Animating Newmarket Square Team Sheena Barrett Paul Lawlor David O’Connor Jeroen Laven Hans Karssenberg Target At the April 2007 ErasmusPC / School of Spatial Planning “Lost Spaces” Workshop we set out to discover badly used and under-used spaces in the city that can be brought back to life. It did not take us long to think of Newmarket Square, located just off Cork Street and penned in by the Tenters, the Liberties and the Cork Street Corridor, Newmarket Square is a large rectangular space that, as we found out, has been neglected, in spite of fantastic cultural potential. ErasmusPC set out to discover the soul of Newmarket Square and to translate that soul into ideas that could animate Newmarket Square.

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Lifestyle We found two different lifestyles around Newmarket Square: the old Dublin culture and the new yuppies – and not a few immigrant communities – moving in. Some of the old Dubliners we spoke with feel threatened by this (fear of being priced out), or would at least like to maintain the culture that they themselves are proud of.

Idea #1: Newmarket Film We visited the new community centre just around the corner of Newmarket Square. One of the staff, a true old Dubliner as he claimed himself, suggested making a film interviewing the old Dubliners still living in the area, and show it on a big screen on Newmarket Square. Finding the soul of the place through film and using it to create pride. We found out that similar films have already been made in the vicinity of area, which could be included to create a mini Newmarket film festival.

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Void Newmarket Square itself seems to be completely detached from city life around it. It is at the edge of three well known Dublin neighbourhoods: the Liberties, the Coombe and the Tenters. But it does not connect to any of them . When most squares act as a centre, this one sits on the edge.

It is a void, an urban vacuum. It is a desolate desert in the otherwise flowing city, a pocket of isolation. It lies off track: so far, it has just been missed by The Big Dublin Boom. No one we interviewed living around it uses it. It hardly seems relevant to local people that it is there. It used to house what one local acclaimed to be the Worst Pub of Dublin, but it was shut down after the last shooting he alleged. And yet we later found out that the pub hosted one of Dublin’s only heavy metal venues – and it was for the truly hardcore fan. Even though some people miss a location for functions, such as playing grounds for the youth, Newmarket Square is never mentioned as an option for redevelopment. People seem to take the existing square as a fact of life. Redeveloping it or using it in another way than the current way, to fit the needs of existing and new residents, is something that seems to be far from peoples imagination. A Missing History? And yet, we felt that there was some deeper history that we could not discover. What happened to the area? Was there a community on the square once? Were there tenements that were pulled down and families moved out to new towns on the urban edge, like so many other working class communities in Dublin? Was it like a mini-urban evacuation? We had trouble finding anyone that seemed to have a relationship with the square. This is unusual for Dubliners who are normally never short of a few stories about a place. In fact it was almost eerie in this sense. Market Its name suggests a market. If it ever was there, it has been erased from the collective memory. No one knows what the name signifies. Finally, one person speculates that the last market took place over two centuries ago, and that it must have been something like Smithfield not too long ago and partly even today, where the horses are being sold.

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Programme Although the first look around suggests it, still, Newmarket Square is not completely empty. It is occupied by small businesses, taxi companies, car repair companies etc. A lot of the companies present are in one way or another subsidised by the government, as many of the entrance signs of the companies tell us. The IDA and Dublin City Enterprise Centres offer local employment, especially to the disadvantaged, but they generate low activity levels in a mono-functional environment. Development This will change. New development will take place, as it does in other places in Dublin. All of the buildings around Newmarket Square are owned by one single owner and by the city. They have prepared a plan that is supposed to start somewhere 2008. Unlike countries like the Netherlands, temporary use of buildings and vacant sites during the (sometimes long) process of redevelopment is not common in Dublin, where useful premises are often left vacant. (Temple Bar in the 1980s was the great exception to this. This would mean opportunities are missed to use temporary functions to uplift both the square and the surrounding areas. In other countries these kind of temporary uses often also lead to a better sales of property being developed in the square. In Dublin this kind of strategy is not common. Idea #2: Egg timer Let’s go for some food for thought; we should perhaps leave Newmarket Square as it is. Of all the places that should be animated in Dublin, let’s not do this one. What would happen? A last resort of an ‘Old Dublin’ that probably never existed in the first place, an echo of what the city could have been before the Boom, something future generations would appreciate to experience. We could ring fence it, paint the fence with the cityscape of the other side of the square, so no one will notice it has gone missing for good. Newmarket Square could then finally be erased from everyone’s thoughts. Just one egg timer hidden on one of the corners, set to go off 200 years from now.

