Spatial Subversion in Eighteenth-Century Dublin: The Suburban Design Practices of the Fitzwilliam Estate

摘要

The story of Dublin's Fitzwilliam estate, the capital's largest, as told by the agents' letters, surveyors' plans and housing proposals, reveals much about eighteenth-century urban and suburban design. Some of the questions raised by these sources include: When do suburbs become more attractive to develop than the city centre and why? What spatial practices advanced suburban development at the expense of the city centre? How did suburban housing evolve such homogeneity and why? Unusual both in its scale and absentee management tradition, the Fitzwilliam suburban landscapes correct any misapprehension that Dublin's suburbs were direct translations of British and American practice. Their creation reveals the contorted practices that convert absentee landlords and their Catholic agents had to adopt if they wished to exploit the economic potential of their land holdings. The estate actively manipulated Dublin's spatial hierarchy, advancing edge over core and seaside over mountain. As the inner city's attraction diminished so the suburbs' attraction was increased, and this in effect made Dublin's geography less hierarchical. The same smoothing occurred at the smaller scale of housing design. Keen to attract tenants of many incomes and, significantly for Ireland, churches, the Fitzwilliam suburban housing projects were deliberately egalitarian, non-denominational, mundane and unexceptional. This flat character, verging on the boring, has long been associated with suburban environments. That this monotonous homogeneity, encouraged by Dublin's particular geographical, social and religious structure, was a conscious design decision and not a mere dilution of design ingenuity and effort is unexpected and brings a new nuance to the evaluation and understanding of suburban space. In these anomalous suburbs laid out by an anomalous landlord, both spatial and social hierarchy became concealed, fractured and sometimes wholly reversed - a perennial feature of suburban space.