: Female. Irish. Virtual video interview, 16/6/2022. DYLAN: Male, 51 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 7/5/2022. FILIP: Male, 51 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Lithuanian. In-person interview, 31/5/2022. HANNA: Female, approx. 40 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. Informal discussion, 31/5/2022. KEIRA: Female, approx. 40 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 6/5/2022. LIAM: Male, 51 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 7/5/2022. LOCAL COUNCILLOR: Female, lives in Ballymun. Irish. Virtual video interview, 25/2/2022. LUKE: Male, 45 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 31/5/2022. MAEVE: Female, approx. 30 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 7/5/2022. MARIE: Female, 72 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 28/5/2022. MARK: Male, approx. 55 years old. Does not live in Ballymun, used to live there when younger. Irish. Email correspondence, 23/09/2022 – 26/9/2022. 21 The interlocutors are anonymised and listed here under ascribed pseudonyms. Wherev- er appropriate, some personal information may have been omitted for the sake of ano- nymity. 155 List of interlocutors A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 155 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 155 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 MATT: Male, approx. 60 years old. He used to live in Ballymun, now lives in a nearby area. Irish. In-person interview, 23/2/2022. NIAMH: Female, approx. 45 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 16/3/2022. OISIN: Male, 70 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 9/6/2022. PATRICK: Male, approx. 45 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 7/5/2022. RYAN: Male, approx. 30 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 14/4/2022. SAOIRSE: Female, 38 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 14/6/2022. SHANE: Male, 23 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 13/6/2022. SIOBHAN: Female, 74 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 19/7/2022. STEVEN: Male, 83 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Northern Irish. In-person interview, 10/5/2022. THOMAS: Male, 47 years old. Lives in Ballymun. Irish. In-person interview, 9/5/2swdc 156 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 156 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 156 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 Index A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 157 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 157 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 Abbot, Andrew: 55-6, A Craft, Maurice: 30-1, 33 Crawford, Adam: 105 Creed, Gerald: 53-4 Acemoglu, Daron: 35, Cresswell, Tim: 13, 15, 25 Akbar, Poeti Nazura Gulfira: 15-6 Crump, Jeff: 106 Al-Kodmany, Kheir: 16 Cruz, Marcelo: 121 Allen, Kieran: 77 Cully, Leona: 78, 104-5 Allen-Collinson, Jacquelyn: 94 Altman, Irwin: 117-8 D Angé, Olivia : 131 Appadurai, Arjun : 68 D’Orsi, Lorenzo: 109, 112 Aryal, Komal : 96 Daly, Mary : 33-4, 36-7 Attuyer, Katia : 87 de Certeau, Michel : 12, 80 Aucoin, Pauline : 15 Degnen, Catherine : 110, 125, 132 Delaney, Enda: 