"We want to have a creative sustainable city." Using the Sustainability Paradigm to Revitalize the City of Dublin

Abstract

This paper argues that the sustainability paradigm is currently used to transform industrial port cities into creative sustainable cities (Müller, 2013). Based on empirical data from the city of Dublin, I show that the sustainability paradigm is combined with the creative city paradigm to revitalize inner-city quarters. This urban planning strategy includes a focus on the creative class (Florida, 2004) and aims at integrating the old in the new, both in architectural and social terms. With this, it tries to be an integrative urban revitalization strategy. In the course of the 20th century, the Irish society developed from an industrial to a postindustrial, knowledge-based society (Bell, 1973; Drucker, 1993). New occupations emerged, making new forms of working spaces and modes of transport necessary, and a growing population now asks for a new kind of living spaces. Additionally, inner-city quarters have become increasingly popular with people working in knowledge-intensive industries. Consequently, city planners have initiated a revitalization process in these quarters, and they used two urban planning paradigms â creative cities (Florida, 2005) and sustainability â as guidelines for urban regeneration. This strategy aims to transform the whole city, but the single districts have to be the object of investigation when empirically approaching the changes of the built environment. Here we see that a threefold understanding of sustainability is used to integrate the demands of the new social groups in those of existing communities. Thus, the approaches used in the districts differ: (1) In The Liberties, home of a new-build technology cluster, the focus is on an economically sustainable development. (2) In Temple Bar, Dublin's cultural quarter, the emphasis is on a socially sustainable approach. (3) In the Docklands, the area of the old inner-city harbor, an attempt is made to combine all three dimensions of sustainability by creating new buildings (ecological sustainability) for both 'old' and 'new'1 inhabitants (social sustainability) and work space for growing industries like the knowledge-intensive industries (economic sustainability). The urban revitalization strategies have one thing in common: The inner-city districts dispose of a number of protected buildings which have to be integrated in the re-structuring of the quarters. Therefore, these buildings are renovated and combined with new buildings to form an architectural and spatial image of Dublin as a city with a future that is rooted in the city's industrial past. In this sense, the urban regeneration approach even has a notion of architectural and historical sustainability.