Vacancy as Precarious Property in Dublin's Temporary Urbanism Moment

Abstract

This paper makes a case for viewing vacancy as “precarious property” (Blomley 2020; Antipode 52[1]:36–57), i.e. less a material object defined by absence of use than the property relation (understood as a bundle of social, economic, legal, and political relationships) put under strain by the visibility of non-use. Focusing on Dublin's temporary urbanism moment (2008–2017), the paper has two aims. Firstly, it gives a critical account of this recent urban history of experimentation, documenting how the possibilities of the period following the crash were (fore)closed through governmental interventions. Secondly, the empirical case is used to make a wider conceptual argument about the conjunctural role that vacancy plays in urbanisation and urban politics, developing three main arguments: that vacancy is a vulnerable axis within the ownership model of property; that claims to vacancy are articulated in conjunctural and contextual ways; and that vacancy epitomises the dual nature of precarity.