We Have A Right To This City Too
Nathan O’Byrne takes stock of the furore over people enjoying themselves on Drury Street.
During a spell of good weather, young people gathered on Drury Street in Dublin, sitting on the kerb, sharing drinks and enjoying the evening sun. In response, local businesses erected signs warning against this “anti-social” behaviour. National media, including RTÉ, picked up the story, giving airtime to business owners who claimed financial hardship due to pedestrian congestion. But they never asked the people who had chosen to spend time on Drury Street why they were there, what it meant to them, or how they felt about the pedestrianisation of the street.
Private property relations and their conflicts with social life are nothing new to Dublin, but they often escalate along similar trajectories — barriers are erected, toilets and bins removed, steps hosed with water, and signs installed telling people to move on and not sit down. These moments reveal the deeper social relations behind how our cities are developed. As French Marxist and writer on ideology in everyday life, Henri Lefebvre, wrote:
The signs on Drury Street are products of the contradictions embedded in Dublin’s political struggle for social life and public space, against private property and gentrification. The camouflaging of ideology in the physical world of cities and urbanism often creates opaque and confusing flashpoints of dissent. These can manifest in anger over a sign, a bylaw enforced by physical infrastructure or the denial of access to a public space, but behind them is an ideological struggle over our physical world. The outrage these flashpoints provoke and the debates they spark are rooted in an ideology which is made invisible: the neoliberal city and its rules. However, the language around them often strips this away – a deliberate camouflage that obscures the political nature of the issue and the conclusions that should arise from the actions of both businesses and the council.
Critical Urbanism: What draws us to Drury Street?
Critical urbanists and philosophers interested in the everyday, like Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, as well as the Situationists, often used methods like rhythmanalysis and the dérive to closely observe everyday life and critique the commodified rhythms of the city. For them, walking was not just movement but a way to critique and reimagine urban space. In many ways, these theorists revolutionised the most basic act of walking from one point to another as a means to critique and imagine what the experience of our urban landscapes can/should be.
So I asked the question: why Drury Street? Why do we gravitate toward these finite and ever-shrinking spaces for social life in the city?
To begin answering that, I conducted a simple observational walk from a nearby DART station into the city centre. What struck me was how, in many ways, all roads led to Drury Street. For every café or supermarket I passed, there were five or six boutique designer stores – including one selling Rolexes, directly across from another displaying Louis Vuitton bags that cost more than a couple months’ wages for most people.
These spaces were not inviting. The narrow footpaths, the high-end retail, the lack of seating – it all discouraged lingering. They functioned more like high-speed commercial corridors than places to pause, interact, or dwell. Few people seemed to be browsing, apart from some well-dressed tourists. What remained were highly curated, exclusionary environments – spaces designed not for gathering but for consumption.
Eventually, I arrived at George’s Street Arcade, an ornate red-brick Victorian complex. Just beside it lies the street that has provoked the anger of the city’s pearl clutchers: Drury Street.
This pedestrianised strip captures the evening light and avoids the wind-tunnel effect that defines much of Dublin’s urban core. Despite this, little infrastructure has been introduced to support the increased footfall. Businesses have extended their outdoor seating, but only for paying customers. There is just one public bench on the entire street that is not affiliated with a private business.
“Pedestrianisation! But not like that!”
I believe in the right of those who inhabit our cities to shape them, determine how urban life unfolds, and how shared space is produced. This means recognising and embracing the irregular production of social space: spontaneous, informal, often including unsanctioned acts of gathering. In the case of Drury Street, what some label “anti-social” behaviour is in fact an expression of the city’s collective social desire. It is a quiet resistance to the dominance of for-profit urban development.
The work of critical geographer David Harvey reminds us that urbanisation under capitalism is never neutral. What appears to be the organic clustering of development in certain areas is the result of deliberate political and economic decisions. Neoliberal urbanisation operates on a logic where private profit trumps collective need. Public space is parcelled off, commodified and increasingly hostile to uses that don’t generate revenue.
In this process, what Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession” becomes starkly visible: shared urban spaces that once allowed for loitering, gathering, or rest are transformed into zones of surveillance and consumption. Kerbs, benches, plazas – these become battlegrounds. Spaces that have not yet been absorbed into the city’s profit-making machinery are treated as threats. The result is a city that tries, poorly, to manage the contradictions of commodified urban life by offering weak concessions, like Dublin City Council’s tokenistic pedestrianisation efforts.
As an example, consider a walk through the south inner city. You’ll pass four pedestrianised streets or squares – some active, some ghostly, all telling. Start with Suffolk Street, a dimly lit pedestrianised zone lined with private businesses catering mainly to tourists. There are no benches, no shelter, and little sun – just the relentless logic of transaction. Not unlike Drury Street, it is not exactly hostile, but it is indifferent to your presence unless you’re paying to be there.
