This blog post is based on a talk I gave at Ignite Dublin in the Science Gallery on the 8th June.

All urban dwellers carry with them an imperfect mental map of their city. Imperfect because it tends to over-state places they live or work in, or areas they spend lots of time in, and so know well. It also tends to leave gaps in areas they don’t know so well.

When I moved to Dublin from England a decade ago, I was surprised how many Dubliners’ mental map of their city contained a black hole where Temple Bar should have been. The mental maps reminded me of those medieval maps where uncharted areas of a continent or ocean were simply left blank, and marked “here be monsters” or “here be dragons” or simply “here be danger.” For Temple Bar, they were marked “here be expensive pubs, stag weekends, pools of vomit, fist-fights, aggression, groups of pissed up people shipped into Dublin by RyanAir or EasyJet like so many veal calves.”

During the Celtic Tiger, Temple Bar was the very antithesis of the “local shops for local people” idea. There were no local shops, so there were no local people. This was fuelled by overwhelmingly negative media coverage – for every good news story told, two bad news stories were published.

But the recession has changed Temple Bar, just as it has changed Dublin and changed Ireland. It has brought a renewed interest in our cities and urban life, and what we want from the places we work and live in. Fifty percent of people live in urban Ireland, and that proportion is only getting bigger.

Other urban regeneration projects have collapsed because of the recession – The Digital Hub and Smithfield are performing very poorly, but Temple Bar is entering a third period of growth, more like its original aims.

The first period of growth happened in the 1960s when CIE, the state transport agency had a plan of buying all of the buildings between the Liffey and Dame Street, and Trinity and Christchurch and demolishing them to create a central transport hub – the largest concrete structure in the country.

In the meantime, they leased the property on short-term leases and at low rents, and Temple Bar gained a reputation as an incubation hub for small commercial or cultural projects. It became the cultural quarter of the city, but also an area for fledgling enterprises.

During the Celtic Tiger, the area went through its second phase where the healthy competition between commerce and culture tilted in favour of commerce, and Temple Bar gained its poor reputation.

But the recession, and the need for commercial operations to revisit their plans, gives us a chance to go back to basics, and re-assess the original plans for Temple Bar.

The pop-up restaurants and shops, and their harnessing of new types of advertising, is a type of business which Temple Bar first wanted to attract back in the 1960s.

The regeneration of the area has been slow – it has taken over 50 years just to get to here – but just as a business which is launched in a recession is better placed to survive a recession than a company which has never seen bad times, so Temple Bar, and its slow, confusing regeneration process is more likely to outlive regeneration plans made during the Celtic Tiger.

The recession is the third phase of Temple Bar’s regeneration, and it is more inclusive than in the past. 300 businesses operate there. 3,000 people live there, and 10,000 people work there. It’s ours to use, and I hope by using it, the mental map carried in the mind of the Dubliner can be made more perfect.

Thank you.