Robin Hood Gardens reminds me (in some ways!) of the Hulme Crescents in Manchester. I was made aware of them when doing a research elective in Hong Kong called Shrinking Cities (http://www.shrinkingcities.com/manchester_liverpool.0.html?&L=1) where we studied previous examples of city centre shrinkage in Manchester (after the failure of the textile industry in the 1950's) and in Detroit (around the same time and still continuing today) and used this information as a base to study current city shrinkage in Shenzhen, China. I'd be interested in doing something similar (with a slight scale change!) for Dublin. It's weird when you think about how much energy is put into city/urban planing for growth but I don't think there's much in the reserves for a decline!
Below is a short documentary about Hulme.
It gets kind of funny when they start talking about how this was supposedly one of the first examples of deck access, how the architects were totally out of touch with reality and how it was supposed to be a scaled up version of the Georgian Crescents in Bath. The Manchester Government were, at the time, encouraging industrialised, large-scale building.
Weirdly, the "slum" that Hulme very quickly turned into, became a breeding ground for the art and music scene in Manchester and so did the many abandoned buildings in the city centre and it was this (along with other factors) that led to Manchester city centre being repopulated.
Detroit never recovered and people never moved back into the city centre, the suburbs expanded massively. Its kind of amazing, in most other places in the world people say - "Oh, I remember when there used to be green fields here" and in Detroit it's more like "Oh, I remember when there used to be housing estates here". There are lots of urban farm incentives on the go there at the moment in the lovely green fields in the former city centre. And, there's a trend for people to have their relatives graves dug up and moved out to the suburbs so the families never have to go back to the city! Theres a great documentary about it but I cant remember what its called. Heres a great BBC documentary instead! The footage of the abandoned buildings is fantastic. Detroit is cited as an example that we should all prepare ourselves for in the future! Can't wait.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OpXhd7iau8
(I don't know why none of my links are coming up properly, just copy and paste if you are interested!)
Very live topic. The abandoned housing estates of Leitrim and in other counties are a huge problem and an indictment of the governments incentive scheme for such developments. Dominic Stevens has done some work on this issue, What Now looked into it and there are other initiatives. I think one of your classmates. Blabhach(?) is doing his dissertation on this. The Shrinking cities issue impacted in East Germany in a big way with falling house prices over the last ten year leaving vast areas virtually deserted. Peter Cody's group seems to be dealing with the issue of "Re- making the city", which is a cycle of construction and destruction. John McL has the shrinking city book vol 1 ..in fact I have it for the last year on the desk behind me!
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