Reclaiming Dublin city

DUBLIN has accumulated many underused sites throughout the years and these days the chances of encountering one while wandering in the city is highly likely.

Such spaces include abandoned buildings that have been boarded up and put up for sale, dilapidated ones that have been forgotten by their owners and different sized vacant or underused spaces.

Dubliners may have wondered about the possibilities for such places, or even thought about practical solutions that could improve these spaces.

With that in mind, gathering up as much information as possible on underused spaces is judged to be very helpful, in the sense of offering a quick way, for example, for community groups to find a desirable spot to carry out their activities in the city.

Keeping beehives, storing anything in particular or growing vegetables are all concepts that have been much talked about in Europe, not only for its purposes of sustainability per se, but for its social interaction factor that brings neighbourhoods together.

Reusing Dublin is now attempting to map these underused and vacant spaces to create a database and to make it public to assist in the reuse of vacant spaces.

The Reusing Dublin website serves as a platform that functions by crowdsourcing, meaning interested people and especially Dubliners – the ones who know the city best – are able to write what they know about underused spaces and make suggestions on possible uses.

They can be fenced brownfields that could function as parks, buildings in ruins that need refurbishment, or even flat roofs that are spacious enough to accommodate some activities.

Reusing Dublin’s goals also include reaching out to property owners to participate in this quest, adding more pins to the reuse map and hence more opportunities.

This will also attract people to engage in various events held by the organisation’s team, such as the recent

‘Recycling Dublin’ cycle that was carried out on June 20.

The event gathered as many people as possible mounted on their bikes on a mission to cycle throughout the city and discover more unused sites to be added to the website.

It was a great experience in all regards, and equally important to update the information from existing entries on Dublin 7 areas.

The project has started this year and has been broadening its access via the social networks, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Reusing Dublin is an experimental research project that is part of a wider EU FP7 project called TURAS (Transitioning towards Urban Resilience and Sustainability).