Dr. Cian O'Callaghan
Associate Professor, Geography

Projects

• Title
  • Rethinking urban vacancy: : Addressing the challenge of underutilised land through innovative policy solutions
• Summary
  • This project aims to contribute to academic knowledge and inform policy decisions on urban vacancy by filling significant knowledge gaps in two key research questions: i)How is urban vacancy categorised and measured in the Irish contest, and how could new forms of measurement lead to more effective policy solutions? ii)What are the underlying structural and contextual factors that contribute to the production of vacancy in its different forms?
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council
• Date From
  • April 2019
• Date To
  • October 2021

• Title
  • Co-living and the housing crisis: a comparative critical analysis
• Summary
  • A comparative analysis of co-living housing in Dublin, Ireland and Sydney, Australia.
• Funding Agency
  • University of Wollongong
• Date From
  • 2020
• Date To
  • 2021

• Title
  • ESPON Ensure (European Sustainable Urbanisation through port city Regeneration)
• Summary
  • ENSURE (European Sustainable Urbanisation through port city Regeneration) is a targeted analysis aimed at providing better insights into the potential regional impacts of port city regeneration and a better understanding of the appropriate methods and tools. The research involved a comprehensive literature review, a pan-European desktop analysis of port city regeneration in small and medium-sized cities and in-depth case studies in four stakeholder cities (Aalborg, Brest, Catania, and Cork), as well as a series of workshops and conferences.
• Funding Agency
  • ESPON
• Date From
  • 01 December 2018
• Date To
  • 01 December 2019

• Title
  • Alternate urbanisms: an international comparative study
• Summary
  • This project explores issues of housing crises and alternatives in Dublin, Ireland and Sydney, Australia.
• Funding Agency
  • University of Wollongong
• Date From
  • 2018
• Date To
  • 2018

• Title
  • The new urban ruins: Vacancy and the post-crisis city
• Summary
  • The project aims at exploring contestations over the reuse of vacant spaces in Dublin. The central hypothesis is that vacant space will play a key role in determining how cities of the future respond to the both urban problems and wider global challenges. The project explores how geographically-specific responses to, and contestations over, vacancy may lead to either the continuation of the financial model of urban development or to more socially progressive cities. The project focuses primarily on Dublin, with smaller comparative case-studies in Berlin and Barcelona.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council
• Date From
  • 2015
• Date To
  • 2017

• Title
  • Memories of the everyday present: Haunting, absence, and the spectral performance of everyday life on the Irish 'ghost estate'
• Summary
  • This project explores how ghost estates have been used in media and political debates to represent the Celtic Tiger crash, to highlight from a policy perspective some of the problems that are posed by the estates, and to explore changing Irish identity through the point of view of residents living on them.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council
• Date From
  • 2011
• Date To
  • 2013

• Title
  • Capital and Culture: Regenerating the city and staging the arts in postindustrial Cork
• Summary
  • Drawing upon a theoretical approach combining poststructural critiques of discourse analysis, Lefebvre's theories on the production of space, and recent debates on relationality, this project explored the impacts of contemporary urban and cultural transformation on the Irish cities of Cork and Limerick through the plans to redevelop their urban waterfront and Cork's hosting of the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) in 2005. Situating Cork (and drawing comparatively on Limerick at points) within a relational interface between 'global' and 'local' forces and material and immaterial processes, the project traced the ways in which new urban imaginaries were constructed through strategic interventions, and how these became spatialised through complex processes of property development, culture-led regeneration, and contestation. The thesis takes the two nodal points of the plans to redevelop the docklands and the (ECOC) event to explore the complex and contrapuntal ways in which the city is reproduced. Basing its findings upon extensive discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews carried out between 2004 and 2008, the project presents a nuanced picture of urban transformation in Cork; one that is relational, contrapuntal, and contingent on a plethora of processes and forces that produce the city in a way that is open, not closed.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council
• Date From
  • 2004
• Date To
  • 2007