suburbia + language

Issue 05 considers the relationship between language and suburban space. Three essays respond to the fractured process of translation that has come to define the territory of suburbia.

Liam Mac Mathúna (Professor UCD) outlines a history of linguistic change in the Dublin area, describing how preceding eras of colonisations and cultures have renamed, subverted and built upon a place and its people.

Emma Geoghegan (architect/lecturer DIT) documents the absence of a vocabulary in both the imagination and critique of space on the urban-rural fringe, suggesting that a consideration of this landscape as an independent territory might begin a means of understanding its unique conditions.

Isobel NÍ Riain (lecturer UCC) reveals how a reading of place-names, in the now suburbanised area of Little Island on the edge of Cork city, can tell of a long history of occupation; one whose built form is often subsumed by the office parks and semi-ds of the immediate present.