36 Bachmann-Medick, Doris: 12, 14 B Delanty, Gerard: 53 Dickson, David: 31-2, 34-5 Dillon, T.W.T.: 35 Bail, Christopher: 56 Doherty, C. H.: 92 Bajič, Blaž: 110 Dooley, Terence: 30, 36-7 Barth, Fredrik: 55-6 Drudy, P. J.: 10 Bartley, Brandan: 39, 41-2, 76-7 Dukelow, Fiona: 86 Baskar, Bojan: 13 Dziuban, Zuzanna: 16 Berliner, David: 131 Beza, Beau Bradley: 15 E Bird-David, Nurit: 125 Bolger, Dermot: 24, 59 Edelenbos, Jurian: 15-6 Boran, Pat: 29-30 Edelmann, Achim: 56 Boyle, Mark: 59, 74-5, 81, 85, 87-8, 105 Elias, Norbert: 61 Bradshaw, Ted K.: 53 Engler, Steven: 31 Brady, Joseph: 10, 39-41, 43-5, 47, 58, Enqvist, Johan: 14 60, 95 Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs: 55 Breathnach, Proinnsias: 76-7, 87 Evans, James: 120 Breeze, Jonathan: 71 F Brennan, Teresa: 121 Brenner, Neil: 130 Fahey, Tony: 10, 38 Brent, Jeremy: 52, 54 Fairbanks II, Robert P.: 87 Brubaker, Rogers: 53 Fanning, Bryan: 10 Brudell, Paula: 87 Farrell, Tom: 122 Bulley, Dan: 81 Fatah gen Schieck, Ava: 15-6 Buser, Michael: 14 Feld, Steven: 16 Byrne, Michael: 106, 131 Fennell, Catherine: 16, 92, 96 Ferguson, James: 14, 55, 83 Callanan, Mark: 42 C Finnan, Sean: 90, 106 Forde, Catherine: 74 Fournier, Marcel: 55 Carnegie, Anna: 88-9, 106, 131 Foxe, Greg: 63, 71 Casey, Edward: 13 Free, Marcus: 11 Chaudhuri, Tapoja: 15 Friedmann, John: 16 Christensen, Pia: 16 Frykman, Jonas: 116 Christiaanse, Suzan: 124 Clarity, James F.: 77 G Clarke, John: 52-3, 86-8, 95, 100 Clear, Caitrona: 34, 37 Gadwa Nicodemus, Anne : 14 Coghlan, David: 64 Gaillot, Olivier: 92 Cohen, Anthony P.: 53, 55 Galvan, Susan: 31-3 Collins, Andrew: 96 Geoghegan, Martin: 78 Collins, Neil: 74 Ghaziani, Amin: 14 Connerton, Paul: 125 Gibbon, Peter: 36 Connolly, Lynn: 24, 79 Giddens, Anthony: 77 Connolly, Sean: 31 Gifford, Robert: 117-8, 127 158 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 158 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 158 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 Goffman, Erving: 61 L Gray, Richard: 94 Lamont, Michele: 55-6 Greaves, Hugh: 75, 122 Larragy, Joe: 42 Gregg, Melissa: 116 Lawrence-Zúñiga, Denise: 12 Gregory, Derek: 34 Le Breton, David: 94 Greif, Gary: 121 Lefebvre, Henri: 12, 17 Guinnane, Timothy: 37 LeGates, Richard: 26 Gupta, Akhil: 14, 55, 82 Leigh, Andrew: 85 H Lems, Annika: 17 Lewicka, Maria: 120, 131 Haartsen, Tialda: 124 Logan, John: 25 Halligan, Gavin: 92 Loughran, Hilda: 71, 80 Hamilakis, Yannis: 198 Löw, Martina: 13 Hanna, Erika: 26, 39-44, 46 Low, Setha: 12-3, 15-7, 117-8 Harney, Nicholas DeMaria: 14, 16 Loyd, Richard: 87 Harvey, David: 13, 17, 47 Lyder, Andre: 67 Hastings, Donnan: 51, 54 Lyndon, James: 29 Hay, Gordon: 65 Hayden, Karen: 62 M Hayes, Liz: 75-6, 122 MacLaran, Andrew: 10, 76, 78, 87 Helander-Renvall, Elina: 121 Malpas, Jeff: 55, 121 Hennessy, Michelle: 122 Marsh, Brendan: 65, 67 Hernandez, Bernardo: 117 Massey, Doreen: 10, 14, 25 Hernandez-Garcia Jaime: 15 Matheson, Robert E.: 34 Hidalgo, Carmen: 117 Mazumdar, Sanjoy: 16 Hubbard, Phil: 12 Mazumdar, Shampa: 16 Hysing, Erik: 74 McCann, Mary Ellen: 71, 80, 98 J McDonagh, Frank: 59 McDonald, Frank: 122 Jacobs, Jane: 44, 47, 62 McEvoy-Levy, Siobhan: 14, 16 John, Peter: 74 McGaw, Janet: 14 Jones, Phil: 