THE revitalisation of Dublin's city centre through apartment developments and tourist-driven initiatives has been described by Mr Proinnsias Breathnach, senior lecturer in Geography at NUI Maynooth, as "a major failure" in urban planning.
Speaking on social polarisation at the conference, he said inner-city development was not creating sustainable communities. While the economic boom and redistributive programmes were reducing the overall number of households living in poverty, the gap between the very poor and the rest of society was growing.
"The `depth' of relative poverty has been improving," he said. "There has been a substantial fall in the proportion of households whose income is less than 40 per cent of the average," mainly due to the fall in unemployment and targeting of low-income groups with State supports.
However, he said, there was still a high degree of social polarisation because many of the poorest people were ghettoised. The growing income gap between the "cyber-proletariat" and other groups benefiting from the strength of the economy, meant that the beneficiaries of the boom were "becoming the target of criminal intrusions" from those left behind.
"The former have been responding by increasingly defensive measures, such as employment of security guards and electronic surveillance systems, and the creation of `gated' communities."
While this process was more advanced in the US, Mr Breathnach said, "elements of these trends are clearly evident in Dublin, although here the former inner-city employment blackspots have, to a large extent, been relocated to suburban ghettos in places like Tallaght and Finglas.
"They have largely been replaced by a new `yuppie' community which inhabits the 10,000 apartments which have been constructed in the centre of the city in the 1990s. This represents a classic process of `gentrification' of inner-city areas which has been widely documented by geographers and sociologists."
Some commentators had referred to "the `aesthetisisation' of the inner city, although it might be stretching it a bit to apply this concept to some of the new apartments in central Dublin", he said. The tendency of "yuppies" to live in central city apartments was driven by the need "to be close to consumer-intensive spectacular districts of ethnic restaurants, boutiques, theatres and art galleries.
"While in the case of Dublin the success of Temple Bar is sometimes attributed to the growth in the tourism industry, there is no doubt that the rapid growth of the locally resident cyber-proletarian population has also been a major factor.
"Studies of these new apartment developments have shown them to consist almost entirely of one- and two-bedroomed units inhabited by young single people or childless couples. There is absolutely no provision for older households, or for families with children, either in the design of the apartments themselves or in the availability of public and community services.
"Given the need to encourage more urban living as a partial antidote to the mounting problem of housing and urban transport in Dublin, the proliferation of such apartments in central Dublin must be seen as yet another major failure on the part of the urban planning system."