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Self-organising: the Dublin Tenants Association
Here’s the text of a talk Mick gave at the anarchist book fair last Saturday. We’ve been interested in forms of self-organising for quite a while now, particularly thinking about the role of concrete practices in generating material social relations in order to foster social change. Here we look at some of these issues in the context of the Dublin Tenants Association. What is 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 financialization of social housing?
The current housing crisis means the need for social housing is greater than ever. And yet, cuts to the funding of social housing over the last few years have reduced output to levels so small it is genuinely hard to believe. New social housing provision by local authorities fell as low as 285 units in […]
NAMA and the housing crisis
What follows is based on a talk given by Mick Byrne at the Housing Emergency and Rights Conference which took place in Liberty Hall on October 3rd, 2015. You can listen to audio from all the talks on the day here and read some reflections on the conference here. NAMA seems in many ways like […]
Reflections on Housing Emergency and Rights Conference
These are just some brief reflections from last Saturday’s Housing Rights and Emergency conference. They’re not meant to reflect the day as a whole, but rather my take on what were the main themes that emerged both from the speakers’ inputs and from the discussion in the workshop. Analysis of the crisis While the day […]
Ireland’s New Transnational Landlords
Originally posted on Ireland after NAMA:
We have heard a lot about the crisis in Dublin’s rental sector in recent months. On the surface, a lack of properties for sale or to let on the market has contributed to rising rents and the crisis of homelessness. But underneath this, a less visible, though no less…
The Financialization of the City
Originally posted on Ireland after NAMA:
People interested in urban studies will have no doubt come across the term ‘the financialization of the city’, or similar terms such as ‘the financialization of real estate’ or the ‘financialization of urban space’. This post gives a sense of what this means, but also theorizes how financialization relates…
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 […]
Something wonderful is happening in Madrid, in spite of Madrid
We recently came across this interesting project in Madrid linked to the ‘right to the city’. Like Dublin, the Spanish capital was overwhelmed by a speculative storm of property construction from the mid-1990s to the financial crisis. But it has also played host to a variety of new social movements seeking to reclaim the city. Most […]
Six reasons why Michael Noonan is right to compare Dublin Docklands and Canary Wharf
“The Dublin Docklands area presents a unique opportunity for NAMA and the Irish taxpayer. It is rare that such large swathes of prime waterfront land in a modern city such as Dublin has remained undeveloped. It is even rarer that the ownership of such land rests in a State organisation providing the opportunity for truly […]
provisional university 