120 McGowan, Mark: 30 Jones, Reece: 56 McGrath, Louisa: 89, 91 Jones, Samantha: 96 McGuirk, Pauline: 42 Jordan, Thomas: 30 McManus, Ruth: 32-3, 35-6, 39-40 Joseph, Miranda: 53 McVerry, Peter: 64 K Meade, Rosie R.: 77-8, 81 Medina, Laurie Kroshus: 14 Kaasch, Alexandra : 87 Merrifield, Andrew: 13, 17, 47, 121 Kapila, Lois: 90, 106 Mikkelsen, Miguel Romero: 16 Kaplan, David: 14, 16 Miller, Peter: 99 Karge, Toni: 14 Mitchell, Timothy: 86 Katić, Mario: 16 Molnár, Virág: 55-6 Kearns, Kevin: 33-6 Montague, Andrew: 65-6, 71 Keesing, Roger M.: 53 Montague, John: 46 Keightley, Emily: 131 Montgomery, John: 9 Kelly, Olivia: 122-3, Montserrat Degen, Monica: 91 Kelly, Seamus: 125 Moore, Niamh: 9, 25 Kelly, Sinead: 10, 76, 78, 87, Moran, Marie: 77 Keogh, Rachel: 65 Motta, Wallis: 15-6 Kerrigan, Gene: 58, 60, 63 Muir, Jenny: 19, 88-90 Kilfeather, Siobhan: 30-2 Murphy, Ailbhe: 14 Killeen, Richard: 30-3 Murray, Kathleen: 77 Kincaid, Andrew: 26, 35, 41-3, 132 Myers, Fred: 14, 16 Kintrea, Keith: 19, 88-90 Kitchin, Rob: 12, 86 N Kohn, Margaret: 51 Nagendra, Harini: 14 Komarova, Milena: 14, 16-7 Nally, David: 37 159 Index A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 159 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 159 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 Navaro-Yashin, Yael: 16 Roberts, Gareth: 14 Negussie, Elene: 42 Robertson, Jennifer: 16 Nejad, Sarem: 14, 16 Robertson, Roland: 132 Newhouse, David: 14, 16 Robinson, James: 35 Newman, Janet: 80-1, 95, 97 Rodaway, Paul: 94 Neylon, Laoise: 91 Rodman, Margaret: 17 Nolan, Patrick: 64 Røe, Per Gunnar: 16 Nora, Pierre: 130-1 Rogerson, Robert: 12, 19, 87-8, 105 Norris, Michelle: 26, 30, 35-8, 46, 64-5, Rolfe, Steve: 81 77, 86, 88-9, 106, 131 Rose, Nikolas: 82, 88, 99 Nowlan, Kevin: 36-7 Rottger-Rossler, Birgitt: 121 O Rowles, Graham: 125 Rowley, Ellen: 34-5, 38-42, 44-7, 59, 92, O Ceallaigh, Maolsheachlann: 123 106 Ó Gráda, Cormac: 30, 32, 36-7, 60 Ruppert, Evelyn S.: 104 Ó Riain, Seán: 10, 76, 78 S O’Brien, Joseph: 31-2 O’Connell, Cathal: 46, 59, 65 Sack, Robert D.: 112 O’Malley, Anthony: 24, 62 Saris, Jamie: 77, 100 O’Malley, Eoin: 31 Sassen, Saskia: 10, 25 O’Neill, Cathleen: 93 Scannell, Leila: 117-8, 127 O’Toole, Jack: 99 Schneekloth, Lynda: 16 Oliveira, Katrina-Ann R.: 16 Schulte-Droesch, Lea: 16 O'Rourke, Kevin Hjortshøj: 60 Seigworth, Gregory: 116 Owton, Helen: 94 Sen, Amrita: 14 P Seremetakis, Nadia: 92 Serin, Bilge: 15 Pachucki, Mark: 55 Sevenhuijsen, Selma: 110, 113 Palmberger, Monika: 14 Sheller, Mimi: 14 Parker, Cathy: 14 Shibley, Robert: 16 Pašeta, Senia: 31 Slaby, Jan: 121 Peace, Robin: 85 Smith, Jeffrey S.: 119 Pendergrass, Sabrina: 55 Soja, Edward: 12 Pickering, Michael: 131 Sokhi-Bulley, Bal: 81 Pieris, Anoma: 14 Solar, Peter: 29 Pile, Steve: 121 Somerville, Peter: 52-3 Pink, Sarah: 17 Somerville-Woodward, Robert: 41, Potter, Emily: 14 43-6, 58-60, 63-4, 75, 92, 98 Potter, Jonathan: 53-4 Starke, Peter: 87 Povrzanović Frykman, Maja: 116 Steadman, Chloe: 14 Powell, Fred: 78, 86 Stevenson, Deborah: 86, 105-6 Power, Anne: 12, 60, 71, 75 Stuart, Susan: 94 Power, Sinéad: 43-5, 59, 64, 75-6 Svašek, Maruška: 14, 17 Pratschke, Jonathan: 10 Swanstorm, Todd: 25 Preston, Christopher J.: 104, 109, 112 T Prichard, David: 88-9 Prunty, Jacinta: 35-6, 40 Taggart, Jonathan: 94 Punch, Michael: 10 Tangherlini, Timothy: 80 Purcell, John: 89-90 Taylor, Peter: 25 Q Tengö, Maria: 14 Theodore, Nik: 130 Quinlivan, Aodh: 74 Tonkens, Evelien: 80-1, 95, 97 R Tornaghi, Chiara: 14 Treadwell Shine, Kasey: 76-7 Rappaport, Nigel: 52-4 Trigg, Dylan: 15-6 Reicher, Stephen: 53 Tsimouris, Giorgos: 16 Relph, Edmund: 118, 127 Tuan, Yi-Fu: 120 Rembeza, Magdalena: 14 Tuohy, Michael: 122 Riaño-Alcalá, Pilar: 16 160 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 160 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 160 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 U Urry, John: 14 Usher, Robin: 30 V van Hooren, Franca: 87 van Lanen, Sander: 90, 122 Vannini, Phillip: 94 Vymětal, Petr: 74 W Wacquant, Loïc: 62 Waddington, Shelagh: 39, 41-2 Walker, Ryan: 14, 16 Walsh, Francis: 26 Wanner, Catherine: 132 Waters, John: 92 Werner, Johannes: 31 Wetherell, Margaret: 54, 121 Whelan, Edward: 30 Wikan, Unni: 116 Wilson, Thomas: 54 Wolf, Eric R.: 53 Wonneberger, Astrid: 52-4 Wynn, Jonathan: 16 Y Yeates, Padraig: 122, 128 Yetis-Bayraktar, Ayse: 16 Young, Iris Marion: 53 Z Zerubavel, Eviatar: 56 161 Index A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 161 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 161 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 162 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 162 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 POVZETEK V monografiji se ukvarjam z vprašanjem ustvarjanja kraja predmestne delavske soseske, pri čemer se osredotočam tako na vplive na prostor od zgoraj navzdol kot tudi na moč delovanja prebivalcev pri ustvar- janju kraja od spodaj navzgor in njihovem doživljanju svojega okolja. Soseska Ballymun v Dublinu je v razmeroma kratkem obdobju svojega obstoja doživela velike preobrazbe. Zgrajena je bila v šestde- setih letih 20. stoletja, najprej kot blokovsko naselje za občinske naje- mnike, značilno po visokih »stolpnih« blokih, nato pa je bila soseska na prelomu tisočletja v procesu revitalizacije in regeneracije material- no popolnoma spremenjena. Visoki bloki so bili porušeni, občinski prebivalci preseljeni v nove nizko grajene terasne hiše, v sosesko pa so se priselili novi srednjerazredni prebivalci. Materialne spremembe so- seske, ki so tako šle z roko v roki tudi s spremembami njene družbene strukture, so pomembno vplivale na to, kako so njeni prebivalci obču- tili kraj. Ena od tem, na katere se zato v monografiji tako osredotočam, so ekonomski in politični procesi ter njihov vpliv na sosesko, njihove učinke pa raziskujem skozi osebne izkušnje prebivalcev. V prvem poglavju monografije sta opisana zgodovinski in po- litični kontekst, znotraj katerih je bil zgrajen Ballymun, v naslednjih poglavjih pa se osredinjam predvsem na načine, na katere prebivalci skozi vsakodnevne prakse ustvarjajo in občutijo svojo sosesko. Ker je občutenje in pripadnost skupnosti eden glavnih elementov povezo- vanja prebivalcev s krajem, začnem z opisom načinov, na katere se je skupnost v Ballymunu vzpostavila in zamejila, ter raziskujem njene spreminjajoče se meje. Nadalje prikažem, kako se je z neoliberalizacijo države