Further along lies Barnardo Square, a space used primarily by delivery riders catching a moment of rest. There are benches, but they are hard, uncovered, and offer no protection from the elements. The young trees planted there are too slight to provide shade or shelter. Meanwhile, Dame Street roars past, undercutting any sense of peace. Looming above the square is the former Central Bank – a brutalist relic, oversized, grey, and void of warmth.
Only in Temple Bar do we encounter a more viable attempt at public space. The average city inhabitant likely works to avoid this square given its proximity to the heart of Dublin’s tourism-scene. Temple Bar represents to many a commodified nearly theme parke-sque answer to what Ireland is, catering to a deeply American audience, a characteristic the space struggles to shake off. Yet here, benches are thoughtfully placed around maturing trees that will one day offer canopy and comfort. A small market regularly appears, offering crafts rather than luxury commodities. There is no traffic, but there is life, and quite a lot of it. The square hums with informal, irregular, often uncommodified activity. Were the space in any other part of the city, it may actually feel real and welcoming. It offers a glimpse of what urban space could be, were it organised around use value rather than exchange value, to borrow from Lefebvre.
Henri Lefebvre revolutionised how we think about space – not as a static backdrop but as something actively produced through social relations, struggle and desire. Space is not made solely through planning decisions, the planting of trees, or the laying of benches. It is shaped in the informal grey zones of urban life, where people gather, resist, create, and reassert their right to exist and cohabit in the city.
In Lefebvre’s radical vision, the value of urban space cannot be measured in sales per square metre, as it so often is in Dublin. Instead, it must be reimagined through what becomes socially possible: what kinds of relationships can form, what kinds of interactions emerge, and how art, joy, and creativity can fill every crevice. These are declarations, however subtle or improvised, that say: this space is ours. This space is for everyone.
Against this vision stands the dominant logic of exclusion: a confining urbanism grounded in private property. This logic is enforced not only through legal regimes or rent prices, but in the physical manifestations of power all around us. Hostile architecture, fences, surveillance cameras, signage declaring acceptable behaviour are not neutral features. They are signals that we are visitors, not inhabitants, and that it ultimately is not ourselves who will determine what is acceptable and what isn’t.
Lefebvre believed that social space should produce democracy, not just as a political ideal but as a lived, spatial practice. It should invite collective life, not restrict it. But in Dublin today, the opposite often feels true. Our city is being flattened into a series of consumer corridors, designed to shuttle people from one transaction to the next. Pedestrians move like blood cells through the arteries of the city, forced to keep moving from one critical organ to the next. To slow down – or stop altogether – would interrupt the flow of money that underpins the city’s very logic: a vehicle for capital accumulation. Moving slower, spending less, living more, spells death to a neoliberal city that designs its own reproduction into the very curves and bends of the streets themselves.
Signs of resistance
Across Dublin, manifestations of resistance are making tangible differences. CATU, which organises against eviction, fights for tenants’ rights and challenges the forces of gentrification. Artist collectives are creating vibrant, expressive works in a city increasingly devoid of and hostile to genuine grassroots culture and social life. One such example is the ‘Liberties SOS’ page which documents the rapid gentrification of the South Inner City and produces often poetic vignettes of everyday life and culture of ordinary people which confronts the process of gentrification and displacement. There are also groups like United Against Racism, who are pushing back against the dangerous logic that misidentifies the scarcity of urban life, services and most of all housing as a product of immigration, or a grand “replacement” conspiracy. These different movements are united by a common goal: to fight displacement, build community, and express collective struggle across all lines used by the capitalist class to divide the working class.
What’s missing from our struggle in Dublin and across urban spaces in Ireland is the connective tissue – the political imagination that can bring these various struggles into relation. A Right to the City alliance wouldn’t be a single organisation, but a shared project: a movement of those who refuse to be priced out, pushed aside, or policed out of social life and deeper into alienation. It would serve as both a forum and a vehicle for uniting groups around issues of social dislocation, anti-social architecture, gentrification, and cultural expression, working toward the creation of urban social movements committed to resisting the current system of urban development. This alliance would bring together those who want cities that nurture the full potential of life, art, democracy, and sustainability, ultimately laying the groundwork for resistance which rewrites the rules of urban life and transforms economic life itself. It would ask who truly owns the city? Who shapes its social life? These questions can emerge from simple origins like signs on a street. The left needs to be prepared to answer these questions and recognise these issues as part of a broader fight for the very soul of our cities and of everyday life.
The answer to who owns the city doesn’t begin in council chambers, but in the everyday acts of presence and refusal already unfolding on kerbs, in squats, in marches, in tenants’ meetings, and beneath the shadows of luxury hotels. It is small radical acts that begin to re-imagine the city, expressing what could be and what we truly desire from urban life. The work of fighting gentrification and the ideological logic of the neoliberal city needs to be done as a united front of artists, tenants unions, anti-racists and revolutionaries.
James Connolly put it well:
