Category resistance
New Frontiers #2: Energy Infrastructure
This is the second in a short series of posts about new sites of contestation that are emerging outside of the city – the usual focus for Dublin-based activists and social movements. While these sites of contestation are outside of the city, this doesn’t meant that they aren’t intimately connected with the city. Just think […]
New Frontiers #1: Fish Farming
Nearly all of the articles we publish on this blog have an urban (Dublin) focus. That isn’t really surprising when Dublin is where we live, work, rent, and socialize. More generally the city has been (and continues to be) the site of new and politically significant transformations – particularly the relationships between real estate, the […]
Vulture Landlords: an in depth interview with Desiree Fields
The crisis in Ireland’s private rented sector keeps gathering steam, and recent additional regulations introduced by Alan Kelly are not going to make much of a difference. One of the most novel aspects of what’s happening currently is the emergence of a new type of landlord: financial institutions buying cheap real estate and becoming mega-landlords. […]
The fisherman’s guide to ruining Dublin
At the end of June we attended a public meeting in Dunard Community Centre in Dublin 7. The meeting was a presentation of the ‘D7 Parks’ project, which has come about through the collaboration of Oxmantown Rd. community garden, the Dunard/O’Deaveny Gardens football club and a number of O’Deaveny Gardens residents who are horse enthusiasts. […]
Municipal revolution, part II: Dublin
This is the second of two blog posts on ‘municipal revolution’, reflecting on the victory of ‘citizens’ platforms’ across Spain and what it might mean for Dublin. While much attention has recently been focused on next year’s general elections, it seems to us that the municipal scale currently offers more possibilities for a variety of […]
Municipal revolution, May 2015
Feeling the euphoria of the municipal elections in Spain, we’ve decided to scribble out a few notes on what happened there and to think through what it might mean for Dublin. What follows is a bit sketchy, but we think it’s worthwhile to add to the debates currently going on and to get our heads […]
Openhere Starts Tomorrow
The Openhere conference/festival starts tomorrow in the Science Gallery, Dublin. The three-day program all looks really interesting – a great line-up of speakers – but perhaps most interesting for us are the talks by Brett Scott on open-source financing and the interview with the Robin Hood Collective who ask: “Could we bend the financialization of […]
Escaping the activist ghetto and the role of militant research
Below you can read the notes from our talk about Militant Research at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference in London 2014. There are a couple of points around the historical and political context of militant research that are worth making in terms of understanding its relevance to contemporary social movements. Militant research began to gain traction […]
Squatting in Dublin steps up a gear
The last year or so has seen DIY urbanism move up a gear in the fair city. Most notably, the unprecedented success and ambition of Granby Park marks a ‘before and after’ in terms of grassroots urban initiatives. This period has also seen Dublin City Council take an increasing interest in alternative or ‘creative’ uses […]
A manifesto for housing
“A housing bubble. Not enough supply. Not enough credit. We hear so much about the housing market, but for the majority of us the reality is an ongoing housing crisis. At the heart of this crisis is the government’s failure to create a housing policy that guarantees everyone’s access to a home. The market-based policies […]
provisional university 