Vacate the Dancefloor!
Why post-crash Dublin produced vacant space and demand for underground nightlife, but no lasting meanwhile-use club ecology.
Post-crash Dublin appeared to contain the elements needed for a meanwhile-use club ecology: vacant buildings, depressed property values, established cultural temporary uses, skilled operators and a visible demand for nightlife beyond the conventional licensing system. BYOB venues, illegal raves and word-of-mouth nights made that demand clear. What did not emerge was a repeatable model comparable with London venues such as The Cause, Printworks or Drumsheds.
Vacate the Dancefloor! asks why. It reads temporary use through the precarity usually associated with neoliberal urbanism, but identifies an inverse condition: space withheld because occupation itself would become an encumbrance. The decisive scarcity was not empty floor area. It was usable duration—the time an operator could reasonably expect to occupy a building before having to return it.
Irish licensing made that distinction consequential. A nightclub depended on a publican’s licence, recurring special exemption orders and a public dance licence. Those requirements imposed substantial premises-bound costs. They favoured occupations long enough to repay the financial, legal and material work of opening, while meanwhile-use offered uncertain tenure and a promise to leave. The operators most dependent on reduced rent were therefore least able to absorb the non-rent cost of becoming legal; the spaces available temporarily could not offer the time that temporary operators needed.
The project places this contradiction within Ireland’s post-crash property regime. Through the National Asset Management Agency, distressed property was organised around disposal, the recovery of asset prices and renewed access to international capital. Temporary occupation could produce cashflow, but only while it did not complicate a sale, the bundling of assets or the delivery of vacant possession. In contrast to forms of London “austerity urbanism,” where temporary activity might keep a stalled site warm, Dublin’s asset-price urbanism aimed to shorten the stall. The availability of a building did not imply the availability of a tenancy.
“Meanwhile non-use names vacancy preserved as a tool of financialisation.”
Dublin Docklands makes the argument spatially concrete. Large vacant commercial sites, transport access and cultural-policy interest sat beside fast-track planning, NAMA-backed development and investor-facing disposal. The broad conditions associated with temporary clubs were present, yet the area’s financial and planning machinery directed it toward office-led redevelopment.
The research develops meanwhile non-use to name this condition: vacancy preserved as a tool of financialisation, maintaining fungibility, disposability and financial mobility. It asks not only how precarious occupation is permitted, but how the timing of property markets prevents even temporary use from taking hold. In Dublin, what was made unavailable was usable duration.