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This paper illustrates the place of root shock in the colonial and postcolonial history of Ireland and situates this series of Irish papers inspired by Mindy Fullilove’s seminal book. It explains why the practice of eviction has such a traumatic resonance within Irish society. This trauma was laid bare in the responses to a 2023 artwork by Spicebag that connected modern eviction with its historical precedents. In this paper the elements of Spicebag’s work are given their historical context with an account of dispossession and plantation, famine and exile, urban poverty, and neoliberal privatization of land and housing. In each case, a new form of root shock was added to the earlier legacies producing chronic place-based trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an established working-class community in Dublin’s southeast inner city. It describes the experience of root shock in a community that has experienced ‘displacement in place’ following urban renewal and gentrification in the surrounding area. The article highlights the shrinking of ‘third places’ for public mixing: older men have lost their pubs, younger people have lost their playgrounds, and young adults express a profound sense of displacement in place. As the class composition of the area changes, there are few places where classes can mingle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s concept of ‘Root Shock’ captures the trauma caused by the mass displacement and dispossession associated with urban renewal. In the twenty years since it was published, such policies have set in motion waves of trauma and ‘dispossessive praxis’ (Lancione, 2024, p. 841), producing what Fullilove (2004, p. 99) calls ‘a downward spiral of collapse’. Reflecting on the book’s twentieth anniversary, in this paper we draw on root shock and ancillary concepts to reflect on what happens when the forms of community, reciprocity, and solidarity presupposed in analyses of residents’ experience of displacement have already been hollowed out? We do so by examining how housing movements have had to simultaneously resist displacement and engage in active processes to create community, focusing on the experience of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) in Ireland. We show that the denial of roots requires the praxis of cultivating and nurturing their potential through tenant organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges inherited twentieth-century assumptions of suburbia by teasing out existing interrelationships between the city centre and its peripheries. This is done through a content analysis of promotional material and spatial plans guiding the development of 'City Edge', a proposed 700-hectare regeneration scheme over an industrial development in the periphery of Dublin, Ireland. The analysis of new land-use ambitions for City Edge elucidates tensions around the 'highest and best use' of land, the role of non-local speculative approaches, and how the demand for housing in global cities, combined with an ideal of 'mixed-use' is reshaping suburban landscapes. In so doing, we draw upon the concepts of 'blandscape' and 'blendscape' to examine some contradictory forces at work in shaping contemporary suburban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major programme is a combination of projects that together deliver a defined outcome, for example urban regeneration, major infrastructure investment, or an urban extension. It takes time and it needs a good plan. But circumstances change over time. That same good plan must have in place the flexibility to respond to change. The intention of this paper is to provide a practitioner’s reflection on plans for major programmes. It explores the theme of effectively setting and maintaining an authentic vision, drawing on learning from engineering and business sectors and considering experiences of the Adamstown Strategic Planning Zone (SPZ) in the Republic of Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]