No abstract

Abstract. The desire for 'vibrant', 'bohemian' neighbourhoods forms a focal point of the amenity preferences of Richard Florida's 'creative class' thesis. Here, a vibrant street culture, which includes cafes and restaurants spilling on to the pavement, is implied as being of key importance in the selection of a residential area for creative and knowledge workers. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, this paper examines the residential preferences of the 'creative class' in Dublin, Ireland. The results illustrate the continued importance of classic factors in residential decision-making, including housing cost, accessibility and travel-time to place of employment. Moreover, the results also illustrate how changes in the life-cycle, including the decision to have a family, have a direct influence on their residential location choice. While there is a tendency for younger workers to select the city centre, older workers predominantly opt to live in suburban areas with good transport connections to the city centre or their place of employment.

In this paper, we argue that new social media produces new forms of public geography and digital praxis in which the relationship between reader and writer is radically altered and which enables geographers to engage in timely conversation and debate with the public on unfolding issues, and provides new avenues to connect with older forms of broadcast media. Social media can strengthen geographers engagement with the existing fourth estate and forge new relationships with an emerging fifth estate – dynamic, responsive and empowered publics. We illustrate such potentials by drawing on our own experiences of contributing to IrelandAfterNAMA, a collective blog that provides critical analysis of the present crisis in Ireland which has established a regular readership and has led to significant media work (over 500 newspaper articles and radio and television interviews). Such public geography projects are not without their challenges and pitfalls, not least because they alter and challenge the ways in which academics work, communicate and are assessed. Nevertheless, we believe that at the very least their quotidian practices enact what Macgilchrist and Bőhmig (2012: 97) term ‘minimal politics’, creating ‘tiny fissures in the mediascape’ that inform and engage with wider publics in ways that academic articles rarely do and work to challenge hegemonic formations.

No abstract

Throughout the last number of decades, a significant amount of attention has been given to the notion of the 'European city' within policy formation and academic enquiry. From one perspective, the ideal of the 'European city' is presented as a densely developed urban area with a focus on quality public transport and a more balanced social structure. More recently, however, the particular elements of the 'European city' associated with pedestrianized public space, urban design and image-making strategies have become central features of entrepreneurial urban policies throughout Europe. This article seeks to undertake an examination of the notion of the 'European city' in urban change in Dublin since the 1990s. Specifically, the article illustrates the degree to which a wholly positive spin on the urban design and image-making elements of the 'European city' in Dublin has served as a thin veil for the desired transformation of Dublin according to neoliberal principles.

No abstract

No abstract

In response to the commentaries, we discuss further how social media disrupts and remakes the creation and circulation of geographical knowledges and potentially reconfigures the moral economy of the social sciences. In particular, we examine questions of what is meant by public geography, the publics which such geographies serve, alternative and complementary approaches to social media, the politics of authorship within collective blogs, the politics and mechanisms of knowledge circulation, and the extent to which social media has an impact beyond the academy, enacting ‘minimal politics’.