od leta 1990 dalje skupnost spreminjala in vedno bolj postaja- la »strategija oblasti«, obenem pa ostajala tudi taktika prebivalcev za nasprotovanje vladnim strategijam. V naslednjem poglavju se posve- tim oblikam »obstoječega« neoliberalizma v Ballymunu in načinom, na katere se je kraj z regeneracijo na prelomu tisočletja spremenil, pri čemer vzamem pod drobnogled le en vidik zaznavanja teh sprememb, in sicer intimno in kolektivno občutenje ogrevanja in toplote. Pri tem pokažem, da so spreminjajoče se zaznave toplote spremljale spreminja- jočo se politično subjektivnost v Ballymunu. Sledi poglavje, ki vklju- čuje razpravo o spremembah moralnega okvirja v Ballymunu, ki jih je vpeljal proces regeneracije, in o vezeh med (različnimi) moralami in (različnimi) manifestacijami kraja. Čeprav vsa poglavja do neke mere 163 Povzetek A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 163 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 163 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 29. 11. 2024 11:09:42 zadevajo vezi med ljudmi in krajem, pa v zadnjem poglavju ta tema stopi v ospredje. V njem obravnavam afektivne vezi med prebivalci soseske in Ballymunom, otipljive predvsem v odnosu Ballymunčanov do nakupovalnega središča, ki v času pisanja te knjige ni več obstajalo. Pokažem, da prebivalci prostor animirajo in mu pripisujejo človečnost, hkrati pa ga občutijo kot del sebe. V zaključku povežem vsa prejšnja poglavja z eksplikacijo teme, ki je bila prisotna vseskozi in se je ves čas prepletala z drugimi temami – to je nostalgija in z njo zaznamovano spominjanje preteklosti. 164 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 164 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 164 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 ZUPANIČEVA KNJIŽNICA 1 MESS – Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School. Vol. 3. Edited by Zmago Šmitek and Rajko Muršič. Ljubljana 1999. 2 Urban Symbolism and Rituals. Edited by Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 1999. 3 Cultural Processes and Transformations in Transition of the Central and Eastern European Post-Communist Countries. Edited by Rajko Muršič and Borut Brumen. Ljubljana 1999. 4 Kolesar s Filozofske. Zbornik v počastitev 90-letnice prof. dr. Vilka Novaka. Uredil uredniški odbor. Ljubljana 2000. 5 Zemljevidi časa/Maps of Time. Zbornik ob 60. obletnici Oddelka za etnologijo in kulturno antropologijo. Uredila/edited by Zmago Šmitek in/and Borut Brumen. Ljubljana 2001. 6 Mirjam Mencej, Gospodar volkov v slovanski mitologiji. Ljubljana 2001. 7 MESS – Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School. Vol. 4. Edited by Bojan Baskar and Irena Weber. Ljubljana 2002. 8 Besede terorja. Medijska podoba terorizma in nasilja. Uredil Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 2002. 9 Vladimir N. Toporov, Predzgodovina književnosti pri Slovanih. Poskus rekonstrukcije. Ljubljana 2002. 10 MESS – Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School. Vol. 5. Edited by Rajko Muršič and Irena Weber. Ljubljana 2003. 11 Mateja Habinc, Ne le rožmarin za spomin. O spominskih predmetih in njihovem shranjevanju. Ljubljana 2004. 