Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment Nikhil Gupta Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment, by Andrew Kincaid , pp. 297. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. $75 (cloth); $25 (paper). The political, cultural, and economic struggles to control geography and people in Ireland, both before and after independence, have left their marks on Dublin's built environment. Taking the postcolonial state's capital as his text, Andrew Kincaid reads the changes in twentieth-century Dublin's urban planning and architecture to provide a nuanced understanding of Irish history and culture. For too long, Kincaid argues, a literary paradigm has dominated our interpretations of Irish modernism and has limited the scope of Irish Studies in general. In focusing on the material space of the city, Postcolonial Dublin: Imperial Legacies and the Built Environment presents Dublin as a site where multiple social forces, ideologies, and state policies compete simultaneously to shape the urban geography. Kincaid's work, in other words, complicates our understanding of how imperial and national authorities have consolidated and maintained power in Ireland. He examines a number of the state's plans and concerns that have not been studied within the context of more well-known modernist ideas and processes of modernization. The result is a compelling reading of the city that supplements previous depictions of Ireland's relationship to modernity. Kincaid interprets the transformations in Dublin's urban geography in a way that shows just how contradictory the efforts to create and manage twentieth-century Irish identities were. Ireland was variously described as local and global, rural and urban, traditional and modernized. These tensions materialized in the physical core of Dublin and the changing subjectivities of those who lived within that space. For the British at the turn of the century, planning [End Page 152] and reimagining the material space of Dublin served two functions: it helped not only to coerce, but also to gain the consent of, the colonial population by appealing to their best interests. Kincaid emphasizes how "the rhetoric of development masked the required obedience to the law" in constructing national schools, prisons, and hospitals, in standardizing building and hygiene codes, and in forming a national police force. At the same time, nationalists appropriated the language and principles of urban planning, and used them to further their own image of Ireland as modernized and, thus, ready to be recognized as a modern, independent nation-state. Town planning would reconfigure urban housing so as to eliminate slums, make room for an industrialized and commercial city core, and improve mobility between new suburbs and the city center. The British saw these measures as a way of preventing violent outbursts that might arise from congestion, poverty, and poor living conditions; nationalist planners saw these measures as the best way to legitimate, and make tangible, their ideological positions. The years immediately following independence gave rise to several new forms of cultural production—among them stripped-down classical style architecture, garden suburb housing, slum clearance schemes, and new apartments influenced by European styles—that counter the trend in Irish Studies to portray the new postcolonial state "as a repressive and authoritarian regime." Suburban homes intended for sale, rather than for rent, were meant to create the healthy, self-reliant, property-owning middle class that was a prerequisite for Irish nationalism's entrance onto the world stage under the leadership of William Cosgrave and Eamon de Valéra. In building high-density flats with modernist and expressionist features in Dublin's inner city, the state's early leaders showed that they could balance the public needs of a new industrial economy with a more individual, liberal vision for the city. Rather than a simply conservative or even repressive culture, Kincaid finds in these years "a more flexible and open state" that was modernizing Ireland in order to promote a nationalist agenda that would also maintain stability. By emphasizing American and European influences on the architecture developed in this period (especially Ireland's own adaptation of the international style promoted by Le Corbusier, Gropius, van der Rohe, and others), Kincaid rejects conventional representations of the new Free State and shows it to be, in this way, outward...