With the publication in 2016 of Dublin, 1950–1970: houses, flats and high-rise and in 2017 of Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s: cars, shops and suburbs, the Making of Dublin City series now extends to seven volumes. The series has been an initiative of the Geography Department in University College Dublin and the series editors Anngret Simms, Joseph Brady and Ruth McManus have brought the geographer’s perspective to the history of the city, a perspective defined in the first volume as ‘concerned with explaining the landscape of the city and its spatial character’. Four of the seven volumes, including the two under review, explore the physical development of the city in the twentieth century. These volumes form part of the rich contribution made by geographers over forty years to the study of Irish urban history through decades when, as a field, it has perhaps been eclipsed by advances elsewhere in the discipline.

By the end of the 1960s, 44 per cent of Dublin city’s housing stock was less than twenty-five years old. This aspect of the remaking of the city reflects the very extensive house building that took place in the early 1950s and again in the 1960s and is the central concern of Houses, flats and high-rise. Substantial chapters on public and private housing and Dublin Corporation’s involvement in post-war flat and high-rise developments are bookended by statistically based portraits of the city in the early 1950s and again in 1971. A close analysis of census data shows the dramatic shifts in population related to the clearing of the old tenements close to the city centre and the burgeoning new housing schemes at its periphery including Finglas, Walkinstown and Coolock. The account of the building of these huge schemes – over 3,000 houses were built in Ballyfermot alone between 1950 and 1956 – is forensic, supported by maps, photographs and statistical tables derived from Dublin Corporation minutes. This is an unvarnished history of the origins of ordinary places that are a part of the fabric of the city and represents a valuable contribution to its historiography. Throughout, even in relation to most private housing, the low priority given to design is clearly apparent and illustrated in many photographs. The design of localities similarly lacked distinction. Brady documents these flaws and is particularly critical of Ballymun’s tower blocks. At the same time he highlights the achievement of the corporation’s policy in the face of the city’s enduring housing crisis where over 40 per cent of the population in some inner city wards lived in overcrowded conditions in the late 1940s. Mary Daly in The buffer state (Dublin, 1997), which is not referenced, explores the crucial but often fraught relationship between Dublin Corporation and central government and suggests it reflected a bias on the part of official Ireland towards the city. This question is taken up briefly in Cars, shops and suburbs but it offers a perspective that might profitably have been applied in both volumes when assessing the corporation’s achievements and its failures.

Houses, flats and high-rise concludes with a detailed portrait of the social geography of the city based on 1971 census data. The mapping of ‘social status’ or social class confirms patterns of residential segregation and social differentiation evident in most modern capitalist cities with the professional and middle classes largely south of the Liffey and, to a lesser extent, along the coast to the north. Decisions made by Dublin Corporation, obliged to acquire land for social housing where it could best afford it, and by private developers seeking to appeal to those with sufficient income to purchase a new home, reinforced existing patterns. The corporation’s policy of reserving plots for private housing or tenant purchase within its schemes was an attempt to promote a mix of households with different incomes. Set alongside this, however, was its caution in confronting objections on the part of those in nearby private estates to proposed council housing. Plans for the St Anne’s Raheny estate in the early 1950s, for example, changed under intense lobbying from nearby Clontarf residents (supported by the Irish Times!) for a scheme of over 900 houses. Ultimately 600 tenant purchase houses were to be built on the Raheny side of the estate, at a remove from the superior housing in Clontarf. All this suggests questions for further research into the role of the new Irish state and its institutions in addressing or reproducing patterns of social differentiation.

A recurring theme in the Making of Dublin City series is the varying impact of town planning on the changing morphology of the city. The gap between the precepts of town planning, planning legislation and the reality of a growing city forms the introduction to Cars, shops and suburbs. Brady recounts the corporation’s studied refusal to publish a plan for the city under the Town and Regional Planning Act of 1934, despite adopting its provisions in 1936. While the legislation was flawed, the corporation’s defence that ‘such was the need for housing that all other matters had to take second place to it and that included town planning’ is a revealing testament to how it viewed its role as a planning authority. Both volumes provide ample evidence of the enduring impact of the piecemeal nature of development in the absence of an integrated plan for the city in these decades. What is less fully addressed is the essentially top-down nature of how the city was shaped and the apparent lack of agency on the part of its citizens, particularly those who were re-housed as part of the corporation’s housing programmes. Dublin, of course, was no different from any other city in this regard in the post-war decades as slum dwellers had their homes demolished and were relocated to the city’s periphery. Perhaps what is required here is an engagement with a range of sources that more fully reflects their voices.

The impact of growing car ownership on the geography of the city and its streetscape is explored in some detail in Cars, shops and suburbs. The blighted streetscapes that scarred parts of the city in the 1970s and 1980s that some of us may recall reflected the sterilisation of land in earlier decades linked to ambitious plans for road building which privileged the role of the private car. Lack of finance, the growing opposition of residents and other groups and a realisation that a more integrated approach to transport planning was required meant that ambitious proposals for inner city flyovers and highways, described here in detail, fortunately remained paper projects. A chapter entitled ‘The suburban city’ is essentially a history of the changing geography of retail in the 1950s and 1960s as international trends such as a suburban-based shopping centres and self-service supermarkets challenged the position of neighbourhood shops and the dominance of city centre stores. With its reproductions of advertisements for everything from cars to ladies’ fashion and photographs of generally uninspiring and bleak early suburban shopping centres, it evokes a certain nostalgia for a long-lost mid-twentieth-century Dublin. An extended discussion of the urban landscape in these decades features a series of interesting photographs, marking out the more prestigious south-eastern part of the city as the location of a growing commercial sector including over 1,000,000 sq. feet of office space. Linked to this is the battle over Georgian Dublin. Brady refers readers to published work by Frank McDonald and Erica Hanna for fuller accounts of the role of developers, the corporation and ‘the preservation movement’ but he makes some interesting remarks regarding official Ireland’s view of cities, especially Dublin, as ‘colonial constructs’. He goes on to quote the redoubtable Kevin Boland describing the admirers of Georgian Dublin as ‘the consortium of belted earls and their ladies and left-wing intellectuals’.

Houses, flats and high-rise and Cars, shops and suburbs are rich in detail and illustration, none better than the wonderful Dublin Opinion cartoons that gently satirise both the pretensions and foibles of national politicians and Dublin Corporation. The individual stories of housing estates, detailed discussion of road plans, trends in the availability of household appliances and the cost of public transport are but part of a total history that reflects the author’s determination to tell the whole story. Dubliners will dip into these books and learn much about the places where they live and the streets they walk through. As a contribution to Irish urban studies they set an agenda, they oblige us to look anew at our urban landscapes, mine the sources and bring new understanding to the history of our cities and towns.