Myths of Progress: Real-Estate Development, Private Property and Dwelling Outside Ownership

This essay examines the case of Marianella, a mixed-tenure development in Dublin, where social tenants were excluded from a series of homemaking and community-building capacities, unlike their neighbours, who owned or privately rented their homes. By unsettling dominant conceptions of property as an individual right over things I explore the relational forms of privilege and precarity that shape people’s access to, and power over, essential resources. The essay challenges the valorisation of property ownership as a social ideal within planning policy and critiques discourses of social integration that subtend the increasing privatisation of shelter and gentrification of urban space through real-estate development. Reading policy discourse, government debate and media coverage on the case, with a focus on the stories shared by social tenants regarding their differential treatment, this essay addresses the hierarchies embedded within dominant property arrangements that devalue claims to home and community for people who access housing outside the private market and who do not dwell under proprietary tenure regimes. I explore how the case reveals the ways marginalisation is reproduced within practices of desegregation when dominant property logics and arrangements continue to shape the allocation and distribution of rights to housing and space.