Dublin's twentieth-century social housing policies: tenure, ‘reserved areas’ and housing type

Joseph Brady and Ruth McManus

Planning Perspectives, 2020, vol. 35, issue 6, 1005-1030

Abstract: At the start of the twentieth century, Dublin city's slums bore comparison to those of Calcutta. The last inner city slums were finally cleared in the 1980s. This paper takes a long-term perspective to examine the key features of local authority housing policy over these decades. We explore three key policy instruments (tenure, housing type and the provision of ‘reserved areas’), detailing for the first time how and why they evolved. Both parallels and contrasts with the UK experience are identified. We argue that the varying approaches to tenure reflect shifting government funding regimes and were not ideologically driven. One result was two phases of housing stock sell-off to sitting tenants. Ongoing internal debate concerning the balance between flats and houses resulted in periodic changes in the type of dwellings provided. ‘Reserved areas’, a serendipitous response to a financing problem in the 1920s, remained a consistent policy instrument over the years. This led to increased social mixing and a varied appearance within housing schemes. We demonstrate that the combination of these three elements created Dublin's distinctive social housing landscape with its low-rise, low-density footprint.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02665433.2019.1662833 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rppexx:v:35:y:2020:i:6:p:1005-1030

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rppe20

DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2019.1662833

Access Statistics for this article

Planning Perspectives is currently edited by Michael Hebbert

More articles in Planning Perspectives from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().