Brookfield

BROOKFIELD

DUBLIN

CASTLE

Deirdre Murphy

Walter Ngegwe

Silas Ngegwe

Rose Ngegwe

Josephine Ngegwe

Rufus Ngegwe

Derek Smyth

Bianca Smyth

Kirsten Smyth

With

Participative Project

July 2007

Brookfield Active Parents

Various media

Donna Doyle

Tory Doyle

Eva Doyle

Aisling Elliot

Craig Elliot

Lee Elliot

Olivia Fitzsimons

Karen Mulligan

Jordan Mulligan

Amy Mulligan

A walk in Brookfield. Clip 24”

A walk in Dublin Casle. Clip 41”

Music courtesy of JP Renoult

The Brookfield housing estate, 12 km South West of Dublin City centre, lies on the edge of the vast plain of South Dublin County. A ring of low terraced houses, in blocks of three or four, encircles a wide windswept field. Four lonely lampposts planted in a tarmac disk celebrate the centre of this “green”. Behind the houses, the foothills of the Dublin Mountains rise up, and, above them, a vast leaden sky. The scattered low-density housing estates that pepper West Tallaght were conceived less to receive aspiring new citizens from the country than to alleviate the problems caused by failed social housing in the city centre and north Dublin. In Dublin, where local wits constantly turn out new terms of derision, the area is nicknamed “the Northside Embassy”, a double whammy, effectively disparaging in three words both the new suburb and the northern district - previous home of many of the residents.Brookfield is a problem estate, hit by most contemporary urban problems: delinquency, lack of public services, abandoned and dysfunctional public spaces... In Summer 2007 we developed a community art project, essentially organising a day trip with local residents. The project theme was ‘awareness of the city, its problems and its potential’. We ourselves rapidly learned about the difficulties and stigmas attached to living in that part of town. Of those we approached, not one mini bus operator would accept to go to Brookfield to pick up the group. We finally ordered four bumper sized taxis, two of which didn’t arrive, leaving half of our group stranded on the windswept green. Desperately we rang around for more, putting on our best middle class accents to offset the address. In the end it took us more than two hours to get the entire group to the city centre. Our destination was Dublin Castle, the medieval nucleus of Dublin. At its centre is a park, a place unknown to most Dubliners, a sort of secret garden hidden away at the heart of the city; small, simple, well cared for, surrounded by life; everything that Brookfield green is not. Unlike the suburban green, the city centre garden is deliciously intimate, sheltered and welcoming. It embraces visitors and invites them to linger.What is it about these two urban spaces that make them so diagrammatically different? In Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (a recipe book of good and bad urban planning) we find so many ingredients that are wrong or missing in Brookfield. Parks need to be small, it seems; the community needs to be involved in their design and their daily life and they need to be sown into the urban fabric. But principally, the density of the whole area is wrong. Neither country, nor city, there are quite simply too few people to fill the spaces and too few eyes on the green. The group we brought to the secret garden in Dublin Castle was made up of single parent families from diverse backgrounds, with children ranging from 2 to 13 years of age. It was a typical Dublin summer's day, one minute raining, the next sunny, so umbrellas became an integral part of the event. Each parent was given a digital video camera and worked with their own children to make a film of the child’s footsteps following the looping paths of the garden. Older children learned how to use video and sound material, interviewed each other, and filmed the event. In many ways, the process itself became the point, giving us the opportunity to meet new people, inspiring subjects for art, allowing the children to learn new skills and to discover the wonder of a real city park.

PREMISES

PRACTICES

PLACES

You'll come and find the place

Brookfield to Dublin Castle

PRODUCTION

Moving Dublin explores the everyday world of movement in Dublin and its vast sprawling suburbs spreading out west from the coastal city. We look at how far the contemporary world of the Dublin commuter has strayed from the civic realm it constituted when Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses.

Moving Dublin is to be published in the form of a book and DVD in March 2009 by Gandon Editions

Moving Dublin has been commissioned by South Dublin County Council through In Context 3 and funded under the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government’s Per Cent for Art Scheme.