12 Dediščina v očeh znanosti. Uredila Jože Hudales in Nataša Visočnik. Ljubljana 2005. 13 MESS – Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School. Vol. 6. Edited by Boštjan Kravanja and Matej Vranješ. Ljubljana 2005. 14 Dediščina v rokah stroke. Uredila Jože Hudales in Nataša Visočnik. Ljubljana 2005. 15 Post-Yugoslav Lifeworlds Between Tradition and Modernity. Edited by Zmago Šmitek and Aneta Svetieva. Ljubljana 2005. 15/I Post-Yugoslav Lifeworlds. 2nd Edition. Edited by Zmago Šmitek and Aneta Svetieva. Ljubljana in Skopje 2008. 16 Ethnography of Protected Areas. Edited by Peter Simonič. Ljubljana 2006. 17 »Zakaj pri nas žive Cigani in ne Romi«. Narativne podobe Ciganov/ Romov. Uredil Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 2006. 18 Mirjam Mencej, Coprnice so me nosile. Raziskava vaškega čarovništva v vzhodni Sloveniji na prelomu tisočletja. Ljubljana 2006. 19 Jaka Repič, »Po sledovih korenin«. Transnacionalne migracije med Argentino in Evropo. Ljubljana 2006. 20 Europe and its Other. Notes on the Balkans. Edited by Božidar Jezernik, Rajko Muršič and Alenka Bartulović. Ljubljana 2007. 21 Places of Encounter. In memoriam Borut Brumen. Edited by Rajko Muršič and Jaka Repič. Ljubljana 2007. A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 165 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 165 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 22 Špela Kalčić, »Nisem jaz Barbika«. Oblačilne prakse, islam in identitetni procesi med Bošnjaki v Sloveniji. Ljubljana 2007. 23 Boštjan Kravanja, Sveti svet. Topografija religioznega prostora na primeru Breginjskega kota. Ljubljana 2007. 24 Uršula Lipovec Čebron, Krožere zdravja in bolezni. Tradicionalna in komplementarne medicine v Istri. Ljubljana 2008. 25 Space and Time in Europe. East and West, Past and Present. Edited by Mirjam Mencej. Ljubljana 2008. 26 Prostori soočanja in srečevanja. Spominski zbornik za Boruta Brumna. Uredila Rajko Muršič in Katja Hrobat. Ljubljana 2008. 27 Jože Hudales, Slovenski muzeji in etnologija. Od kabinetov čudes do muzejev 21. stoletja. Ljubljana in Velenje 2008. 28 MESS and RAMSES II. Mediterranean Ethnological Summer School. Vol. 7. Edited by Jaka Repič, Alenka Bartulović and Katarina Sajovec Altshul. Ljubljana 2008. 29 Miha Kozorog, Antropologija turistične destinacije v nastajanju. Prostor, festivali in lokalna identiteta na Tolminskem. Ljubljana 2009. 30 Peter Simonič, Kaj si bo narod mislil? Ritual slovenske državnosti. Ljubljana 2009. 31 Kulturna dediščina in identiteta. Uredil Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 2010 32 Niko Zupanič, njegovo delo, čas in prostor. Spominski zbornik ob 130. obletnici rojstva dr. Nika Zupaniča. Uredila Rajko Muršič in Mihaela Hudelja. Ljubljana 2009. 33 Med prezentacijo in manipulacijo. Uredil Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 2010. 34 Nataša Visočnik, Hiša kot prostor identitet. Oblikovanje identitet skozi percepcije prostora in telesa v bivalnem okolju na Japonskem. Ljubljana 2011. 35 Alenka Bartulović, »Nismo vaši!« Antinacionalizem v povojnem Sarajevu. Ljubljana 2013. 36 Antropološki vidiki načinov življenja v mestih. Uredila Jaka Repič in Jože Hudales. Ljubljana 2012. 