inhabiting edge city

These are a selection of projects from the second year studio in UCD. The brief was for high-density residential development in a series of sites around Blanchardstown, Castleknock and Finglas. These sites were pieces of ground left over by the continuous processes of suburbanisation.

Students were asked to propose solutions which provided a variety of types of accommodation ; which established a hierarchy of public and private open space ; which negotiated between individual autonomy and a sense of community ; and which considered issues of accessibility, adaptability and sustainability. The design project was preceded by an analysis which sought to discover the particular qualities of these 'edge city' conditions, and to identify strategies for working in such contexts. The projects illustrated are representative of the rich diversity of responses to these notionally 'anonymous' locations, and of the inventive approaches to the perennial issue of in William Morris's words 'how we live and how we might live'.