What is the shape of contemporary Dublin? In literature, cities are often personified as bodies, with heads, hearts, limbs and other anatomical references. London, in The Waste Land is depicted as an infertile womb, and to Joyce, Dublin is a recumbent sleeping giant. Dublin, today, is less human than amoebic in form. A nebulous expanse of grey, a fragmented porous skin, with fingers that stretch forward and spread out until they join with other fingers. A comparison of aerial views of Dublin with London or Paris, sights we’ve seen a little too often in recent years, is revealing. A sinuous silver ribbon bisects each city, but here ends the similarity of Dublin to her two big sisters. London and Paris both offer clearly defined districts with variants of scale and grain, punctuated by landmarks and historical buildings, and expand outwards in progressively less amplified waves. Dublin presents a vast loosely knit fabric to our eyes, thinly spread over a landscape breaking unevenly through its weave. Dublin is the archetypal edgeless city.
A look at a few statistics of these three great cities gives us a clue as to why this might be. The Dublin metropolitan area, covering 913 square kilometres, houses 1,187,000 people; that is 1,300 people per square kilometre. Greater London, for a surface area of 1,579 km², houses 7,512,400 people, or 4,758 people per square kilometre. Paris, and its “petite couronne”, covering 762 km², is home to 6,408,200 people; 8,409 people per square kilometre. The city of Paris itself packs in 20,433 souls per square kilometre, sufficient customers to keep any number of bakeries, butchers, flower shops and the like in business. The American urban theorist Jane Jacobs argues that urban density is a necessary condition for diversity in cities. Viewed from the air, the unrelieved repetition of Dublin’s sprawl bears out her point.
