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Case Studies  Urban Regeneration in the City of Dublin: Partnership structures and integrated area planning
Urban decline
Seventy years ago, Kilmainham-Inchicore was a solidly lower middle class/working class neighbourhood with high levels of local employment in industries that ranged from engineering to jam-making. In the 1970s, like many inner-city neighbourhoods, the area began to go into decline. De-industrialisation meant the closure and relocation of many places of employment. A social housing estate, St. Michael’s, built in that decade, became synonymous with the drug economy and culture. Crime in the neighbourhood rose, and banks and other institutions began to “redline” the village, which resulted in further disinvestments. One resident described Inchicore at the end of the 1990s as “a deserted village”. Quality of life in the neighbourhood declined and this lead to a hardening of existing divisions within the neighbourhood (mainly between local authority tenants and private home owners) and a feeling that residents had been abandoned.
Now the neighbourhood is changing once again. The pressure to provide more homes in Dublin has enhanced the profile of Kilmainham-Inchicore, because of its relative maturity and proximity to the city centre. Thus, all available sites, many of which were formerly occupied by industry, are being developed for private residential accommodation. Houses have greatly augmented in value and a new breed of gentrifiers (middle class professionals) are moving into the area. It is noteworthy, that having suffered a population decline between 1986 and 1996, the population of the area had stabilised by 2002 at just over 11,000 (CSO, 2002). So in the lifetime of the long term residents, the neighbourhood has evolved along a trajectory which is not untypical of the lifecycle of other neighbourhoods in other ENTRUST cities: traditional, homogenous industrialised urban enclave to de-industrialised urban blight to regeneration bringing changes in the character of the neighbourhood and the class composition.
Neighbourhood lifecycle |
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Late nineteenth century |
Traditional industry |
working class |
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| Late twentieth century |
De-industrial |
older residents/
Welfare recipients/
old working class |
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| Twenty- first century |
Post-industrial |
welfare recipients/
old working class/
professional-managerial gentrifiers |
Housing Tenure  Urban Renewal
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