37 Politika praznovanja. Prazniki in oblikovanje skupnosti na Slovenskem. Uredil Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 2013. 38 Heroji in slavne osebnosti na Slovenskem. Uredil Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 2013. 39 Praznična večglasja. Prazniki in oblikovanje skupnosti na Slovenskem. Uredila Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik. Ljubljana 2014. 40 Simona Klaus, Pa vse, kar sem hotu, so ble dobre vile. Folklora v oglasih med letoma 1980 in 2011 v Sloveniji. Ljubljana 2014. 41 »Kar ustvariš ostane. Svetu cvet. Tebi rane.« – Vinko Möderndorfer – učitelj, politik in raziskovalec Uredila Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik in Jože Hudales. Ljubljana 2016. 42 Ambrož Kvartič, Pa se je to res zgodilo? Sodobne povedke v Sloveniji. Ljubljana 2016. 43 Sounds of Attraction. Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Popular Music. Edited by Miha Kozorog and Rajko Muršič. Ljubljana 2017. 44 Collecting and Collections in Times of War or Political and Social Change: COMCOL Annual Conference, Celje 2014. Edited by Jože Hudales and Tanja Roženbergar. Ljubljana 2017. A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 166 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 166 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 45 Države praznujejo. Državni prazniki in skupnosti na območju bivše Jugoslavije. Uredila Božidar Jezernik in Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik. Ljubljana 2017. 46 Helena Konda, Grafiti v Ljubljani. Zgodovina, grafitarji, mesto. Ljubljana 2017. 47 Anthropological Perspectives of Solidarity and Reciprocity. Edited by Peter Simonič. Ljubljana 2019. 48 Močni, modri in dobri: Junaki v slovenski folklori. Uredila Božidar Jezernik in Ingrid Slavec Gradišnik. Ljubljana 2020. 49 Dediščina prve svetovne vojne. Reprezentacije in reinterpretacije. Uredila Jurij Fikfak in Božidar Jezernik. Ljubljana 2021. 50 Juš Škraban in Uršula Lipovec Čebron, Medkulturna mediacija in zdravstvo v Sloveniji. Ljubljana 2021. 51 Prepletenost svetov: zgodovine in refleksije zunajevropskih raziskav v Sloveniji. Uredile Sarah Lunaček, Tina Palaić in Maja Veselič. Ljubljana 2022. 52 Občutki mest: antropologija, umetnost, čutne transformacije. Uredili Rajko Muršič, Blaž Bajič in Sandi Abram. Ljubljana, 2022. 53 Kovidna krajina: ranljivosti v času pandemije. Uredili Uršula Lipovec Čebron in Sara Pistotnik. Ljubljana, 2023. 54 Commemorating the First World War in the Former Yugoslavia. Edited by Božidar Jezernik, Vijoleta Herman Kaurić, Ljiljana Dobrovšak. Ljubljana, 2023. 55 Ana Svetel, Spremenljive krajine severovzhodne Islandije: Vreme, letni časi, svetloba in tema. Ljubljana, 2024. 167 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 167 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 167 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 Kataložna zapisa o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani Tiskana knjiga COBISS.SI-ID=214407171 ISBN 978-961-297-448-0 E-knjiga COBISS.SI-ID 214459651 ISBN 978-961-297-451-0 (PDF) A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 168 A place for raptures and bonds - FINAL.indd 168 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43 29. 11. 2024 11:09:43