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Soul However, development seems to be a fait accompli. On second thought we should animate the place to the best benefit to the public, and not just for the developers. Animate it in a way that it has character, it is distinctive, it has something unique from all the other squares of Dublin. In other words, search the soul of the place, and build animation on that. To discover what that soul might be we went and talked to several people in the surroundings. Shop owners, people from the nearby church and community centre, people in the pub on the corner of the square, passers by, people living in the surroundings and other Dubliners with an opinion about the area. The interviews provide several ideas. There are seven elements we find in particular… 1. Jameson, Pimms and other distillers used to own the buildings for grain storage. So the area had a relationship with the many breweries and distilleries in the city. And with the south east of the country, where much of the grain was sourced. 2. There are beautiful and interconnected underground vaults with arched roofs. 3. The River Poddle runs underneath the square, eventually emerging into the Liffey by the Clarence Hotel in Temple Bar. 4. There are large (and growing) Russian and Polish communities in the vicinity. 5. There is a concentration of antique shops in one of the nearby streets. 6. There’s a growing population of creative people in the neighbourhood. Artists working and living there. 7. The square does not play an important part in the life of people living in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

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Idea #3: Temporarily Breeding Artists The first, the vaults, we could at least use in the transitional period, on a temporary basis. Dublin is faced with a huge lack of space for artists, studios, sound studios. This is also mentioned in element five above. The kind of space where culture is begotten, space that must provide breeding artists with a lot of room for a very affordable rent. Temporary use of the Newmarket Square buildings will good for artists (for they will have their space), it will be good for the city (for the city gets to keep its artists, which is a value in itself, but on the long run is the basis for any creative economy development as well), it will be good for developers (for the space will be animated, Newmarket Square will become an ‘address’ that people actually want to visit). What we need is a legal temporary rent agreement, which provides developers with security that they can use their buildings when they need them for development. There are examples of the anti squatting organisations in Amsterdam and other Dutch and European cities that could provide the basis. And we need a “pilot attitude” to open doors. A pilot attitude is where the Council is open to experimentation and is also to the benefit of the city, which could then continue to use Newmarket Square as a case example for the rest of the city, thus creating a unique continuum of temporary spaces for its artists to use.

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Idea #4: Streams The second, the underground river, we do not know how to use exactly, but we would like to have it explored. We do know it does not have the quality shown in this (therefore provocative) picture. However, it would be using the soul of the place to get the stream up to the surface and use it in the design of the square. We need a team of open minded water engineers and artists to come up with ideas. Inspiration can be taken from the German city of Freiburg. Many streams (bäckle) had been put under the surface in the 60s and 70s. Recently, redesigning their whole public realm in an inner city planning intervention, they brought the streams back to the surface. It turned out to become the unique selling point for the city centre of Freiburg. It looks wonderfully, but it also adds a peaceful sound experience to the micro climate of the streets. And it unexpectedly turns out to be one of the most important playgrounds for children. It has been done elsewhere so why not here: Why not build a water wheel, powered by the river, that would bring water up into the square and run a “bäckle” through the square following the course of the underground river? Also, why not position a small hydro generator in the river that could power decorative uplighting, such as the very successful ones in the new Eyre Square in Galway and on the North Wall Quay Campshires?

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Idea #5: New Markets The third and the fourth lead to a series of markets and events to animate Newmarket Square: car boot market: if one place in Dublin is suitable for a car boot sale, this is it; it could be linked in with the Polish and Russian communities which in their home country have a strong culture of car boot markets antique market: the shop owners love this idea, although they mention that antique is a down market; perhaps creating an actual market event could blow the dust off the furniture and its image? bio market: selling organic foods, crucial to the new urban lifestyle, and still scarce in supply in Dublin soccer, boxing and majorette tournament: these are the sports that seem to be popular in the neighbourhood among the people that have lived here for a long time. Why not respect their lifestyles and use their energy?. a religious or spiritual space could be incorporated into the square somehow, to reflect the growing number of Pentecostal and immigrant religious movements that are emerging in the city. These are happening in a very organic way – in warehouses, portacabins, peoples living rooms - but are building strong community fabric in the city. Dublin seems to have a schizophrenic attitude to fairs and markets. While longstanding fairs such as the Smithfield horse market are oddly being driven out, organic farmers markets are being encouraged elsewhere. Why not give the square over; offer it up! Allow the many transitory uses to take it over on certain days. In truth, nothing could be more intrinsic to Irish economic and social life than the fair, which was the centre of urban life for centuries and there could hardly be a more fitting venue than Newmarket. We think animating the place in these or other ways seems to be especially important, because there is more public space in the area, but it seems illegal to use it. Idea 6 # Involve the people During the afternoon quite a few challenges were recognized concerning old an new population: The square plays a very small (if any) role in the life of people living nearby There’s a gap between old Dubliners and newcomers. The yuppies and traditional population don’t really mix. There’s a need for functions such as playgrounds for old and new inhabitants. It would be a challenge and chance to organise the redevelopment process of the square (and the possible temporary use) in such a way that it brings old and new inhabitants together. To build citizenship and a shared pride of the area. These kind of processes have been done before often in many countries. All that is needed is a recognition of the process and a commitment to manage it effectively. Soul Afternoon To conclude, we are amazed ourselves with the inspiration we are apparently able to find about the soul of Newmarket Square and how to animate based on that, just focussing one part of an afternoon

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on a place like Newmarket Square. We did this by walking around with our international and multidisciplinary team, exchanging our own ideas, and having street interviews with local people. Just imagine what is possible with more time on your hands. To find out more about the ErasmusPC / School of Spatial Planning workshop, contact david.oconnor@erasmuspc.com ErasmusPC. Dublin / Amsterdam / Rotterdam, May 2007